The Future of Technology...recorded on a cassette tape

In 1983, Steve Jobs gave a speech to a relatively small audience at a little-known segment of the event called the International Design Conference inAspen (IDCA). The conference’s theme, “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”, seems all too fitting because, despite the vastness of the World Wide Web, very little is available on the Internet regarding this particular Steve Jobs speech. The recording of a formerly unknown 40-minute Q & A section of this speech, found on a cassette tape, was released this week and the content has proven shocking. A full recording of the speech can be found on this blog by Marcel Brown.

 

Shocking because the speech is a very accurate “prediction” of sorts, in which Jobs describes what he wants out of his then company, Apple, Inc., within the next decade (by 1993). 

Jobs states in 1983 that in the future, we will “spend more time interacting with personal computers than cars” and, “people could be walking around anywhere and pick up their e-mail.” He also discusses how one of his goals is to make Internet information “possess-able by everyone.” Taking a look at our mobile devices, tablets, computers and the extent to which the Internet has become embedded in our lives, we can see that these predictions are startling and chillingly accurate as the internet became much more popular and commonplace in the decade after this speech.

Along with these statements, somehow, Jobs preconceived 20 years ago the difficulty we would face with voice recognition technology. "This stuff is hard," he said toward the end of the discussion. This is an intriguing statement, considering the often criticized Siri app on iPhones today. 

Brown, considered the “Most Trusted Name in Technology,” stated in his blog, “Regarding the speech, it is amazing to hear Steve Jobs talk about some things that were not fully realized until only a handful of years ago. This talk shows us just how incredibly ahead of his time he was.”