In the year of the artificial intelligence Big Bang, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, could have planted a big flag on the ground and shown us a reinvented Apple designed to change the world a third and definitive time, like the Macintosh and the iPhone did in eras past.

He didn’t.

He could have spoken about his grand vision for AI, a humanistic synthetic mind that could permeate the entire Apple ecosystem to create a completely new user experience. One that has ethics, privacy, and diversity built-in from the ground up. One so smart and so useful, that it will save us from having to look at screens to manage our desktops, apps, widgets, documents, Slack messages, and all those other two billion tasks that take half of our precious conscious life on this beautiful blue marble.

That too was missing from Cook’s presentation earlier this week during Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference.

Cook had an opportunity to set the tone for one of the most important and consequential conversations humans might ever have. And he could have owned it. He could have shown the world what AI must be for humanity— the right way to do AI. The golden standard.

Instead, Apple wants to glue two more screens to our eyes because that’s what they do: sell screens. That’s its core business. And it’s a good business. But it’s so much Vision Pro for such little vision.

Has Cook lost the golden opportunity? Apple is clearly thinking about generative AI, given its recent job postings, but tech giants from Google to Microsoft are already in the game, not to mention the hot new startup darlings OpenAI and Stability. Few people would deny that AI is changing the world. More specifically, AI is changing the way we interact with technology and how we do our jobs—both areas Apple already owns and could impact with a meaningful push into AI.

Like the famed theoretical physicist Avi Loeb told me in a recent chat, “AI will free us from the boring repetitive jobs and menial tasks we do in life. Free us so we can use our time to think and create, in the same way that fire and cooking saved our primitive ancestors from chewing food, which consumed most of our time. This allowed our species to develop technology and culture.” The Apple CEO could have unveiled an AI to save us from our generation’s equivalent of chewing rancid meat: looking at screens all day long.

Apple is in an exceptional position to do that. It controls a tightly integrated ecosystem in which chips, hardware design, operating system, software development, and even apps work in unison to deliver a coordinated user experience. Right now, it’s an experience rooted in 20th century computing. We need a UX experience for the 21st century and beyond. That’s AI.

Apple uses AI, of course. There’s Siri, whose current version is only slightly more capable than the original introduced in 2011. Siri is still great at what it does best: set timers and tell knock-knock jokes. Apple also uses the same good old machine learning the company introduced years ago in the Apple Watch to track health and activity. At WWDC, the company unveiled AI-powered tools like auto-translating voicemails, auto suggestions on how to finish a line in messages, and a new mindfulness app powered by AI that can write journal “drafts” for you, basically negating the actual mindfulness act of sitting down and reflecting on your day by yourself.

In an interview with Fast Company, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, only had vague things to say about AI. He’s afraid about how generative AI can trick us. Which, fair! “We want to do everything we can to make sure that we’re flagging [deepfake threats] in the future: Do we think we have a connection to the device of the person you think you’re talking to?” he told Michael Grothaus. “These kinds of things. But it is going to be an interesting time [and everyone will need to] keep their wits about them.” All true, but he could have said so much more.