Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he no longer fears the day robots become more intelligent than people because he thinks they'll consider us pets, or even better, as gods.
"It's actually going to turn out really good for humans," he said at the Freescale Technology Forum conference this week.
"It will be hundreds of years down the stream before they'd even have the ability. They'll be so smart by then that they'll know they have to keep nature, and humans are part of nature.
"So I got over my fear that we'd be replaced by computers. They're going to help us. We're at least the gods originally."
Wozniak, who helped Steve Jobs turn Apple into a computing powerhouse in the late '70s and early '80s, said he's even started feeding his dog "filet steak and chicken every night" because if he wants robots to treat their pets nice, he should do the same for his.
He says the ascent of artificial intelligence has begun with the 'internet of things' – where many household devices are connected in some way, through the internet.
"I want the internet of things. It does things for me. I don't have to think," Wozniak said.
"The internet of things, if it ever did want to take over the world, would send a message to the computers of today saying, 'Build us the internet of things, that's what we need.'
"It makes things nice for humans, so we want this. If it turned on us, it would surprise us. But we want to be the family pet and be taken care of all the time."
Wozniak's comments follow similar thoughts from technology and space travel entrepreneur Elon Musk, who in March told astrophysicist and TV host Neil deGrasse Tyson if we were lucky, robots would treat humanity "like a pet Labrador" – or perhaps not.
"It may conclude that all unhappy humans should be terminated," Musk said, "or that we should all be captured with dopamine and serotonin directly injected into our brains to maximise happiness, because it's concluded that dopamine and serotonin are what cause happiness, therefore maximise it."
Tyson himself suggested a superintelligence would "keep the docile humans and get rid of the violent ones" – much like humans currently do to dogs.
Stephen Hawking, on the other hand, fears a robot uprising would be less I, Robot or Wall-E and more The Terminator or Battlestar Galactica.
"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," he told the BBC last year.
3 News
source: newshub archive
