Did we just rewrite our future? Check back in 50 years
Apple and SpaceX just took a great leap forward, but was it for humanity or just its customers?
This was originally published in June 2024, following a Starship test flight and Apple introducing new AI features. Next week, SpaceX will launch another test flight (that I’m very excited for) and everything here remains true. Enjoy.
I wonder if, when world-changing inventions of the past came to be, people realized they were going to change the world.
When the Gutenberg press was invented, did people know what was to come? Or the steam engine, the automobile or the airplane?
What about the day Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call or when Edison created the light bulb? Our history is filled with world-changing inventions, and I don’t know how many of them people knew would change everything forever. But I bet even Bell and Edison couldn’t have foreseen the impact their inventions would make upon the world.
Some folks probably knew when Wernher von Braun was developing the rocket or when Alan Turing was developing the first computer, but even then, regular people definitely didn’t see what was going on.
This week was different. This week, millions watched live as we reached milestones in the development of technologies that have the potential, at least, to reshape our world.
SpaceX sent a rocket the size of the Statue of Liberty into space and had half of it return to a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico and the other half to a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia. Elon Musk’s Starship has the potential to drastically reduce the cost of getting cargo and people to space. Not just to space — Starship has been specifically designed from the beginning to go not just to the moon but to Mars.
Two decades ago, the idea that you could land and reuse a rocket seemed like science fiction. Musk had an idea, and the competition laughed at him. Even a decade ago, his competitors at United Launch Alliance thought landing and reusing a rocket was crazy. Nonetheless, he persisted. Recently, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the 300th time.
With this successful soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico, SpaceX showed that Starship can be reused as well. For its next launch, Elon is hinting that they’ll try to use their insane “chopsticks” set of pincers to catch the ship when it returns to Earth.
If you thought flying a rocket to India was crazy, with an HD video feed watching a flap slowly burn away like something out of “Terminator,” you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Then, on Monday, Apple unveiled the most significant updates to its computer platforms since the invention of the iPhone: A deep integration of artificial intelligence into the iPhone, iPad and Mac that will change the way people use their phones and computers forever. Apple’s tagline for this was perfect: “AI for the rest of us.”
I’ve been playing with ChatGPT and its competitors for more than a year now and have been able to get some amazing results. But I still haven’t been able to talk to it like it was the computer on “Star Trek.” I had to be extremely specific, almost pedantic, to get it to do what I wanted, and even then, it wasn’t quite right.
Apple correctly noted that, in order to be truly helpful, an AI bot needs some sense of personal context — information about your life from your calendar, your email and your text messages. Only then can an assistant be truly helpful. This is what we were promised 13 years ago when Siri launched as the first voice-activated assistant.
It only took a decade and then some, but it seems this promise is finally here. You’ll be able to say things like, “When does my mom’s flight get in?” and it’ll know to check your messages and emails for messages from your mom, find her flight number, check its status and return the information to you in just a second or two.
No longer will you need to remember where she sent the information — was it in a text or an email? This seems like a small thing, but our brain doesn’t need to remember where Mom sent that information, just that she sent it.
It seems silly — or it will seem silly in five or 10 years — that we ever needed to remember things like that, in the same way a Rolodex is amusing when we see it on the set of “Mad Men.” No one remembers phone numbers anymore. The Yellow Pages no longer exist; the entire idea of them is an anachronism.
What will Apple’s new artificial intelligence make obsolete? What will Starship landing and taking off multiple times a day mean for our species? I don’t know the answer, but I know that this was one of those weeks where everything might have changed. We just won’t know it for a while.
But boy, am I excited about it.
