Personal essays
A pedelec for your mind
Apple Intelligence
I’ve just gotten back from Apple’s developer conference in California.
I suppose that’s not exactly true.
I didn’t have tickets so I didn’t go to the actual conference. But Kim, who was much smarter than I, would tell me to go with or without a ticket and so I continue to do so and come back with a head filled with ideas and a heart filled with the friendships I’ve rekindled or begun.
Although AI still isn’t high on my list of things to do this year, it is clearly on top of Apple’s.
There were rumors ahead of the conference that they would be partnering with OpenAI and that worried me a lot.
There’s something about OpenAI that makes me feel uneasy.
I listened to the keynote with trepidation - depending on the deal, I was considering leaving Apple platforms.
I should have known better. Apple threaded the needle nicely. They are doing AI, which they obnoxiously brand “Apple Intelligence”, in a very Apple way. Most of the queries are done on-device or with the assistance of a private server using the context you have stored on the phone.
Apple has distinguished those types of personal context based queries with question you might want to ask of the broader world.
That’s where the OpenAI partnership comes in. You have to opt in and you are aware of when you are asking a question of Chat GPT so that you can put the results in context.
I think I’m ok with this approach and like this clear division between Apple Intelligence and the Artificial kind.
Two-wheeling
There are bicycles everywhere in California.
There seem to be three kinds and I like two of them.
There’s the old-fashioned kind.
No, not the Penny-Farthing. The ordinary bike that you pedal getting some help from the different gears.
This is the kind I grew up with. We biked everywhere.
But I’m old and not as energetic as I once was so I can use some help now and then.
The second kind is the pedelec. This is short for pedal - electric. It’s an electric bike that gives you a boost when you pedal it. You don’t get any help from the motor if you don’t pedal and so it supplements your effort.
Now you know there are people who ask, “why do we have to pedal at all?”
And for them there is a third kind that doesn’t require any effort. You adjust a throttle to go faster. I don’t consider this to be a bike. It feels more like a moped or scooter.
To me, this is the ChatGPT of the biking world. There are people who use them, but I don’t think that it should count as a bike.
Bicycle for your mind
Steve Jobs famously said that a computer is like a bicycle for the mind.
His observation came from considering a study on locomotion - how much energy it takes us to move some distance.
In the study, a “condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list.”
But what if we test a human on a bicycle? With a bicycle, a human was way more efficient than a condor.
Jobs concluded that “that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
“But Daniel,” you say, “isn’t a scooter more efficient still?”
The point is that a bicycle takes the human effort and turns it into more amazing results. A scooter says, you don’t need to put in any effort at all. You just watch as I take you places.
What about a pedelec?
I would argue that a pedelec makes the bicycle even more efficient. I still have to pedal on my pedelec. I end up working pretty hard. But my legs take me farther than I otherwise would get.
And that’s what I thought about Apple Intelligence - it takes this already powerful computer - this bicycle for my mind - and turns it into a pedelec which takes me further than a plan old bicycle can.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 221. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe