Humans become ‘pets’ in rise of the machines: Apple co-founder

June 7, 2011

Source: The Age

Machines have won the war and the human race is destined to become little more than house pets.

That’s the future according to one of the smartest geeks on the planet, Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computers and is convinced that in his lifetime he will see computer intelligence equal that of humans.

The Woz is to the technological world what The Fonz was to leather jackets and denim, and when he talks, the global industry listens.

Steve Jobs (right) and Apple-co founder Steve Wozniak from the early days of Apple. Photo: Reuters

As technology explodes, humans are not going to be needed so much in the future and will settle back into a life of ease, Mr Wozniak told a business congress on the Gold Coast on Friday.

“We’re already creating the superior beings, I think we lost the battle to the machines long ago,” he said.

“We’re going to become the pets, the dogs of the house.”

He said all of a sudden, true artificial intelligence will creep up on mankind like an accident.

“Every time we create new technology we’re creating stuff to do the work we used to do and we’re making ourselves less meaningful, less relevant.

“Why are we going to need ourselves so much in the future? We’re just going to have the easy life,” he said.

Mr Wozniak said Singularity, where a machine seems like a human being and has feelings, can think and be motivated, seemed an impossible dream to him years ago.

When he started Apple, he said, he never thought a computer would be powerful enough to hold an entire song and today we can fit 50 movies on a little disc in an iPhone.

“You don’t realise it’s happened until it’s there and I think that awareness of machines is getting very, very close and we’re getting close to where a machine will really understand you,” Mr Wozniak said.

“My comment about the machines winning the war is partly a joke, but we’ve accidentally already put so much in place that we can’t get rid of from our lives.

“Once we have machines doing our high-level thinking, there’s so little need for ourselves and you can’t ever undo it – you can never turn them off.”