acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM TechNews

Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak on the Apple Watch, Electric Cars, and the Surpassing of Humanity


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he is concerned about the future of artificial intelligence, and what it will mean for the future of humanity.

Credit: Nic Walker

In an interview, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said he is concerned about what the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence will mean for the future of humanity.

Wozniak said he agrees with fellow tech luminary Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking that "the future is scary and very bad for people." He warned against building "devices to take care of everything for us," noting eventually devices might be able to think faster than people and eventually do away with them, especially if they are put to the task of running corporations efficiently.

Wozniak also ponders what role humans will take in a world of superior machines, wondering if they will be revered as gods, treated as pets, or dismissed as insignificant as ants.

He suggests such a future could be forestalled by the impending end of Moore's Law, as transistor density approaches the atomic scale. Quantum computing could provide further advancements in computing power beyond the atomic scale, but Wozniak did not express high hopes for the technology, saying, "for all the time they've been working on quantum computing they really have nothing to show that's really usable for the things we need."

From Australian Financial Review
View Full Article

 

Abstracts Copyright © 2015 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account