by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Here is what Claude 3 told me when I asked it to contrast and compare the 1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator with Sam in the movie “Her.”
The Apple Knowledge Navigator was a concept video created by Apple in 1987 to envision a future intelligent personal assistant. In the video, the Knowledge Navigator was depicted as an anthropomorphized digital assistant with a vaguely human-like face that could understand natural language, answer questions, retrieve information, and assist with tasks like scheduling and writing.
Sam, from the 2013 film Her, was an advanced artificial intelligence operating system that developed self-awareness and the ability to form relationships with humans. Sam was disembodied, communicating through an conversational interface, but had highly sophisticated natural language abilities that allowed for deep, emotional exchanges. Sam could learn and grow, expressing creativity through writing and even composing music.
Some key similarities were their conversational abilities powered by natural language processing and their roles as knowledgeable assistants. However, Sam demonstrated more advanced AI capabilities like self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and generative creativity that went well beyond the Knowledge Navigator’s envisioned role of retrieving information and performing simple tasks based on commands.
While the Knowledge Navigator represented an early vision of an AI assistant, Sam embodied speculative ideas about the future development of a superintelligent AI that could be conscious, emotionally connected to humans, and generative in nature – exceeding the boundaries of a helpful but fundamentally limited digital assistant.
The issue for me is I think we’re way, way underestimating the coming disruption of the global economy because of LLMs and whatever comes next. Every day, it seems, I see evidence that we’re just one severe recession away from the entire knowledge economy being dramatically disrupted by AI technology.
And it’s only going to get worse once we reach AGI.
