“Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has said he wants Apple to take on Tesla in the car business, that he plans to buy the cheapest Apple Watch available when it goes on sale, and that he has recently resigned himself to the fact that computers will one day become the masters of humanity,” Paul Smith reports for Financial Review.
“Speaking to The Australian Financial Review from his US home, the recently minted Australian permanent resident said that while the Tesla Model S P85D electric car was one of the finest pieces of technology he has ever owned, he was hoping recent rumours that Apple was getting into the automotive game would prove to be true,” Smith reports. “When the devices go on sale on April 24, Mr Wozniak said he would be buying the entry level Apple Watch Sport, rather than plunging in with the most expensive models… ‘I’m just not going to buy it for jewelery’s sake until I know it’s something I’m going to want around me and on me and use every single day continually as a permanent part of my life,’ he said. ‘Then maybe I’d consider looking into getting the nicer jewelery version.'”
“‘Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,’ Mr Wozniak said,” Smith reports. “‘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.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re getting Apple Watch Sport models because we plan on really using the fitness features and we want them to be as light as possible. Would we buy an Apple Car? What do you think? As for The Singularity: Some things that seem inevitable never come to fruition and are often looked upon by successive generations with a 20/20 hindsight chuckle.
MDN’s take on the singularity is that technology will just stop growing?! Wtf. For as long as it’s heading toward improvements, a singularity is inevitable.
Benefit of the doubt, maybe MDN hasn’t read a fraction of the tens of thousands of pages of books related specifically to the topic of a technological singularity as I and others have.
No matter how much you know and how much you read, the future is not a certainty.
I don’t know why you are so harsh on the MDN Take. Your conclusion is flawed. Technology can continue to progress for a long, long time without inevitably reaching singularity. Or we might encounter it in a few centuries or decades if humanity somehow manages to avoid destroying itself and the environment.
Indeed I have been wearing a silver suit since 2000, I refuse to accept all those predictions could possibly be wrong, it’s others who are all wrong about it. That sort of attitude gets you no where but down dead ends and society is at least as likely to be grovelling around in the ruins of our derelict civilisation a we are to create seriously intelligent machines. After all as history should teach us we go backwards almost as often as we go forwards over the milenia and the technological age is as yet barely a blink in the history of mankind.
Remember, everything page you read about the future… was written in the past. And prognostication that is sufficiently vague is also entirely obvious. It’s the details that no professional prognosticator wishes to get mired in.
My personal favorite prediction has come true every day, so far:
“The sun’ll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
‘Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow!
I love ya
Tomorrow!
You’re always
A day
A way!”
Software engineering is problem solving, and from my experience as a software engineer, you cannot solve a problem you don’t understand. Who understands the mind? How do you get a machine to *want* something?
I don’t see it happening at least until our perception of what the mind is undergoes a radical transformation and aligns itself with reality. Even then, I don’t see it. Some things don’t lend themselves to digital replicas.
Yes indeed! Then add in the facts that:
– Software Engineering of large programs is already at a level beyond the comprehension of any one human.
– The most common software languages we used, based on C, are guaranteed to create bad memory management, resulting in security holes.
– A minority of the world even has access to computers. We in the ‘first world’ often think we’re the only world. Nope.
– Forget about complicated programs (such as anything remotely like AI) being within the comprehension of the common man. Not gonna happen. We will forever point at Target Corporation who, despite all the precautions, warning and alarms, deliberately ignored the fact that their network of POS (card reader) machines had been hacked to the tune of 110 Million accounts being stolen and sold online. This is modern Standard Practice.
IOW: The Singularity is sci-fi.
Example:
MRIs show our brains shutting down when we see security prompts
This is your brain after repeated security warnings. Any questions?
…The MRI images show a “precipitous drop” in visual processing after even one repeated exposure to a standard security warning and a “large overall drop” after 13 of them.
Uh oh.
I disagree. The Singularity will happen.
The questions are, “Will it be intentional, i.e., man created, or will it be self derived by an unintentional confluence of smaller subsets?”, and, “Will it happen in 20 years or 200?”
A single video card today is almost 1 million times faster than the first Cray. We’ve come a long way in the last 40 years. Where will we be in another 40?
And the reference to C is not realistic. COBOL and FORTRAN, back in their heyday, were much, much more hackable than C was/is. Newer languages will keep popping up and they will put into place what we have learned over the past three decades about the issues with C.
It’s all “evolving”. Things will change. The Singularity will happen. Just maybe not in our lifetimes.
I completely agree regarding the progress of computing speed. But with it will come even more computing complexity with even more computing security catastrophes, big and small.
Plus I again stress the status of the majority of the world, versus we first worlders.
AND I suggest reading up on exactly what ‘The Singularity’ is supposed to be. Most people get it wrong. What is ‘singular’ about it is that it is the point where man and machine become one, as in integrated, physically, not just superficially. Oops, Mr. Billiard was hacked last night. R.I.P.
You’ve got it completely wrong also. I just hope the topic doesn’t come up again on MDN because it makes everyone on here look like ignorant douchebags, especially the ones who think it’s not possible and ramble ignorant reasons for why.
No, I read Kurzweil’s description. And seeing as he was one of the conceivers of the term ‘Singularity’, perhaps you should get off your lazy, trolling ass and read about ‘The Singularity’ as well, instead of pretending everyone else is more stupid than you are.
Another day of stupid. Nothing new around here.
For those NOT interested in being as stupid as anonymous coward ‘demondeathkill’, here’s what to read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
So Derek, is Apple’s Swift or modernized versions it and accompanying programming tools from Apple going to be the language/s to stop common programming bugs?
I don’t know. There’s been a stall in programmers flocking to it because of bugs and the need for further maturity. It’s also going to require massive bashing (penetration testing…) out in the field. But Apple says it’s safer.
It’s easier. It doesn’t bring a lot new to the table (unless you only know Obj-C) but it packages a lot of the features of other languages all together. It’s a big part of attracting new devs who have grown up learning modern languages like C#, Java, Ruby. For them, C was just this mandatory class that they had to take in Programming history.
More than anything, Swift reminds me of C#, to be honest.
Put another way, Objective-C has always sucked to the majority, but was loved by the minority (C Programmers). This is why people are flocking to it. It’s a far more accessible language and more productive. Some lament the inability to get low-level access but forget that to get that access you had to sacrifice ease of use and elegance.
In fact, I’d say that Objective-C was the LEAST apple-like. Ruby or C# are way more Apple-like, if you ask me.
I’m a software engineer that has build a powerful and flexible applications framework that now drives many websites and web apps. One feature added a couple of years ago is a queue-based events system, and this is driven by a single “heartbeat” (cron job). It’s so cool watching my websites “run” themselves, scheduling tasks at the appropriate times, and then watching those tasks execute at those times. I know that’s the furthest thing from “intelligence”, but it’s still neat to watch, and has opened up a much better way to accomplish stuff across various apps.
It absolutely is intelligence. It’s “coolfactor’s” intelligence that set it in motion, built all the logical branching. But can it rewrite its own code (in a way that improves itself?).
Singularity is human’s fear based on our own mortality and timeline. An intelligence based on technology that does not have the same short life-span and therefore does not suffer from fears of spreading its gene and does not suffer from greed would not even be bothered about humanity.
We are not able to think about what a true AI (singularity) would do versus an AI controlled by its feeble humans controlled by GREED.
Gene is not going back inside the bottle…
Gene is not going back in the bottle; OK.
Per chance, were you attempting to type Genie?
Slow down, take a breath, let loose of edification of the world
and edit y’all’s work.
That alone, will improve your high standing
Who is Gene, and is he really really small?
You made me think of
“Gene, Gene, the Dancing Machine” and
Steve Martin’s “Let’s Get Small”
God, I’m old.
AI and singularity are not the same thing, you sound like an idiot.
How is this guy still a thing? He sounds more clueless every day and still thinks he is relevant. The media loves him because he spouts of inane controversial click bait. He is just a turncoat and has nothing left to offer.
Woz was one of the founders of Apple Computer and a technology genius.
Show him respect.
Today he is just being Woz and most of us understand that.
typo- Woz was a technology genius.
I agree on the cheapest watch offering. It’s tech not jewelry. I leave that to my Rolex
I love that… “the jewelry version”… Apple marketing, pay attention! 😉