Steve Jobs on Digital Libraries: Computers for the Humanities
What Jobs talks about
Jobs argues that computers are not just for science and industry anymore—they are becoming powerful enough to transform the arts and the humanities. He frames the computer as the best tool humans have created because it amplifies our abilities.
His central example is the digital library: putting books inside a computer so people can search knowledge in seconds. He illustrates this with Shakespeare, Orwell, and Lincoln Steffens to show how access to ideas could change research and learning.
He also points to music synthesis as another breakthrough, describing a computer-generated Bach piece and suggesting that digital tools can participate in creative work. The segment is about computers expanding human culture, not replacing it.
Jobs speaks throughout, with brief quoted lines introduced from other voices and a Stevie Wonder music intro in the segment.
In his words
“Hi, I'm Steve Jobs and I make computers.”
“As humans, we're all tool builders.”
“The neatest tool we've ever created is the computer.”
“We've taken books like the complete works of William Shakespeare, and we can search through them in under a second.”
“We can now place the knowledge of our civilization accessible to our fingertips”
Key points
- Computers are the neatest tool humans have ever created.
- Digital libraries can make knowledge searchable in seconds.
- Books and classic texts can be made instantly accessible at the fingertips.
- Computers are now powerful enough to affect the arts and humanities, not just science.
- Music synthesis shows computers can engage with creative expression.
- Technology can amplify human abilities and open new cultural possibilities.
Full transcript
In the history of this planet's civilization, some discoveries or inventions have led to breathtaking changes in our lifestyle—fire, for example, or the wheel. This year in 1988, we have developed supercomputers that are capable of performing two billion calculations per second. By next year, we expect that capacity to have doubled. If we have a master, what we now believe to be the physical impossibility of traveling at the speed of light so that we ourselves can visit the most distant stars, computers will make that breakthrough possible. Hi, I'm Steve Jobs and I make computers. As humans, we're all tool builders. We create tools that amplify inherent abilities that we have.
Tools like the bicycle, telescope, language, mathematics. But the neatest tool we've ever created is the computer. And until now, computers have been used to revolutionize science and industry. But the great news for 1988 is that computers have finally gotten powerful enough to have the same impact in the arts and the humanities. The two things I'd like to share with you are one: a concept called digital libraries. How many times have we all been in a great library and knowing there was knowledge there that we wanted to find, but there was no hope of our ever finding it amongst the mass of books? What if we could take that library and put it inside the computer and search through it in a second or two? We've done that in 1988. We've taken books like the complete works of William Shakespeare, and we can search through
them in under a second. Now, I'm interested in the future, so I'd like to see what a few people had to say about it. I can walk over here, enter a future into the computer, and find out that, uh, see what George Orwell had to say: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." Not too positive. And let's go down a little bit further. I found Lincoln Steffens here: "I've seen the future and it works." We can now place the knowledge of our civilization accessible to our fingertips, and this is going to be revolutionary in the humanities. But something even closer to our souls as humans is music, and the computer has finally gotten good enough
to synthesize music of equality to accompany a human virtuoso violinist. What you're about to hear is synthesized from pure mathematics and was created about a tenth of a second before you're going to be listening to it. This is from Johan Sebastian Bach concerto in A minor. (music)
Hi, I'm Stevie Wonder, artist of song, lyric, music, voice. This technology has made it very possible for so many things that were highly impossible to happen—the touch of a button, the click of a switch, the turn of a knob.
From YouTube captions, lightly punctuated for readability. Timestamps link to the video above. Errors are possible.