Steve Wozniak Thinks Future of Artificial Intelligence “is Scary and Very Bad for People”

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has thrown his hat into the artificial intelligence scaremongering ring – along with Professor Stephen Hawking, father of Microsoft Bill Gates, and SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk – by claiming that the future of AI is “scary and very bad for people,” presumably because a computer could choose more evocative synonyms than “scary” and “bad” to describe the singularity’s threat to humanity.

“Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people,” Wozniak told the Australian Financial Review. “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.”

Wozniak added, cranking up the hysteria, “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 […] But when I got that thinking in my head about if I’m going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines […] well I’m going to treat my own pet dog really nice.”

In an effort to appease any AIs that might have been listening – “Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” he claims – Wozniak welcomes our new AI overlords, à la Kent Brockman, saying, “I hope it does come, and we should pursue it because it is about scientific exploring. But in the end we just may have created the species that is above us.”

Wozniak’s recent apocalyptic alarmism marks a u-turn; he had previously dismissed Ray Kurtzweil’s prophecies of doom regarding super machines that were destined to control the world, but now admits that, after seeing it in progress, he is now a believer. Let’s just hope Woz never stumbles upon the ramblings of David Ike.

Source: Washington Post