At a business event on Friday afternoon, Steve Wozniak (Co-founder of Apple alongside Steve Jobs) claimed that humans would "become the pets, the dogs of the house." Wozniak was speaking to an audience of over 2000 business people at the Australian Chambers Business Congress on Australia"s Gold Coast.
Steve Wozniak (often affectionately known as simply "The Woz") has long been known as an eccentric character and his latest claims certainly back that up. In what must have sounded like a speech from Sarah Connor - an apparently fictional character in the Terminator movies and The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series - The Woz went on to claim "We"re already creating the superior beings, I think we lost the battle to the machines long ago".
Fortunately he did slightly temper comments about a SkyNet like problem by stating "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." And then strangely, he ranted again by stating "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."
The comments came to light in an article by Tony Bennett published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday. We certainly look forward to hearing what The Woz will rant about next and many of us will secretly be wondering whether, he is, in fact correct. Are we at the brink of a new age where machines will rule the world - and we"ll simply sit back with nothing to do?