“When I start using agents that try to do things without me, and the goal of these people… to try to make it autonomous and to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that. First of all, because it doesn't connect human creativity to the product… But secondly, these people aren't stepping back and saying, why are we making this? And the answer should be to help humanity.”
TBPN · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Asked whether the AI boom needs a Steve Jobs, Isaacson describes two camps going back to Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing: computers that augment people and computers that replace them. He says he's fine using chatbots and puts Jobs's "bicycle for the mind" against agentic AI.
Transcript
Do they believe their own confabulations? I kept asking people who knew Elizabeth, and I kept trying to figure out, has she fooled? I know she's a con artist, but has she conned herself? So I'm not sure.
…Jobs had when he launched GarageBand and Apple Music and some of the iPod, this idea of the iTunes. Sometimes disruptive technologies still empowering humans and remaining in this artist world, a friend to the creatives, and living in the technology world, but still never losing touch. There's
…that said the street sign of the liberal arts and sciences or technology. That was his goal. What we're doing now, not just with AI, but more importantly, with a Gentic AI, which is where I worry about it. I don't mind. I can use Claude, fine. But when I start using agents that try to do things without me, and that the goal of these people, whether it be Muse or Claude's or whatever I'm using, to try to make it autonomous and to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that. First of all, because it doesn't connect human creativity to the product. It doesn't have the music that makes our hearts sing, as he said with the iPod. But secondly, these people aren't stepping back and saying, why are we making this? And the answer should be to help humanity. That was Steve's lodestar.
The only thing that I would push back on slightly is it doesn't feel like agents are not generative. I have not seen a single product or piece of marketing material where the seed of the idea, whatever the thing that is that makes it great, was from the AI. All of the agents that we have today are…
That's a really good point.
And so my view on it is like, I'm actually, as somebody who loves generating ideas, I'm actually upset that the AI can't do the one thing that I really value and that I love. You want to be
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