Tech pioneers like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk have warned humanity of the dangers of AI for years, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s finally a beliver in the doomsday scenarios.
“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Woz told the Australian Financial Review in a recent interview from his US home.
The man who sparked the personal computer revolution with the invention of the Apple II says ‘the future is scary and very bad for people’ because computers will eventually get faster than us and wipe us out.
“If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently,” Woz said.
“Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don’t know about that.” explained Woz, who then noted our eventual demotion to the bottom of the food chain reminds him to be really nice to his pet dog.
Woz also talked about rumors of Apple’s car project, saying it’s “perfect territory” for Apple. When it comes to the gold Apple Watch though, Woz isn’t sold just yet.
“If you buy the really high-priced ones, the jewelry ones, then you’re not buying a smartwatch that has a bunch of apps. Like a Rolex watch, you’re buying if for prestige and a label and a symbol of who you are.” said Woz. “The fact is the difference between a $10,000 watch and a $17,000 dollar watch is only the band, and for an engineer like me I don’t live in that world, that’s not my world.”
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
12 responses to “Woz: ‘The future is scary and very bad for people’”
And we just let the Government take control of the internet, not like they would like to keep any information from us…would they?
Shared information played a large part in the collapse of East Germany and it continues to impact Eastern Europe.
And that’s the difference between Woz and Jobs! The later one is the visionary and the former just has an opinion. I am sure he would have said something similar about smartphones 30 years ago… “They are so smart they would talk to each other without us knowing it and prepare the takeover” (not that he said that, mind you). He is NOT Jobs, his opinion about the future is not better or more correct than anyone elses.
The real question is WHY?
Answer: Because the super-rich own and will own most of the AI/robots, and they will use the AI/robots to control you.
Woz obviously doesn’t know anything about cognitive neuroscience.
If you can get a CEO to develop a computer to do the employees usual jobs, then hats off to that CEO.
otherwise there will be lots of jobs created by developers having to build these machines who are “taking everyone’s jobs”.
You will see a transition on what jobs are available. But there is still plenty of work out there.
Any owner of a successful website will tell you. HEAPS of jobs out there. problems every friggen day that need solving as it is!
I always find it hilarious that people in tech seem to think that they know everything about other knowledge domains. Like neuroscience, or cognition. Our brains are literally orders of magnitude faster than any computer out there. There is just that much more input and data processing going on that we can’t get the answer to a mathematical equation faster than a computer. Because a computer is a COMPUTEr. Artificial intelligence is nothing more than a computer calculating equations programmed by a human brain. As the programming language is imperfect to describe intelligence, that program will fall short in one of immeasurable ways.
Our brains are much more than computers. They reprogram themselves, they adapt to situations that cannot be foreseen, they have a random idea generator that can make nearly clandestine choices on things in a heartbeat. I for one am not intimidated by narrow minded technocrats who think somehow humans are inferior to technology. It’s like a dog thinking he made a better dog by making it run faster or smell farther. It kind of misses the point of being a dog.
I find it hilarious that people who know a field are trapped by its paradigms and can’t see the bigger picture. Computers don’t have to mimic the human brain in order to be creative, self-aware or intelligent. They will have their own way of doing things. Please describe the fairy dust that makes the human brain more than a vastly powerful computer. All I’m aware of in terms of hardware is neurons, which are pretty basic. The rest is software, in which we have no inherent advantages over computers, except, of course, development time. And as we go down the road of computer-assisted programming, developments that required millennia in biological terms will take increasingly shorter time in electronic terms. I’ve read a CPU will have processing power equivalent to the human brain sometime around 2040. But a CPU will be twice as powerful a couple of years later and continue to advance at a breakneck pace. How do humans keep pace with that? Another issue is that CPUs can be paralleled, bringing still greater power. Even if things move slower than predicted, it remains the direction in which “evolution,” for want of a better word, is headed. Where do you see AI in 50 years? 100 years? Pretty much where it is now?
That’s my take on it. Code already generates code as it is, is that not “sort of” like the brain adapting. AI already does lots of circuit designing for instance.
Once AI is self-sufficient it can start to re-write itself and we’ll have no hope of understanding it once that happens.
Right answer! this is the best comment in this article. Others are tech-trash!
Yeah, well, I can still beat the computer in Wii tennis so…