Steve Jobs: Computers Can Revolutionize the Entire Education Process.
Transcript
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I am extraordinarily pleased to be able to be here with you.
This is one of my personal hopes and wishes, actually, is that I think that computers can radically revolutionize the educational process around the world.
And the average age at Apple, as you know, is about 29 or 30.
And we haven't been out of college so long ourselves.
At least most of the people at Apple haven't.
And it's very, very important to us.
And I think that, as you all know better than I, Europe is sort of a, doesn't exist.
It was just a word invented for the convenience of Americans and others.
And the fact that you're all here in this room as a step towards cooperating with each other,
in new ways, pleases me very much.
It's difficult enough to get cooperation
amongst the competitive universities in America,
and I think that that's great.
What are we trying to do here?
What are we trying to do?
You can have many views of what a computer is.
My particular view is that a computer is a new medium,
A new medium, one of the media, print, television, radio.
And a computer will in the future be looked at, I think, more in this way,
as a delivery vehicle for software,
just like a book is a delivery vehicle for its own kind of software.
And whenever we develop a new medium,
we generally tend to fall back into our old habits from our old medium.
As an example, when the television first came of age in America, the first television shows were simply a camera pointed at a radio show.
And it took about 20, 30 years for television to really come into its own in the late 1950s.
We have this new medium of interactive video because of the laser disc.
And what is the first thing we do with it?
We put movies on it.
So again, we tend to fall back into our old habits.
In the same way, when the personal computer was invented, we tended to look at it as
a smaller version of a big computer.
So we put COBOL and FORTRAN and these bizarre things on it, and looked at it in terms of
simple economics rather than the revolutionary nature that it really was.
Do you know who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about 14 years?
You know, Aristotle.
And I read this, I became immensely jealous.
And I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal.
And through the miracle of the printed page,
I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary.
And maybe if there's a professor they can add to that
But at least I can go directly to the source material
And that is of course the foundation upon which our western civilization is built
But I can't ask Aristotle a question
I mean I can but I won't get an answer
My hope is that in our lifetimes
We can make a tool of a new kind, of an interactive kind
And when I look at the personal computer
We're, as you know, living in the wake of the last revolution
Which was a new source of free energy
And that was the free energy of petrochemicals
And it completely transformed society
And we're products of this petrochemical revolution
Which we're still living in the wake of today
We are now entering another revolution of free energy.
Macintosh, as you know, uses less power than a few of those light bulbs,
and yet can save us a few hours a day or give us a whole new experience.
And it's free intellectual energy.
It's crude, very crude, but it's getting more refined year after year after year.
And in our lifetimes, it should get very refined.
And so my hope is someday
When the next Aristotle is alive
We can capture the underlying world view
Of that Aristotle
In a computer
And someday some student will be able
To not only read the words Aristotle wrote
But ask Aristotle a question
And get an answer
and that's what I hope that we can do.
So this is a beginning.
I think that, as you know right now,
the computer industry is in the tank.
Personal computers, big computers, everything.
And it's difficult.
It's a difficult time.
But I'm sure that Henry Ford had a few bad quarters
back in the 1920s.
and the automobile
had a sort of historical imperative
the minute it was invented
a sequence of events had to happen
the same is true with the personal computer
there is a tremendous momentum behind this
and I think that this year may be a delay
this year we may look back and say
well 1985 was a slow year
but there is such momentum behind this
that it will happen
it will permeate and change forever
are educational processes.
And my hope, again, is that
not too many generations of students
will pass through before this happens.
It will happen within 20 years.
It probably will happen within 10 years.
But it could happen within 5 years.