The take-o-sphere is awash with responses to last week’s WWDC, and the announcement of “Apple Intelligence”.

My old friend and colleague Matt Webb’s is one of my favourites, needless to say – and I’m keen to try it, naturally.

I could bang on about it of course, but I won’t – because I guess I have already.

Of course, the concept is the easy bit.

Having a trillion-dollar corporation actually then make it, especially when it’s counter to their existing business model is another thing.

I’ll just leave this here from about 6 years ago…

BUT!

What I do want to talk about is the iPad calculator announcement that preceded the broader AI news.

As a fan of Bret Victor, this made me very happy.

As a fan of Seymour Papert it made me very happy.

As a fan of Alan Kay and the original vision of the Dynabook is made me very happy.

But moreover – as someone who has never been that excited by the chatbot/voice obsessions of BigTech, it was wonderful to see.

Of course the proof of this pudding will be in the using, but the notion of a real-time magic notebook where the medium is an intelligent canvas responding as an ‘intelligence amplifier‘ is much more exciting to me than most of the currently hyped visions of generative AI.

I was particularly intrigued to see the more diagrammatic example below, which seemed to belong in the conceptual space between Bret Victor’s Dynamicland and Papert’s Mathland.

I recall when I read Papert’s “Mindstorms” (back in 2012 it seems? ) I got retroactively angry about how I had been taught mathematics.

The ideas he advances for learning maths through play, embodiment and experimentation made me sad that I had not had the chance to experience the subject through those lenses, but instead through rote learning leading to my rejection of it until much later in life.

As he says “The kind of mathematics foisted on children in schools is not meaningful, fun, or even very useful.”

Perhaps most famously he writes:

“a computer can be generalized to a view of learning mathematics in “Mathland”; that is to say, in a context which is to learning mathematics what living in France is to learning French.”

Play, embodiment, experimentation – supported by AI – not *done* for you by AI.

I mean, I’m clearly biased.

I’ve long thought the assistant model should be considered harmful. Perhaps the Apple approach announced at WWDC means it might not be the only game in town for much longer.

Back at Google I was pursuing concepts of Personal AI with something called Project Lyra, which perhaps one day I can go into a bit more deeply.

Anyway.

Early on Jess Holbrook turned me onto the work of Professor Andy Clark, and I thought I’d try and get to work with him on this.

My first email to him had the subject line of this blog post: “Magic notebooks, not magic girlfriends” – which I think must have intrigued him enough to respond.

This, in turn, led to the fantastic experience of meeting up with him a few times while he was based in Edinburgh and having him write a series of brilliant pieces (for internal consumption only, sadly) on what truly personal AI might mean through his lens of cognitive science and philosophy.

As a tease here’s an appropriate snippet from one of Professor Clark’s essays:

“The idea here (the practical core of many somewhat exotic debates over the ‘extended mind’) is that considered as thinking systems, we humans already are, and will increasingly become, swirling nested ecologies whose boundaries are somewhat fuzzy and shifting. That’s arguably the human condition as it has been for much of our recent history—at least since the emergence of speech and the collaborative construction of complex external symbolic environments involving text and graphics. But emerging technologies—especially personal AI’s—open up new, potentially ever- more-intimate, ways of being cognitively extended.”

I think that’s what I object to, or at least recoil from in the ‘assistant’ model – we’re abandoning exploring loads of really rich, playful ways in which we already think with technology.

Drawing, model making, acting things out in embodied ways.

Back to Papert’s Mindstorms:

“My interest is in the process of invention of “objects-to-think-with,” objects in which there is an intersection of cultural presence, embedded knowledge, and the possibility for personal identification.”

“…I am interested in stimulating a major change in how things can be. The bottom line for such changes is political. What is happening now is an empirical question. What can happen is a technical question. But what will happen is a political question, depending on social choices.”

The some-what lost futures of Kay, Victor and Papert are now technically realisable.

“what will happen is a political question, depending on social choices.”

The business model is the grid, again.

That is, Apple are toolmakers, at heart – and personal device sellers at the bottom line. They don’t need to maximise attention or capture you as a rent (mostly). That makes personal AI as a ‘thing’ that can be sold much more of viable choice for them of course.

Apple are far freer, well-placed (and of coursse well-resourced) to make “objects-to-think-with, objects in which there is an intersection of cultural presence, embedded knowledge, and the possibility for personal identification.”

The wider strategy of “Apple Intelligence” appears to be just that.

But – my hope is the ‘magic notebook’ stance in the new iPad calculator represents the start of exploration in a wider, richer set of choices in how we interact with AI systems.

Let’s see.