# When the Crazy Ones Meet the Machines ## From the Apple Lisa to artificial intelligence: how certain tools change the way we think about the world In 1984 I spent an entire weekend without sleeping because of a computer. It wasn’t mine. A teacher lent me an Apple Lisa, a machine I had never seen before. Not because anyone asked me to explore it. Not because there was a grade to earn. But because there was something there that I felt compelled to understand completely. I had already seen mice and graphical interfaces. But seeing is one thing. Using them is another. Exploring them for an entire weekend, alone, without pressure, without anyone watching, is something else entirely. Windows. Icons. A screen that was no longer just green text on a black background. The computer stopped being a glorified typewriter. It became a space. Almost a place. That night I realized that a new world was being built. And I wanted to be inside it. --- I grew up on the edges of that revolution. Escola Emídio Navarro in Almada, one of the only schools in the region offering electronics at the time. The computer club I founded was an informal group of students who simply couldn’t go home after classes. There was no internet. Technical books were rare and expensive. Documentation circulated as photocopies of photocopies. Learning meant breaking stones: failing, rebuilding, failing again, and failing better. There were no shortcuts. There was time, obsession, and the irrational conviction that it was worth it. The following year I began collaborating with the coordinating center of Project Minerva at FCT/UNL, which managed the computer centers across the Setúbal region. That was where I first had access to Macintosh machines and, sometime later, to something even more extraordinary: a NeXT Computer, the machine Steve Jobs built after leaving Apple. Once again I spent entire nights awake. The feeling was the same: something that did not yet exist was there in embryonic form, waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was hunger. --- This month Apple celebrates 50 years. The number invites reflection, not because of the company itself, but because of what it represented for a generation that looked at technology differently. Apple did not invent the personal computer. What it invented was perhaps more important: the idea that a personal computer could be beautiful, intuitive, and human. That technology did not belong only to engineers and technicians. It could become a creative instrument available to anyone with enough imagination to use it. The manifesto associated with that vision — *Here’s to the Crazy Ones* — was often reduced to a marketing slogan. But beneath the marketing controversy there was a genuine observation: the most interesting tools in history have been built by people who refused to accept the world as it was. The Apple Lisa that kept me awake for an entire weekend was exactly that. Not just hardware. A declaration that the future could be different from the present. And that somewhere, in garages and labs and bedrooms, people were willing to lose sleep to discover how. --- Forty years later I felt that sensation again. I was working on a complex digital transformation project. I asked an artificial intelligence tool for help. Not as a research assistant. Not to format an email. I asked it to think with me. To help architect solutions. To challenge my decisions. To see the holes I could not see. And it did. It wasn’t magic. It was something more unsettling than magic: competence. A competence that did not require years of school, sleepless nights, or photocopies of photocopies. It was simply there. Available. Patient. Tireless. For a moment I stayed quiet. Not out of naïve amazement. I passed that stage long ago. I stayed quiet because I realized something had changed category. We were no longer talking about tools that do things for us. We were talking about tools that think **with us**. And the distance between those two sentences is enormous. --- Today I work with teams modeling processes and guiding digital transformation inside organizations that are trying to rethink how they operate, decide, and grow. It is not solitary work. It is collaborative work with people from many disciplines, many of them professionally skeptical. There is a moment in every transformation process that I recognize and have learned to wait for. The moment when someone stops resisting. Shoulders drop slightly. Expressions shift. It is not excitement. It is something quieter: the realization that the work they did manually for years can now be done differently. That a problem requiring three days of work can be reframed into three hours. That there is finally space to think about what actually matters instead of drowning in operational noise. It is not the enthusiasm of the 1980s when seeing a graphical screen for the first time. It is something heavier. More adult. And therefore more real. --- I often think about what separates the people who will use these tools well from those who will not. It is not intelligence. It is not technical training. It is not even familiarity with technology. It is a certain inner posture. The ability to look at a powerful tool and not ask “what does it do?” but instead: **“What can I do with it that was impossible before?”** In 1984 some teenagers looked at a ZX Spectrum and saw an expensive curiosity or a gaming machine. Others looked at the same object and saw an unexplored universe. The difference was never in the machine. It was in the person holding it. Apple understood that earlier than almost anyone. It built fifty years of products around that intuition: technology does not exist to impress. It exists to expand what people can do. *Tools for the rest of us.* Tools for those who were not engineers or programmers but still had something to create. Today the distribution is the same. The tools are incomparably more powerful. But the question that activates them remains the same old question asked by people who never learned to be satisfied with what already exists. --- There are real risks. The ethical questions are serious and deserve serious answers. Naïve enthusiasm can be as dangerous as paralyzing conservatism. But I know what I felt during that weekend in 1984. And I know what I felt recently, in a conversation with a machine that returned a question I did not expect. The sensation is the same. The scale is different. Fifty years ago a company decided to build computers for the crazy ones, the misfits, the people who see things differently. It was not altruism. It was a bet. The bet that when those people find the right tool, they create things nobody has yet imagined. That bet was won. The next revolution is beginning. Those who recognize this feeling and have the courage to follow it will help build what comes next. The others will read about it in the newspapers.