Building technology for its own sake harms society; innovation should deliver practical applications that improve lives in the physical world. Pairing AI with smart hardware and physical infrastructure can transform trillion-dollar industries such as manufacturing, life sciences, and agriculture. Early product design decisions illustrate the importance of usability: the initial pre-launch iPhone prototype used an iPod-like click wheel, which testing revealed as cumbersome, so the design was replaced before launch. Today's chatbot-first AI often places burden on users to craft prompts; embedding AI into physical devices can reduce that overhead and better serve people. Understanding physical laws will be critical for this shift.
Society loses when builders ship tech for tech's sake. To paraphrase something my former boss Steve Jobs repeated as we engineered the very first iPhone: The number of megahertz doesn't matter. Innovation must be about delivering practical applications into the physical world that improve lives. Combining AI with smart hardware and physical infrastructure will ensure the transformation of trillion-dollar industries from manufacturing to life sciences to agriculture. AI will power the future. But in order to do so, it must be paired with physical hardware that makes everyday life better for people.
To put this in context, let me share something that's not widely known. The very first iPhone-I'm talking pre-launch, kept deep within the Apple engineering lab-had a click wheel exactly like the iPod. We tested the user experience into the ground before confirming that invoking a rotary phone vibe when users scrolled through contacts and navigated the phone's menu was not good. The lesson from Steve Jobs? Making the user's life more difficult isn't going to fly. We ended up scrapping that clunky model for the sleeker one launched in 2007.
This same tension-whether new technology is burdensome or helpful-is playing out with AI today. The tech's current chatbot era puts the onus on the user to deliver the right prompts and commands. What if AI actually made life easier without the overhead? This is what can happen when AI enters the physical world. During a recent trip to China, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told students he'd study the physical sciences if he was enrolled today, not software. During a speech in DC, Huang said that AI's next revolution will take place in the physical world, requiring an understanding of "things like the laws of physics, friction, inertia, cause and effect." Huang nailed it on both sides of the world.
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