Simon Willison’s Weblog

Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept video (1987) (via) I learned about this video today while engaged in my irresistible bad habit of arguing about whether or not "agents" means anything useful.

It turns out CEO John Sculley's Apple in 1987 promoted a concept called Knowledge Navigator (incorporating input from Alan Kay) which imagined a future where computers hosted intelligent "agents" that could speak directly to their operators and perform tasks such as research and calendar management.

This video was produced for John Sculley's keynote at the 1987 Educom higher education conference imagining a tablet-style computer with an agent called "Phil".

It's fascinating how close we are getting to this nearly 40 year old concept with the most recent demos from AI labs like OpenAI. Their Introducing GPT-4o video feels very similar in all sorts of ways.