Apple co-founder and pioneer of personal computing Steve Wozniak says he’s still not sold on AI putting his scepticism down to the fear of giving up his own intelligence.
Wozniak was speaking at the Dreame Next event in San Francisco where he took part in a hosted discussion with the Dreame Technology Global President and CEO Xinwei Chang about where technology is heading.
When asked by host Tracey Chang “what new AI should we be watching” Wozniak paused before admitting it’s a complicated question for him.
“Every time computer technology increases, it allows the human user to do more than they could do before,” Wozniak said.
“And AI is kind of top of the line on computers, doing the most for us.
“I’m still a little sceptical.”
“I like to use it. It gives me a lot of good ideas for things but it’s my own intelligence that I’m concerned about and I don’t want to just give it up.”
Wozniak said he would never pass on anything AI came up with as his own work.
“If I do I would say this is from AI,” he explained.
And while Wozniak said he believed AI was a good thing he said it would never replace the human brain.
“There are certain ways AI can be implemented to really help you,” Wozniak said.
“Okay if, for instance, the (Dreame) Aurora phone just sort of knows my habits and my patterns, I guess that’s good.
“As long as we’re well aware of it and you know, over time, over the next decades, people will get so used to knowing how it works.
“I don’t really believe we’re going to hit AI AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) where it’s going to be as smart as a person.”
Wozniak told a story about returning to college 10 years after dropping out to start Apple with co-founder Steve Jobs.
“I had one year left to go in engineering but I went back as a psychology major. I wanted to study how the brain works,” he said.
“How does it relate to computers? All I found is we don’t know how the brain is wired.
“We keep trying to come up with a formula to build a brain. We’re only building little parts of it, little parts of it but not the whole thing.
“I was in a company where the engineers did figure out how to make a brain. It takes nine months.
“I’ll let you think about that for a while.”
When asked about how the modern smartphone would change Wozniak said he couldn’t see it moving too far away from its modern form factor.
And naturally Wozniak said was an iPhone user – he currently uses the thin and light iPhone Air.
* Stephen Fenech travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Dreame
