In the year of the artificial intelligence Big Bang, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, could have planted a big flag on the ground and shown us a reinvented Apple designed to change the world a third and definitive time, like the Macintosh and the iPhone did in eras past.

He didn’t.

He could have spoken about his grand vision for AI, a humanistic synthetic mind that could permeate the entire Apple ecosystem to create a completely new user experience. One that has ethics, privacy, and diversity built-in from the ground up. One so smart and so useful, that it will save us from having to look at screens to manage our desktops, apps, widgets, documents, Slack messages, and all those other two billion tasks that take half of our precious conscious life on this beautiful blue marble.

That too was missing from Cook’s presentation earlier this week during Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference.

Cook had an opportunity to set the tone for one of the most important and consequential conversations humans might ever have. And he could have owned it. He could have shown the world what AI must be for humanity— the right way to do AI. The golden standard.

Instead, Apple wants to glue two more screens to our eyes because that’s what they do: sell screens. That’s its core business. And it’s a good business. But it’s so much Vision Pro for such little vision.

Has Cook lost the golden opportunity? Apple is clearly thinking about generative AI, given its recent job postings, but tech giants from Google to Microsoft are already in the game, not to mention the hot new startup darlings OpenAI and Stability. Few people would deny that AI is changing the world. More specifically, AI is changing the way we interact with technology and how we do our jobs—both areas Apple already owns and could impact with a meaningful push into AI.

Like the famed theoretical physicist Avi Loeb told me in a recent chat, “AI will free us from the boring repetitive jobs and menial tasks we do in life. Free us so we can use our time to think and create, in the same way that fire and cooking saved our primitive ancestors from chewing food, which consumed most of our time. This allowed our species to develop technology and culture.” The Apple CEO could have unveiled an AI to save us from our generation’s equivalent of chewing rancid meat: looking at screens all day long.

Apple is in an exceptional position to do that. It controls a tightly integrated ecosystem in which chips, hardware design, operating system, software development, and even apps work in unison to deliver a coordinated user experience. Right now, it’s an experience rooted in 20th century computing. We need a UX experience for the 21st century and beyond. That’s AI.

Apple uses AI, of course. There’s Siri, whose current version is only slightly more capable than the original introduced in 2011. Siri is still great at what it does best: set timers and tell knock-knock jokes. Apple also uses the same good old machine learning the company introduced years ago in the Apple Watch to track health and activity. At WWDC, the company unveiled AI-powered tools like auto-translating voicemails, auto suggestions on how to finish a line in messages, and a new mindfulness app powered by AI that can write journal “drafts” for you, basically negating the actual mindfulness act of sitting down and reflecting on your day by yourself.

In an interview with Fast Company, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, only had vague things to say about AI. He’s afraid about how generative AI can trick us. Which, fair! “We want to do everything we can to make sure that we’re flagging [deepfake threats] in the future: Do we think we have a connection to the device of the person you think you’re talking to?” he told Michael Grothaus. “These kinds of things. But it is going to be an interesting time [and everyone will need to] keep their wits about them.” All true, but he could have said so much more.

A MOMENT LOST

WWDC 2023 was exactly the right time for Apple to announce a grand plan to make AI the very soul of all its operating systems. It could have unveiled (or even hinted at) a Siri so smart and autonomous that it could handle daily minutia or planning a trip. An assistant capable of truly anticipating our needs and enabling us to spend less time looking at our phones, monitors, widgets, and apps. One that directly connects with our natural language capabilities. Because AI should not be just side dish apps, like ChatGPT. That’s not the future. It should be the core, the UX unifier. The future is the Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze’s Her.

Apple could be using AI to articulate its entire operating system strategy and user experience. Of course, I don’t know what that looks like but, as Emily Wengert—Head of Experience Innovation at design studio Huge—told me over an email interview, this may be the moment to go full Star Trek. “Historically, voice interfaces like Siri or Alexa were constrained by the tasks they were best trained to do and the human’s ability to correctly predict which specific words would unlock those actions. There was no room for error,” she says. “Now there’s reason to hope a more open-ended and flexible natural language intelligence means people can engage in a far more natural way, which makes voice commands an intriguing interface we can imagine might grow over time.”

Patrick Goethe, one of the UX designers at OpenAI who worked on ChatGPT for iOS, also believes that AI is an opportunity to communicate with computers just like they are (infinitely more capable) humans, in plain English like you would do with another person. “I think AI technology will enable us to communicate with computers in ways that are more and more human and not less so,” he tells me over email. “We’re finally entering the era where computer commands are not pre-programmed and learned but intuitive and magical.”

The Vision Pro—albeit disconnected from our real needs—was actually a great chance to articulate something truly magical, a device that could have set the stage for that Star Trek promise. Instead, we got a machine that is still anchored in the same basic UX conventions that defined the original 1984 Macintosh.

Of course, there’s more than just issuing verbal commands to work with computers. We have seen plenty of that already in apps like DragGAN or Photoshop + Firefly. But that is precisely why Apple exists: to invent the Next Big Thing, like it did with the original Mac and the iPhone UX. Now, more than ever, it is when we need Apple to lead the last computing revolution, the one in which we all can win or lose everything.

MYOPIA SYMPTOMS

After watching the WWDC show-and-tell, my sinking feeling is that Apple is far from being in a position to usher the world into a new computing era like it did with the Macintosh’s graphical user interface and the iPhone’s multitouch. Apple is lost in its own bean-counting universe:the Sell as Much Hardware as Possible Galaxy. It’s a philosophically meaningless and ultimately inconsequential place to exist, even if it grants the company a market leading position in the present.

Behind all that gold, however, the proverbial emperor has no clothes. Conversely, owning such a powerful hardware platform gives Apple a way to have the upperhand, to own the platform. It can afford a chance to make this alright. It’s going to be extremely difficult, but perhaps it can be done. Look at how Google pivoted and how challenging it is for the company, even with decades of being at the vanguard of AI research.

Make no mistake, though. This one can’t be fixed with Apple’s old playbook of coming later to the game and making a better mp3 player or a better smartphone. It can’t be fixed by buying an AI company either. Making AI the core of your platform and designing a new UX to unify every aspect of it is going to be a Herculean task. It’s going to require very creative thinking, some major reengineering, and lots of talent, which Apple is actively hunting for. With each passing week, all this will become more difficult and coming back from AI irrelevance will get exponentially harder.

The gap between Apple and the rest of the industry is gigantic. Very soon—maybe from Google, perhaps from Meta, probably by some dark horse—something truly disruptive that goes beyond vertical AI apps will arise. Something that changes the way we interact with all devices—and then the hardware advantage will be irrelevant, superseded by a new AI-based, platform-agnostic UX. ScarJo OS is coming.

Futurism aside, the only real thing we can attest right now is that the Mothership has missed the 2023 AI Big Bang and WWDC 2023 is proof of it. That is an existential risk. It’s no coincidence that Ming-Chi Kuo, the famed Apple analyst at TF International Securities, said that investors “are actually more intrigued by Apple’s AI-related initiatives than its AR/VR headset.” The Vision Pro is just a—to steal one of Apple’s favorite adverbs—”outrageously” misguided manifestation of its own myopia.