The video revisits a 1982 "60 Minutes" segment exploring Silicon Valley's emerging technology landscape. Hosted by Seth Doane, it reflects on how the report captured the region's transition from orchards to a technology hub, highlighting key figures and inventions, such as Adam Osborne's portable computer - the Osborne One, against the backdrop of fear and fascination that new technology breeds.

The discussion extends to the Valley's evolution in societal impact, drawing parallels between past and current technological innovations, including artificial intelligence. It features insights from historian Margaret O'Meara, exploring how the culture and business models from the early tech boom still influence today's industry, as seen in the charismatic leaders like Jerry Sanders and Adam Osborne. The conversation underscores how tech has reshaped work, productivity, and societal dynamics over decades.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. trepidation [ˌtrɛpɪˈdeɪʃən] - (noun) - A feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen. - Synonyms: (anxiety, apprehension, dread)

Osborn's invention was one of the first mass marketed portable computers, part of a wave of technology that inspired both hope and trepidation.

2. esoteric [ˌɛsəˈtɛrɪk] - (adjective) - Intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest. - Synonyms: (obscure, arcane, recondite)

Talking computers were just some of the esoteric technologies featured at the fair.

3. ubiquitous [juːˈbɪkwɪtəs] - (adjective) - Present, appearing, or found everywhere. - Synonyms: (omnipresent, pervasive, all-over)

What seemed like jargon in 1982, user friendly technology is now ubiquitous.

4. evangelist [ɪˈvænʤɪlɪst] - (noun) - A person who seeks to convert others to the Christian faith, especially by public preaching. - Synonyms: (preacher, missionary, proponent)

Adam Osborne may have been a great salesman and a great evangelist and a great storyteller for technology.

5. arcade [ɑːrˈkeɪd] - (noun) - A place filled with coin-operated gaming machines and entertainment. - Synonyms: (gallery, complex, center)

And then 1982. Remember, this is when video game arcades were taking off.

6. postmortem [ˌpoʊstˈmɔːrtəm] - (noun) - An analysis or discussion of an event after it happens. - Synonyms: (review, analysis, aftermath)

There have been a lot of postmortems about this failure, sort of a spectacular failure.

7. charismatic [ˌkærɪzˈmætɪk] - (adjective) - Exercising a compelling charm that inspires devotion in others. - Synonyms: (charming, alluring, magnetic)

Adam Osborne and Jerry Sanders are charismatic, as you see in the story, and unapologetic.

8. evangelist [ɪˈvænʤɪlɪst] - (noun) - A person who seeks to promote the success or acceptance of something. - Synonyms: (advocate, promoter, supporter)

Adam Osborne may have been a great salesman and a great evangelist and a great storyteller for technology.

9. ambitious [æmˈbɪʃəs] - (adjective) - Having or showing a strong desire and determination to succeed. - Synonyms: (aspiring, driven, determined)

The valley boys are young and smart, rich, competitive and ambitious.

10. retain [rɪˈteɪn] - (verb) - Continue to have (something); keep possession of. - Synonyms: (keep, hold, preserve)

It reflects the fact that these are really highly pursued and highly desirable employees.

The Original Valley Boys - A Second Look Podcast

In 1982, "60 Minutes" took a trip to a lush, green region of California. Not long ago, this valley was heavy with plum orchards. Prunes was its heavy industry. By the time Morley Safer arrived, the valley was generating a different kind of green. This valley seems to hatch its baby millionaires at practically the rate it spews out its silicon chips. The story was called Valley Boys, as in Silicon Valley, and it featured some of the most cutting-edge technology at the time. The hit of the 1981 fair was a small, portable computer that would fit under an airplane seat. It's called the Osborne, after its creator, Adam Osborn. "What I'm doing is I'm giving you the fundamental machine that does what most people want done." Osborn's invention was one of the first mass-marketed portable computers, part of a wave of technology that inspired both hope and trepidation. Do we have to use them in business? In the working environment, yes. There is no escaping it.

A lot of this is reminiscent of conversations we're having today about artificial intelligence, some of the same predictions, some of the same fears. I mean, when new technology comes on the scene, there's often a mixture of fear and fascination that it's greeted with. I'm Seth Doane, and this is 60 Minutes. A second look today, the original Valley Boys. "When you saw the 60 Minutes piece, what did you think?" "Oh, it's a really marvelous primary source," as we historians call it. It really so captures this place and time. This is historian Margaret O'Meara. I'm a professor of history at the University of Washington, and I'm also the author of the 2019 book The Code Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Morley Safer starts his piece really setting the stage, kind of taking us to Silicon Valley. "Yeah, he reads off the names of the streets. He may actually live on corporate she on Semiconductor Drive. It really captures what the valley was like. First, you have this aerial view of the orchards that were everywhere still. And then you go to the office parks that are not particularly pretty. Let's be honest. They were not built for aesthetics."

The valley is now filled with low-slung factory buildings with names like the characters in the barroom scene of Star Wars, Nitron, Xylog, Quantl, Zynetics. "And you have these strange names of companies. You know, the trons and the tro onics and the, and of course, ten years later, they're followed by other strange names like Yahoo. With an exclamation point at the end. Right? All those funny.com companies. True. It has been generations or decades of generations. And now we have Google and Meta and, you know, you name it like, funny names are a hallmark. When you listen to the way Morley Safer sets up the story, some of it is today, a little cringy." "Yeah, it doesn't age so well, unfortunately. Valley girls, as everyone knows, are a breed of Americans who speak in a strange tongue. The song that describes them goes, tosses her head and flips her hair. She's got a whole bunch of nothing in there. The Valley boys, who you will soon meet, also speak in strange tongues, but they have a whole lot in their heads."

"It's revealing of 1982 and kind of what you would say on television then that you wouldn't say now, the way you'd frame something 60 Minutes called the story Valley Boys. Only one woman was interviewed. It was a boys club. It was and is a boys' club. But also, I love the encapsulation of they speak in strange tongues, but there's a lot going on in their heads that holds up for 2024. This is really the beginning of this. Just this wave of media attention that is framing the valley in this particular way. Fascinated a little fearful. Boy, these people are weird, but they're sure smart."

In 1982, less than 10% of American households had computers. News outlets had just barely begun to assign reporters to the tech beat. Mark Zuckerberg had not even been born yet. But this was a year of change. In January, Time magazine would trade its annual person of the year for machine of the year. The computer moves in. 1982 is kind of an interesting turning point. This is the moment where the computer goes from being something that's this mysterious thing in the back room of a Fortune 50 company or a government agency, and it becomes something that you buy at a store, at a Radio Shack, or a computer land, and you bring it to your house or to your office, and you type with it and you manipulate it and you play video games on it, and you can kind of sense the wonderment.

In a way, Morley Safer is like a lot of journalists who came to the valley during that period. They were kind of like, you know, curious space tourists. Here at the West Coast Computer Fair, the grown-up brains speak a language. Half Greek, half Martian. Is this static RAM, dynamic 64k dynamics. One bit of correction, two bits of detection. All right. The other thing about 1982 that's important to remember is this was not a time when the American economy was striding atop the world as it had been. The 1970s had been a pretty rough decade economically. The big economic story of the late seventies and early eighties in the United States was factory closures, was jobs moving overseas. You have an economy and a society that's basically dying for some new, bright and happy, exciting economic story.

The valley boys are young and smart, rich, competitive, and ambitious. Above all, they are changing the way we live and work and even think. Electronics used to be very expensive. Computers used to fill rooms. We can now make the computer smarter. This is Jerry Sanders, one of the so-called Valley boys. Morley Safer interviewed. "When business types talk about life in the fast lane, they mean people like Jerry Sanders. You may not know his name now, but in the 1980s, he loomed large both in business and in valley lore. He had a bushy mustache ahead of the trend he claimed, wore Italian suits, and drove flashy cars. I remember when I bought my Rolls Royce, I couldn't believe it, but I was driving a Rolls Royce Corniche. Now I can't see myself driving anything else." Back in 1969, he was the 32-year-old marketing director for Fairchild Semiconductor. When he was let go, he had a bright idea and a consuming desire to get even. Thus was born advanced microdevices.

"Our microcomputers were responsible for the Columbia space shuttle mission. Our chips are going to enable us to dispense with a phone directory, a microchip. A chip is the thing that makes a computer go. It's the brainstor. Fundamentally, it's the heart of a new revolution." "At the time of the industrial revolution, quite apart from whatever benefits came to people, there was a great outcry against the enslavement by machines. Are we becoming slaves of these things?" "No, we're not. In the next century?" "No. Because what we really got to do, and the reason that I'm so excited about the silicon business, this little sliver, this little chip, as you refer to it, is that we can put more and more intelligence on that chip to make it user-friendly. Right now, it's not very user-friendly. When it's user-friendly, we can love that jargon. User-friendly."

What seemed like jargon in 1982, user-friendly technology is now ubiquitous. Sanders told Safer about one way silicon chips were already making our lives easier. He gave the example of supermarket scanners. "Wave this little wand across this pattern and through the recognition of those optical patterns processed by a microchip, and then back into the system, and lo and behold, you get a complete tape readout of all your purchases, and all much faster than anybody could do it in human form. This little sliver, which seems to have changed our lives so much, is there any limit to what it can do?" "Can't buy you loaves, but other than that, it can do almost everything else." Silicon chips might not have been able to buy Jerry Sanders love, but they definitely bought him a Rolls Royce or two.

This valley seems to hatch its baby millionaires at practically the rate it spews out its silicon chips. "60 Minutes" was not merely interested in Sanders as a tech mogul, but also because he represented another curious aspect of the valley, the immense wealth it was generating. "I remember that when we first went public as a company in 1972, my wife and I had a conversation about the fact that I guess now we were rich because now we had a net worth of more than a million dollars. And she said, ‘I don't feel very rich.’ So I took her downtown San Francisco and I bought her a new Jaguar." The million-dollar sports complex, the swimming pools, the company cafeteria, it all puts many resort hotels to shame.

All of this suggests that this is a pretty profitable business, this techno gizmo computer business. We start to see in the late seventies and the eighties, cool office space, kind of appealing environments, ways to keep people at work happy and keep them at work longer, something we continue to see today. It is this kind of saturating these workplaces with perks that was a really effective recruitment and retention tool then and is now. It reflects the fact that these are really highly pursued and highly desirable employees. If you had an engineering degree, you were in demand. You could have your pick of a whole host of companies. And so they were working very hard to create a space that was going to be attractive and also, yes, would keep you at work for a long time and also build loyalty.

There's something kind of never Neverland about. "I was talking to half a dozen kids yesterday, still in their twenties, who are millionaires, who are going to be millionaires in the next couple of years. That's Alice in Wonderland stuff." "Well, isn't that the American dream?" The producers found two of the most interesting characters in Silicon Valley to interview, Jerry Sanders and Adam Osborne. They were not only business personalities but very—at the time—very successful business leaders who were representing two really important arms of the valley. One was semiconductors and chips like AMD, that Jerry Sanders was CEO of, and what Adam Osborne called the luggable computer.

Thanks to microchips like those made by Jerry Sanders, computers shrink. And thanks in part to one charismatic salesman, they start popping up in the lives of everyday Americans. "I'm going to run every typewriter out of every office with machines like mine." Can you just tell me you're in a closet with a microphone. "Yeah, I'm in our coat closet. This is Silicon Valley historian Margaret O'Meara again." "My teenage daughter dumps all of her sports stuff in here, and I'm standing in like a sea of cleats and jerseys. And it's pretty common what you do for good podcast audio." "I know, I know. Today we have laptops and iPads and supercomputers and our iPhones. So take me back to 1982 when 60 minutes did the story." "Yeah. In 1982, most Americans did not own a computer, although a growing percentage of Americans did. It was a market that was growing very, very quickly."

The process of making things smaller, miniaturizing computer power, was something that had been pursued vigorously for decades before the 1980s. However, it's only in the seventies and early eighties that the chips get small enough and powerful enough that you can essentially build a box around them and put it on your desk and have a functioning computer. In 1982, if you'd used a computer at all, one likely place you would have seen one was at a school. "What made it go the first time? Right? Run and return. Try that and see what happens." The Americans that were most likely to have touched or interacted with a computer were young people. The classrooms were turned into computer labs. There's many a Gen Xer like me who remembers going to middle school or early high school to the computer lab and being taught some very rudimentary programming. "Did you play the Oregon Trail?" "Funnily enough, I did not play the Oregon Trail. Maybe it's because I grew up in Arkansas. I know I played it as an adult." "Yeah, I grew up in Massachusetts, but I played the Oregon Trail."

"Yeah, one of those early games. One of those early games. And then 1982. Remember, this is when video game arcades were taking off. But computers are still a novelty. And those who are tuning into 60 minutes in the fall of 1982 when they thought of computer, they maybe thought of Hal." "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." "What's the problem?" "I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do." And from what Morley Safer witnessed at the 1982 West Coast Computer Fair, Hal, the devious talking computer from 2001 a Space Odyssey, did not seem all that far off. "They don't quite put blood in their veins. But one company is giving a kind of personality, or at least a voice. The printed word you type into this machine has been transformed electronically into spoken language. It pronounces the english language, at least as well as Andy Rooney and is not nearly so temperamental off camera. Not bad. It pronounces english language at least as well as Andiruni and is not nearly so Tangratal of Kagura."

Talking computers were just some of the esoteric technologies featured at the fair. Alongside new electronic accessories and automated organ music. "Do a control e and move the cursor up a line. Keep holding down, you press the key. This automatically jacks app printer ejection. There's a battery pack jack, and that's quite a unique option, seeing any spacebar problems on any of the machines you're testing." For decades, tech giants like IBM and Texas Instruments had been selling computers to companies. However, this fair showcased a relatively new innovation, personal computers direct-to-consumer products marketed to the average Joe.

It was at the same fair five years earlier that the Apple II computer was unveiled. It's the first Apple that looks like an Apple. It's white encased, and it looks dramatically different than a lot of computers that had come before, which looked much more like something that someone had put together in their basement. Stephen Jobs was 21 when he started Apple computer back in 1976. By the time he was 26, he was said to be worth $150 million. Steve Jobs in particular was very focused on design and creating something that looked beautiful. But not everyone at the fair bought into the Apple allure. Particularly, it might not surprise you, their direct competitor, the British entrepreneur Adam Osborne.

"Apple have established themselves as the oddballs of the industry." And Osborne, not Steve Jobs, was the one Morley Safer came to the fair to see. Osborne believed that buzzy companies like Apple, RadioShack, and Commodore had all missed something important. "I realized that they were really all oddball companies that did not represent the mainstream of the microcomputer industry. And therefore, there had to be a massive opportunity for success for somebody who would come in with a mainstream product. And that's all I did." As sleek as the Apple computer was, it took up a lot of space. And like most computers in the early eighties, it was heavy stationary and lived in a nest of cables.

But Osborne offered something different, something he called the luggable. You could say they're akin to the very first laptops, although they don't look anything like a laptop that we'd be familiar with today. "You see the picture? We looked at one. The woman's carrying the luggable. But it looks barely so barely likable. It is 24 pounds. It is like a large, clunky, plastic-encased briefcase. You opened it up, and it had a tiny screen, a screen that's probably about one-fifth the size of a laptop screen today. And the idea was that you could push it under an airline seat and take it with you." "And just to compare, today a computer is like two or three pounds." "Yeah. Yeah. So next time you complain about a heavy carry-on bag that you're lugging through an airport, just remember, you could be lugging an Osborne one."

The Osborne one sales team at the computer fair was convinced that this portability was going to be the machine's main selling point. "Most people, you'll find now, are starting to become more productive, don't mind taking their work home. They would rather take the work home than stay at their office and stay late. They can now take the system home, work on it at home, and increase productivity there." Another perk of the Osborne one was that it came with software already installed. "This is hard to understand today, but imagine buying an iPhone only to have to go to another store to buy the clock app and the messaging app and whatever else, and then manually install them all." "If you think about it, no computer is useful at all unless it has software, period." "That's one of the reasons why we package and bundle software into the machine. When we sell it, somebody can take it home, unbox it, take out the manual, and start using that computer. From the minute they've got it out of that box, you compare yourself with Henry Ford. How does that comparison work?" "Well, what I'm doing is I'm giving you the fundamental machine that does what most people want done. And if you want the extras or the frills, you go pay a lot more money and get it from someone else."

By designing a product that ostensibly anyone could use, Osborne helped to open up the market for computers across the country. It was a big hit. It was released in the spring of 1981. It sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of units, and it cost almost 1819, $82, which is a lot more today. So it was very expensive. "Wow." "But it was a great success." "Well, you're making a profit at $1,800." "Oh, yes, an excellent one." "You could sell it even cheaper then, theoretically." "Oh, yeah." "And still make a profit." "Sure." "I won't. Why should I?" Just projecting supreme confidence. You can see why this man convinced so many people to go along with what he was selling. He's looking straight at Morley Safer. He is no shrinking violet, that's for sure.

When Morley Safer interviewed Adam Osborne, he and his company were really on top of the world, and he bragged about all the money he was making and how many computers he was selling. "What happened to Osborn's company?" Well, this segment aired in November 1982. By September 1983, less than a year later, Osborne computer is filing for bankruptcy. "What went wrong? What happened?" There have been a lot of postmortems about this failure, sort of a spectacular failure, and in fact, so much so that it's been given a name, called the Osborne effect. He announced, pre-announced a couple of new models that were going to be released that were going to be more powerful and do all these things well before they were ready to go, and in doing so, depressed sales for the existing Osborne one people stopped buying them. That's the story. And so this kind of apocryphal story of the Osborne doesn't have the Osborne effect. This is why you don't pre-announce things that aren't ready to ship.

There was also a lot of competition from other companies that started making personal computers too, and Osborne was quickly outpaced. And also, the company had its own woes managerially. Adam Osborne may have been a great salesman and a great evangelist and a great storyteller for technology. He may not have been the best CEO. And so as soon as his star rose, it swiftly fell to earth and was one of the more notable business failures of the early eighties. "And something that you'd see again and again and again and again." "Yeah. Sometimes the more hype a company has." "Yeah. You fly too close to the sun, and the descent can be quite swift." Adam Osborne died in 2003. Jerry Sanders retired in 2004.

We now know that not all of the promises made by their generation of tech titans have exactly materialized. But the narrative offered by Silicon Valley's golden boys has persisted even as the technology has changed. Adam Osborne and Jerry Sanders are charismatic, as you see in the story and unapologetic. "Do they remind you of CEOs today?" "Absolutely." "And I think the charisma and the swagger that they, you know, in a way, they're setting the tone for business leaders to come. We can think of quite a few that are quite prominent today, including, notably, Elon Musk. Talk about swagger. Right? You got to be a hype man in order to sell something and convince people of things that they don't know they need yet." Coming up on 60 Minutes, a second look, predictions from the Silicon Valley Hype Men of 1982 and the similar scripts of tech titans today.

Morley Safer seems almost a little bewildered by all the young techies he met. "Yeah, I mean, we're now used to young entrepreneurs. We're used to college dropouts turned billionaires." "Right?" This again is Margaret O'Meara, author of The Code, Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. "That's become a familiar business trope. Certainly in the valley then, it was quite novel. They don't seem like what you expect, and it's playing in. It's kind of a kinder, gentler capitalism. And that's another thing that Silicon Valley has been selling for a very long time, which is that we're doing this better. We're not evil. We are making money, but we're also making the world a better place to understand those utopian aspirations. It helps to understand where many of the early Silicon Valley tech types came from. The reason that electronics is there in this fruit-growing valley in California in the first place is because of Cold War military spending and all of that activity. In the fifties and sixties, early tech workers were building tools for military contractors like Lockheed Martin.

But the next generation had different goals. If you're a college student on the campus of Stanford or Berkeley in the late 1960s, there are a couple things that are happening. One, you're getting introduced to computers for the first time. And the other thing that's happening is that you're becoming more and more enraged about the Vietnam War and often actively protesting against it and realizing that the military that is funding this war is also the one that is funding these computers. There are a bunch of people with engineering degrees that don't want to go work for Lockheed or one of these other contractors. And so the computer personal computer industry really starts as a movement, a movement that is similar to the movements of the late sixties, which is trying to bring power back to the people and change society for the better, bring people together in new ways to end war, as Gerry Sanders put it.

Although Jerry Sanders was no hippie, trust me, not with the Rolls Royce, not with the Rolls Royce. But what happens in the 1970s is you have a lot of people who come to believe that computing, if it's in the hands of individuals, not in the hands of the establishment, not in the hands of the military, that it can be used for good. Let's take these tools and let's make them tools of empowerment. At the risk of sounding like a real idealist, I think it can eliminate war. Here's Jerry Sanders again, that CEO we met earlier in the episode. He may not have been a hippie, but he had plenty of hope for what technology could do for humanity. "War generally comes from differing interests in conflict with one another aggravated by poor communication. If, in fact, the communication problem is one of not understanding the language, we are developing computers which can now translate in real time." And on the smaller scale, Sanders felt that technology could give everyone one of the greatest gifts, free time.

"I think it's going to take a lot of drudgery out of the world. The truth is, the industrial revolution changes from an agrarian society to an industrialized society. People left the farms, they went to the cities, they worked in factories. 100 years from now, probably 20 or 30 years from now, you know, people aren't going to have to go to factories to work. We may work at home, but I don't think it's going to be the same thing. We're going to have to find out what to do with our free time." So Jerry Sanders predicts, "I think it's going to take a lot of drudgery out of the world." "Yeah, true. Well, it did indeed take a lot of jobs. You know, jobs went away. I mean, in 1982, many American offices still were filled by human beings who were secretaries or administrative assistants who were doing clerical work and clerical support work that now software and computer hardware and software do in these offices." And so a lot of those jobs went away.

"Now, did jobs that involve drudgery go away?" "No. In fact, those increased. And then the great irony, of course, is that the people that one would think would have been given the most free time by computerization, the white collar professional class in the United States, they've just worked more and more and more, that work hours." "What happened to the promise of all this free time?" "I know, I know. And again, this is the techno-optimism, you know, that there's going to be less work, less drudgery, that computers will do it for you." Adam Osborne bought into this idea as well. "By getting a computer to replace a typewriter, the secretary gets far more work done. You get your messages transmitted and received far more efficiently, far more quickly." "What wasn't anticipated."

"There are all these tasks that technology has created for us that have added to the work that people do or the daily activities people have to do." "Anyone who's spent time calling a customer service line and had to speak to the automated service can relate to the fact that this doesn't necessarily mean that human beings have to get out of the system." "I think all of us have had that experience where we, in frustration, call for the agent. Agent. Representative. I just want to talk to a human being. Yes, I got caught in a computer loop issue today, returning a rental car. I returned it earlier, hoping to get money back. Instead of being charged $300, they charged me $1,100. I was trying to call someone, and I ended up having to get in a taxi after getting this thousand plus dollar bill and going back to talk to the person in person, because it wasn't being resolved by our computers." "We all know the hangups that come along with technological advances, but each new generation of tech entrepreneur with new things to sell has their pitch.

"What we're hoping to do with SpaceX is to push the envelope and provide a reason for people to be excited and inspired to be human." That is Elon Musk speaking to 60 Minutes in 2012 about his plans to colonize Mars. "I think most people would agree that a future where we are a space-faring civilization is inspiring and exciting compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction." Since Valley Boys was broadcast in 1982, "60 Minutes" has interviewed just about every titan of technology.

"Here's Mark Zuckerberg in 2008. One of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people, tell everyone how old you are." "I'm 23 right now." And recently, "60 Minutes" sat down with someone with less name recognition but just as formidable of a market share. "We need artificial intelligence to help us explore the universe in places that we could have never done ourselves." That was one of the richest men in the world, Jensen Huang. He founded Nvidia, now one of the main competitors of Advanced Micro Devices, the company founded by Jerry Sanders.

"There are some jobs that are going to become obsolete." "Well, let me offer it this way. I believe that you still want a human in the loop because we have good judgment because there are circumstances that the machines are just not going to understand." Just as microchips fueled the rise of personal computing today, they are the lifeblood of Alexa and Siri and ChatGPT and the myriad of artificial intelligence projects. Seizing the news cycle now, most of humanity is very used to carrying around a supercomputer in their pocket. That is a smartphone. So as we are here at this AI moment, a moment of, let's, to be honest, a lot of hype, and there's also a lot of many warnings about, oh, well, this is so powerful, it might have all of these negative downstream consequences.

"There's something called computer phobia or technophobia." "Right? It's a disease that I. And when I say I suffer from it, I'm not troubled that I suffer from it. I don't understand how those things work. I can't run them. Why should you?" "And I don't feel that I'm somehow deprived." "Why should you run them? You know, you don't have to be an auto mechanic to drive a car. In the early days, you had to know an awful lot about computers to get the son of a bitch to work and to stay working. Well, those days are over now. We're almost over, and we've almost reached the point where you need to know absolutely nothing about computers in order to use them, any more than a kid needs to know about computers in order to play Pac Man. But do we have to use them in business? In the working environment? Yes. There is no escaping it. A computer is to the mind what the spade is to the arm. I don't care how good a gardener you are and how lousy. Give me a spade and your fingernails, and I will outgarden you."

"There's fear. There's unknown. There's a question of how it might take jobs, how it might change the workplace around us." "Yeah." "This hype man CEO concept that you talk about, are there downsides to this model? It stuck. I think there are. I think there are a few downsides. I think it kind of makes the, in a way, doubles down on the Valley boy stereotype and the presumption that it takes a certain type of person and a certain gender to be a successful CEO. You know, we kind of close your eyes and think of a tech CEO, and you think of maybe Mark Zuckerberg in a hoodie or Elon Musk in a rocket. And I think the storytelling can be really, really powerful and important in explaining a mysterious technology to people that may be both fascinated and fearful, but also it can often downplay the dangers; social media is being recognized as these are tools of not only business power but state power."

"They have extraordinary influence. Whether or not China is influencing what American teenagers see on TikTok, it is still an extraordinarily influential platform. And this debate over how much has this rewired our brains, how much is this contributing to other political fragmentation and social crises that's still vigorously debated? When I'm not studying tech titans, I'm studying American presidents. And one of the things that when I teach about the American presidency, I talk about the White House bubble presidents. It's very hard when you're actually the leader of the free world to kind of get out of the bubble and see what's really going on.

"There's another tech bubble, which can be the. If you're very, very successful and very wealthy and surrounded by other wealthy, successful people like you, it's very, very hard to kind of see what's what, perhaps what the downsides of the technology might be. And I think that's why those of us who are tech users need to, you know, approach these new technologies with appropriate enthusiasm but also appropriate caution. Get out of the bubble. Get out of the bubble. Get out of the bubble. I mean, the world of computing in 1982 was still, it was machines that went on your desk. And now it's something that touches every single domain of business and life. Some of the same questions and concerns and this kind of knife's edge on which we have to balance between appropriate caution and also being willing to go the next step technologically and think about how could this actually be beneficial? So the stakes are much higher. Even though the debates are quite familiar, sometimes their techno optimism can be, yes, a little too optimistic.

"Do you think we're going to look back at AI stories from 2024? Like we look back at the Morley Safer personal computer story from 1982?" "Maybe some of them, I think some of them we might look back on, like the stories that were written in the late nineties about the.com darlings that then went bust. And at the same time, I think there will be, you know, we will look back at the stories written about AI in 2024 and read them with a different eye, just like those remarks by Jerry Sanders. You know, his predictions from 1982. He was right on in many respects. And also, you can see the blind spots, the things that he couldn't see. And there are a lot of things that we can't see now."

Two recent articles, both in the New Yorker, caught our attention while working on this story. One earlier in October, titled "Silicon Valley the New Lobbying Monster," reported on the tech industry pouring money into lobbying efforts to try to encourage a more friendly regulatory environment as technology continues to shape our world. Another from this past summer looked at artificial intelligence, noting, Apple is bringing AI to your personal life. Like it or not, it seemed to us an updated twist on Adam Osborne's 1982 warning to Morley Safer. "You're working in borrowed time.'" "You're not just saying that to scare us." "No, I am telling you, you are working in borrowed time. Boy, am I glad I'm 50 and not 20."

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