The legendary former Apple designer Jony Ive has a few regrets. The man helped bring us the iPhone, which in turn was the advent of the smartphone and social media revolution. Now Ive is working with OpenAI—the company that sparked today’s AI fixation—to design some kind of AI-centric hardware that he says will help him atone for society’s lingering screen fixation.
In an interview with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison published Thursday, Ive responded to a question about the ill nature of today’s smartphone-obsessed world. He specifically cited social media as a greater societal ill, though he stopped short of getting into specifics of what’s truly wrong with the apps (other than the obvious examples of extreme polarization and mass distribution of falsehoods and propaganda).
Ive worked at Apple for 27 years before departing from his role as Chief Design Officer in 2019. His biggest successes included the original iMac, though he was hand in hand with Steve Jobs helping bring us the iPod and later the iPhone. “Some of the products I was very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant.” Ive said. “My issue is even though there was no intention, I think there was still some responsibility, and that weighs on me.”
We still don’t know much about Ive’s company LoveFrom and his prospective AI-centric device. He’s working alongside fellow designer Marc Newson and has backing from several big-name investors. And still, it’s hard not to remain skeptical. We went down the AI gadget rabbit hole last year with a slew of devices meant to—in some way—replace our smartphones. The biggest flop of them all was the Humane Ai Pin. The device could access an AI chatbot with an internet connection, but its AI mostly failed to perform tasks that the typical smartphone could handle better. The company later sold all its assets to HP. There are plenty of other examples of projects that missed the mark, such as the Rabbit R1 which promised a similar level of AI fidelity and now exists more as a smart, though perfunctory bright orange AI toy.
“What I find encouraging about AI is that it’s very rare to have a discussion around AI and there not to be appropriate concerns about safety,” Ive told Collison.
There is a considerable amount of skepticism surrounding generative AI, not only in its impact on society but also in whether it can do everything that big tech firms—including Ive’s buddies at OpenAI—promise it can. There are signs that AI’s progress with current training processes is slowing down due to a lack of new data to feed it. Despite this, AI has already damaged several institutions of modern society. New York Magazine released a report this week showing that students are using generative AI chatbots to write essays en masse. Some users are smart enough to put typos in their copy or run their essays through multiple chatbots to fool their teachers or professors.
And that’s before you get to the implications of AI’s impact on copyright and the job security of people in many creative professions. Ive’s next product has to do more than give people access to yet another chatbot. If the Humane AI Pin proved anything, it’s that Apple’s design for a smartphone has staying power, as much as Ive might regret it.
As an aside, if Ive dislikes the route social media has taken society, the former Apple lead should ask OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the supposed social media platform he’s reportedly building.