Steve Jobs helped create what may be the ultimate consumer product. The iPhone is beautiful, powerful, practical, and reliable. It does so much that it has almost disappeared into everyday life.
But did it make our lives better?
In many ways, of course it did. We can speak to someone on the other side of the world, find our way through an unfamiliar city, or access almost any piece of knowledge in seconds. Yet the same device has also changed the texture of daily life in ways we are still learning to understand.
We used to call a taxi. Now we tap a button. We used to ask someone for directions. Now we follow a blue line. We used to ask friends where to eat. Now we compare ratings on a map.
Each change is small, and usually convenient. Taken together, however, they remove many of the minor reasons we once had to interact with other people.
The iPhone did not create loneliness. That would be far too simple. But it helped create the infrastructure for a life in which convenience often means avoiding another person. We removed friction without noticing that some of that friction was also social contact.
Perhaps Jobs’s mistake was not the product. Perhaps it was the idea of human adaptation behind it.
Technology tends to arrive with an implicit promise: give people a powerful and simple tool, and they will quickly learn to use it well. But products evolve much faster than habits, organisations, or cultures. A device can transform an industry in five years. Learning how to live with it may take a generation.
Almost twenty years after the first iPhone, many of us are still trying to establish a healthy relationship with our phones.
The same question for AI
AI may be the same experiment on a much larger scale.
We are making intelligence available as a service. We can ask a model to write, explain, reason, plan, teach, or create. The progress is extraordinary. But it raises a difficult question: what happens to human relationships when we need one another less?
The optimistic answer is that AI will free us from repetitive work and leave more time for care, art, conversation, and community. The darker possibility is that we will prefer a patient machine to a complicated colleague, delegate more of our judgment, and gradually lose confidence in our own ability to act.
I do not think OpenAI is wrong to build this technology, just as I do not think Jobs was wrong to build the iPhone. Putting powerful tools into people’s hands matters.
But invention is only the first half of innovation.
I see this on a smaller scale in my own work. Models often become capable before teams know how to trust or use them. A convincing demonstration is not yet a working system. The model needs boundaries, evaluation, feedback, and clear human control. People need to understand when to rely on it, when to question it, and what remains their responsibility.
That problem will not be solved by a better model alone. It is also a problem of human and organisational adaptation.
AI systems must be simple enough for both people and machines to understand and operate. Companies will have to rethink how decisions are made, how work is reviewed, and how responsibility is shared. Adding a chatbot to an old process will not be enough.
It may take decades to develop a healthy relationship with AI. That does not make the technology a mistake. It means that builders begin the change, but society has to finish it.
The most important question is therefore not whether Steve Jobs—or OpenAI—was wrong.
It is this: as technology removes more friction from our lives, what do we want to preserve?
I want to build systems that make people more capable without making them feel less necessary. That may be the harder half of innovation.