# Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late **Author:** Andy Baio **Published:** 4 October 2011 **Length:** 1 min (141 words) ## In Summary Andy Baio revisits Apple's 1987 _Knowledge Navigator_ concept film, which imagined a touchscreen computer with a conversational, voice-controlled assistant capable of retrieving and organising information. Clues within the film place its fictional setting on 16 September 2011, just weeks before Apple's announcement of Siri on 4 October. Baio highlights this coincidence as an unusually precise technological prediction, demonstrating how speculative design can articulate possible futures long before the technologies become commercially available. **Source:** [https://waxy.org/2011/10/apples_1987_knowledge_navigator_only_one_month_late/](https://waxy.org/2011/10/apples_1987_knowledge_navigator_only_one_month_late/) ## What might this mean for us? Could Electric Dreams use _Knowledge Navigator_ as a historical object through which to explore contemporary AI agents and educational interfaces? Like Bush's Memex, it imagines technology mediating our relationship with knowledge, but introduces a conversational assistant as intermediary. How might comparing these visions with today's AI systems reveal which aspirations have materialised, which remain speculative, and what assumptions about human agency persist? ## Links in this reading - [Apple Knowledge Navigator concept film, 1987](https://www.youtube.com/embed/3WdS4TscWH8?rel=0) - [The Making of Knowledge Navigator, Hugh Dubberly](http://www.dubberly.com/articles/the-making-of-knowledge-navigator.html) - [Apple announces Siri for iPhone 4S, 2011](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/04/apple-announces-voice-activated-siri-assistant-feature-for-ios-5/) - [EDUCOM 1987 keynote address, WorldCat](https://www.worldcat.org/title/educom-87-keynote-address/oclc/027878535)