On a more optimistic note, Sculley – who now works as a venture capitalist, and has investments in companies looking at healthcare – things that cloud computing is going to make a colossal difference to the quality of our lives. (In the early 1900s, the problems of horse manure in London streets threatened to overwhelm them the car solved that – but, of course, eventually brought its own set of challenges.) That's one of the more perplexing problems of society."Įven so, he does think that – as has happened previously – technology will throw up a solution. "In many cases jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation.
"Those are the things that technology may not be able to solve, but it certainly is a consequence of technology, that the sophistication of automation is changing how work is done, and is changing the skill requirements of workers," says Sculley. Another is the Eurozone, where the tensions between Spanish, Greek, German and French voters and their leaders is coming into starker focus as unemployment rises. The political gridlock in the US – caused by the warring demands of the Tea Party, which thinks government and taxation is destroying jobs, and those of the Democratic Party, which has been trying to drive growth by boosting the money supply – is one example. "The more we bring in these sophisticated technologies, the higher the skills of the people that are needed to be able to use it, and the fewer people we need in the workforce, so the issue is not about work moving to lower-cost workers, it's about automation replacing many of the jobs that we had counted on, particularly for our middle class in the past." Sculley admits he's not as optimistic about that. First, imagine a world where computers have driven humans out of all but the highest-skilled jobs – so that driverless cars, automated factories and similar processes mean that the middle class that has for years been happily thriving on jobs that couldn't be done otherwise suddenly find themselves disenfranchised. "The speed at which a lot of this technology is commoditising is unprecedented," Sculley says.Įven so, he sees some areas for concern. Robust data storage costs are falling too, from around $5 (£3.14) per gigabyte a year ago to 25c now. "The curve is accelerating upwards, at a level that means that technologies are coming out that can do things that you couldn't even envision even two or three years ago." "You can't be an entrepreneur if you're not essentially an optimist, so I'm an optimist by nature."Ĭloud computing, has says, means that we're shifting from the growth of Moore's Law – a doubling every 18 months – to something even more exponential. "I'm an optimist," declares Sculley, now 73 but still deeply involved in technology. And he also has a clear idea of what the Newton really needed to succeed – and which of Apple's visions from the time really matches what we're seeing now.
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