Apple’s Tim Cook Believes AR & AI Will Be Extremely Important To Company’s Future

In advance of the fifth anniversary of his role as CEO at Apple, Tim Cook gave The Washington Post a huge interview where he talks about a slew of different topics – from his job being a ‘lonely’ one to the importance of augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) going forward.

Despite the iPhone recently suffering its first decline in sales recently, Cook doesn’t see that as a bad sign. Instead, he assures us that smartphones will continue to become more and more important in our lives – and it’s hard to disagree with that. Most people today couldn’t imagine not having a smartphone, and there’s no reason to believe that we won’t continue to gain more and more reasons to strengthen that reality.

The biggest reason we’ll become even more glued to our phones is because of the improvements made in artificial intelligence. Apple is no slouch where AI is concerned – it launched the Siri assistant over five years ago – and it doesn’t plan to fall behind anyone else. Cook claims that the “prediction of Siri is going way up”, and how we interact with that AI will continue to expand.

Tim Cook at Apple’s Cupertino Headquarters – Credit: The Washington Post

Take for example remembering where you parked. Sometimes, that’s an exercise in patience. One option is to take a picture (which is easy enough to do, admittedly), and look at it later, but Cook believes we won’t have to do even that in the future. Siri, for example, would simply make a note of where we parked, and then remind us when the time comes to return to the vehicle.

As for AR? Cook calls it a “core” technology, and that Apple is “doing a lot of things on behind the curtain”. And that wraps up all that we know about Apple and AR right now. It does seem clear that the company has been working with it as a technology for a while, and that this hasn’t become a suddenly new focus of the company due to the success of Pokémon Go – though that game could have further bolstered the company’s confidence that AR is worth perusing.

Cook was prodded with an interesting question: if rumors surrounding Apple become so common and thus believable (eg: Apple’s car), why doesn’t the company just suck-it-up and put an end to them? To Cook, it’s because people love surprises, “We don’t have enough anymore”. That’s also hard to disagree with – leaks have become a fact of life.

If you have ten minutes to kill, check out the full interview at The Washington Post.