Derailleur of the Mind

Software engineer and educator Greg Wilson recently invoked Steve Jobs’ famous quotation, expanding the metaphor to argue that, “if a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes.”

They let a lot of people go distances and tackle hills that they couldn’t before, and they’re better for all of us than cars, but they’re a menace to both pedestrians and traditional cyclists, more harmful to the environment than what they’re replacing, and have given companies yet another way to hollow out local businesses. (Neighborhood restaurants know that cheap delivery services are killing them slowly, but if they don’t play, they’ll just die more quickly.)

Wilson’s analogy doesn’t simply rest with that oft-repeated and oh-so-simplistic claim that the machinery of “AI” enables humans to do more better faster; he also recognizes that there are substantial negative implications as well, not only to the environment but to communities -- to the safety and sustainability of everything around us.

But the reference prompted me to look more closely at what (and when), exactly, Steve Jobs made the "bicycle of the mind" quip. How does this metaphor work? What work does it do?

Why the bike?

“A computer is a bicycle for the mind” is, no doubt, one of those marvelous marketing slogans that helps to power the Steve Jobs hagiography -- this idea that, with Apple computers in particular were poised to unlock personal productivity and individual creativity, which, to be clear, was quite different from the messaging from IBM and other “business machine” companies at the time, those that promised heightened workplace efficiencies.

But note: efficiency and productivity remained the goal. Indeed, even in the earliest comparisons that Jobs makes between the computer and the bicycle -- comparisons that he made at the very start of Apple’s existence -- the new technology was poised to “do as much for the individual as the big computer did for the corporation in the 60s and 70s.” That is, the personal computer would bring the ideology of optimization from the job into the home.

And so it has.