Society loses when builders ship tech for tech’s sake. To paraphrase something my former boss Steve Jobs repeated as we engineered the very first iPhone: The number of megahertz doesn’t matter. Innovation must be about delivering practical applications into the physical world that improve lives.

Combining AI with smart hardware and physical infrastructure will ensure the transformation of trillion-dollar industries from manufacturing to life sciences to agriculture. AI will power the future. But in order to do so, it must be paired with physical hardware that makes everyday life better for people.

To put this in context, let me share something that’s not widely known. The very first iPhone—I’m talking pre-launch, kept deep within the Apple engineering lab—had a click wheel exactly like

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