At least one person[1] thinks Steve Jobs has accomplished all he can hope to in the technology industry and won't return to Apple, regardless of his health. The line of thinking behind this notion is symptomatic of the condition that afflicts the technology industry. Namely, it thinks of itself as the technology industry.

Twenty-five years ago, one could have said that Steve Jobs could, anachronistically, unfurl the Mission Accomplished banner even as he was being squeezed out of Apple. After all, he had convinced the entire industry that it must adopt the wussified GUI—originally a term of derision: a "gooey"—if it hoped to find users beyond people like my father and me, people who thought that a green phosphorous screen was already a window into a fascinating universe.

Not only that, but he had also created, with the help of a pre-Macromedia, pre-sucking Adobe, desktop publishing with the LaserWriter printer. And simple networking with AppleTalk. In 1986 the revolution was well under way, and technology was being transformed so that the rest of you could use it.

It is now 2011 and I can understand how dumb, unambitious people can again think that Steve Jobs can crack his knuckles, dust off his palms, and contentedly walk away from Apple.

Steve Jobs is one of ten most important people in my life—and yours. He is the single most important force influencing the way technology is brought to bare on the human condition. As a programmer, I would list him, along with John McCarthy, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, and Bob Metcalfe as one of the most important figures in computing's modern history.[2,3]

Programming makes progress by creating abstractions that paper over the unimportant details the come between programmers' intentions and the lines of code that deliver on those intentions. Apple under Jobs's leadership has tended to make human progress by papering over the technological details that separate people from their desires. And we will never be free of the need for people like Steve Jobs, because we can not help but reach for what we cannot grasp.

Yes, many human desires are trivial, and Apple's products have made it easier for trivial people to do trivial things, but there is nothing new here: Sturgeon's Law will not yield. But more fundamentally, human desire is simple: We yearn to eat, sleep, and get laid.[4] To love and be loved. To have children. To feel a sense of belonging. To feel useful. Technology helps us do these things. Full stop. That is why technology exists. Humanity is not your grad school thesis project.[5]

Jobs is an exemplary humanist, if not always an exemplary human being. We may not all be Keynsians now, and we're definitely not all humanists now, secular or otherwise, but of those of us who do proudly embrace the term, I think—I hope—that most of us realize that contrary to some of the more optimistic dreamers of the Enlightenment, humanity is not perfectible. Perfection doesn't exist except as some hazy vision in our minds. And that's why I don't think Steve Jobs will ever finish the task that he has set for himself. You should hope to have a task like that. Fortunately, you have the power to choose what you're going to do with your time here with us, and I hope some of you set your sights on a goal that is at least one tenth as significant as Steve Jobs has.

1. I long ago flipped the bozo bit on Farhad Manjoo. He's an embarrassment to Slate.

2. If you don't know who these people are, you are in no position to critique this quite critiqueable list.

3. Can you tell that I'm a smug Mac-Unix-Lisp weenie? But seriously, just as the Mac embodies the humanist spirit, Unix embodies the spirit of practicality and Lisp does the same for spirit of programming-as-communing-with-the-mind-of-Einstein's-God.

4. I am reminded of Jobs's critique of the Microsoft Zune's ability to "squirt" music. The anecdote is important and funny enough to point you to a 37signals blog post. (Jason Fried is too similar for me not to hate him.)

5. I write this with Emacs running, editing Clojure and Javascript source files. I see HTML source code there in the back. I've been paid to write assembly language. If you want to engage in some sort of technology pissing match, to you I say game fucking on, asshole.

I for one was strong enough to throw those clear plastic things away. On the other hand, I've used precisely one of approximately a hundred Apple logo stickers I've gotten in my lifetime.