Why AI Needs a Jobsian Visionary
- Rich Washburn
- Aug 19
- 5 min read
Civilizations don’t progress in straight lines. They don’t crawl forward on quarterly earnings or incremental feature releases. They leap.
Electricity. The transistor. The internet.Each was more than a tool — it was a cultural reset. A moment where a handful of obsessive, often abrasive individuals dragged the rest of us into the future.
Today, artificial intelligence stands at that threshold.
The tools are astonishing. The models are powerful. But what’s missing is not another breakthrough in scaling or speed. What’s missing is vision — the kind of vision that takes chaos and collapses it into clarity, the kind of vision that makes civilization feel different on the other side.
In short: AI doesn’t just need better engineers. AI needs a Jobsian visionary.
Jobs: The Archetype
Steve Jobs was famously called an asshole. And maybe he was. But what most people mistook for arrogance was really something else: obsession.
Jobs hated noise. He despised distraction. He had no tolerance for wasted cycles. He lived by a ratio: signal to noise.
The signal was the three to five things that absolutely had to get done in the next 18 hours. Not next year. Not next quarter. Today. Everything else was noise. And if you got in the way of that signal, you got the sharp edge of Jobs.
But obsession without direction is just madness. What made Jobs Jobs wasn’t just intensity — it was foresight.
When he unveiled the iPhone in 2007, the mobile world was a swamp of Nokias, BlackBerries, Palm Pilots, and flip phones. Every device had its own standards, quirks, and keyboards. The iPhone didn’t just make a better phone. It collapsed the chaos into clarity. It defined the interface. It unified the industry. It rewrote how we live.
That is the difference between a founder and a visionary. Founders build products. Visionaries reshape civilization.
Jobs understood this distinction himself. As he put it:
“Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”
That line isn’t arrogance. It’s the essence of vision.
And right now, AI has plenty of founders — but no Jobs.
Bell Labs: Civilization’s Free-Range Visionaries
If Jobs embodied the archetype in one man, Bell Labs embodied it in an institution.
For much of the 20th century, Bell Labs was the closest thing humanity has ever had to a visionary greenhouse. A place where free-range visionaries could roam.
Imagine this: thousands of scientists and engineers under one roof, each among the smartest in their field, many with egos the size of galaxies. Give them labs, chalkboards, oscilloscopes, machine shops, and the freedom to argue, break, and build. Tell them not to worry about quarterly returns. Tell them: play. Fight it out. Be assholes if you need to. Just invent.
The result wasn’t just research. It was the backbone of modern civilization.
Here’s just a slice of what came out of Bell Labs:
The Transistor (1947): William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invented the transistor, replacing fragile vacuum tubes. Every computer, smartphone, and microchip since rests on this breakthrough. Without it, there is no digital world.
The Laser (1958): Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes turned theory into a tool. The laser now drives everything from eye surgery to barcode scanners to fiber-optic communication.
Satellite Communication (1962): Bell Labs launched Telstar, the first active communications satellite. Live broadcasts across oceans became possible for the first time.
The Solar Cell (1954): Bell researchers created the first practical photovoltaic cell. The renewable energy revolution started there.
Information Theory (1948): Claude Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” the Rosetta Stone of the digital age. Without Shannon, there is no internet, no data compression, no modern communication at all.
And those are just the headliners. Bell Labs also gave us UNIX, C programming, CCD sensors (the heart of digital cameras), and cellular technology itself.
The Rock Stars of Civilization
When Ozzy Osbourne died, there were candles, vigils, and global tributes. And rightly so. Ozzy was a cultural icon. He gave the world a sound, a spectacle, a stage presence that defined a generation.
But here’s the overlooked truth: everything Ozzy did on that stage — the microphone in his hand, the soundboard mixing his voice, the lights flooding the arena, the digital recording capturing the performance — was made possible by the breakthroughs of Bell Labs and other visionary labs like it.
Ozzy got the stage. Bell Labs built the stage.
We don’t light candles for William Shockley or Claude Shannon. We don’t hold vigils for the inventors of the transistor or the solar cell. But without them, there is no show. No sound system. No global broadcast. No Spotify stream.
Bell Labs was the cathedral of the 20th century. It didn’t just make products. It made civilization possible.
And it did so by unleashing free-range visionaries.
The Visionary VOID
So what exactly makes a visionary different from a successful builder or founder?
I call it the VOID:
Vision – Seeing not what exists, but what must exist.
Obsession – A relentless focus that looks antisocial from the outside.
Intolerance – A refusal to tolerate distraction, mediocrity, or wasted time.
Direction – The rare ability not just to imagine, but to anticipate: to know what an innovation will cause once it’s unleashed.
This formula is messy. It’s abrasive. It often looks like arrogance, madness, or cruelty. But it is also the only formula that consistently bends reality.
Jobs had it. Bell Labs institutionalized it. Musk, for all his chaos, has flashes of it.
But AI? AI hasn’t found it yet.
The iPhone Moment of AI
AI today is where the internet was in 1995: powerful, chaotic, and fragmented. APIs, RAG stacks, orchestration frameworks. Each brilliant, but together overwhelming.
What AI lacks is its iPhone moment — the unifying narrative that collapses complexity into clarity. Not another tool for developers, but a simple, inevitable experience. A piece of glass you touch. An earpiece you wear. A gesture you make. Something so obvious in hindsight you can’t imagine how it didn’t exist before.
That moment won’t come from scaling faster or raising more. It will come from vision. From someone — or some lab — willing to live in the VOID.
The Call: Free-Range Visionaries for AI
This is not just a moment for AI. This is a moment for us to define what a visionary really is.
Because brilliance alone isn’t enough. Success alone isn’t enough. Vision requires obsession, frustration, madness — the willingness to be misunderstood, even disliked, in service of clarity.
The 20th century had Bell Labs: a cathedral for free-range visionaries. Maybe what AI needs now isn’t just one Jobsian leader, but a new kind of Bell Labs. A free-range visionary lab for the 21st century.
A place where obsessive, impatient, sometimes abrasive minds can collide, argue, and invent — not to optimize quarterly returns, but to give civilization its next leap.
Because until then, AI will remain technically brilliant but spiritually flat — intelligence without narrative, capability without clarity.
The question isn’t whether AI will change the world.The question is: who will step into the VOID — and will we give them the playground they need?
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