Steve Wozniak: ‘We’ve Lost a Lot of Control’
December 8th, 2010Via: CNN:
The world has mostly caught on to Steve Wozniak’s vision of having a computer in every home. But this digital lifestyle can sometimes turn rotten, he said last week.
Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and designed, programmed and built some of the world’s first personal computers, laments the byproducts of a culture that’s always connected to electronics.
Leading a tour through an exhibit of computer artifacts — including giant supercomputers and Atari game systems — that opens next month at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Wozniak paused to criticize the stranglehold technology has on our lives.
“We’re dependent on it,” he said at the museum, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of vintage computers and sits about six blocks from Google’s headquarters. “And eventually, we are going to have it doing every task we can in the world, so we can sit back and relax.”
Wozniak’s musings have undertones of science-fiction, drawing parallels between the internet and robots bent on taking over humanity.
“All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,” he said. “We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers.”
“You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God,” he quipped.
Earlier that day, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.
“Little things that work one day; they don’t work the next day,” he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. “I think it’s much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have … is going to work tomorrow.”
Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.
“There is no solution,” Wozniak said of tech troubles. “Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things,” he said with a smile.
Update: Steve Wozniak Is a Mason
Research Credit: SP
I read the last sentence of this article and my heart stopped for a bit. Holy crap, I think that Wozniak sounds uh, serious. About a lot of things. He also sounds very frightened. That’s technology for ya. You choose your own devils. I don’t have any of that crap and if I could I’d find a car without computer technology. Fl#ck this techno machinery. Cripe. Kill the inventor. Woah, whatever happened to one on one with a therapist dude? Sheesh. You are taking yourself WAAAY to seriously.