Steve Wozniak: What If We Lose Control Of Technology?

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Wozniak: By rebels, time to come programmers

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Apple tree co-founder Steve Wozniak has hesitations nearly a tech-dominated order
Wozniak carries v to x cell phones but expresses frustrations with unreliable products
He has paw-picked several artifacts for an upcoming exhibit at the Calculator History Museum

Mountain View, California (CNN) -- The globe has mostly caught on to Steve Wozniak'southward vision of having a reckoner in every dwelling house. 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'southward 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 information technology," he said at the museum, which holds i of the globe's largest collections of vintage computers and sits about six blocks from Google'due south headquarters. "And eventually, nosotros are going to have information technology doing every job we tin can in the earth, so we tin can sit down back and relax."

Wozniak'southward musings take undertones of scientific discipline-fiction, cartoon parallels between the internet and robots bent on taking over humanity.

"Of a sudden, we've lost a lot of command," he said. "We tin can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers."

"Y'all used to inquire a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? Information technology starts with thou-o, and it'south not God," he quipped.

Before that twenty-four hour period, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.

"Petty things that work one mean solar day; they don't work the next 24-hour interval," he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. "I call back it's much harder today than ever earlier to basically know that something you take ... is going to work tomorrow."

Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story almost the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, chosen Slingbox.

"There is no solution," Wozniak said of tech troubles. "Everything has a reckoner in information technology nowadays; everything with a calculator is going to fail. The solution is: impale the people who invented these things," he said with a smiling.

Joking aside, by that logic, Wozniak should be target No. 1 on that hitting listing. He developed the Apple I, a hobbyist estimator, and its more mainstream successors. His work bound-started the personal computer revolution.

As it happens, the museum exhibit is called "Revolution: The Beginning 2000 Years of Computing." Wozniak, one of 52 fellows at the museum, was asked to paw-pick viii items on brandish.

"Information technology's transformed our lives," Computer History Museum CEO John Hollar said of the personal computer. "It'due south transformed our cultures."

Wozniak, sixty, the computer whiz whose Apple tree shares hands sustain his Segway-riding lifestyle, retired from full-time employment at Apple tree in 1987. Just "the Woz" has remained in the spotlight, thanks to a turn as a "Dancing with the Stars" contestant in 2009 and a much-publicized relationship with comedian Kathy Griffin.

Last month, he appeared in London for the auction of a rare Apple tree I calculator that sold for $213,000. I was also on brandish at the Computer History Museum.

During Wozniak's brusque-lived run on "Dancing with the Stars," gossip bloggers noted his short, portly frame and compared him to a teddy bear. In person, he comes off as kind, humble and patient -- although 1 of the few things that test his patience, it seems, is computers.

Despite his frustrations with gadgetry, Wozniak is still a gearhead. He says he carries five to 10 cell phones around with him at a given time. Sometimes he'll set up upward half a dozen of them, forth with standalone GPS units, on his car's windshield, all navigating him to the aforementioned spot.

On Thursday, he had three: two iPhones (including an elusive white model that has yet to be sold in stores) and another running Google's Android operating organisation.

He is a voracious news consumer whose days are engrossed in "thousands of tech headlines." And Wozniak recently made headlines of his own.

In one, he compared Android to Microsoft'south Windows and said that Google's system would eventually dominate the smartphone marketplace. He echoed this sentiment to CNN.

"Apple likes to sit and command the whole user experience better, and information technology'south a tradeoff," Wozniak said. "The Android platform might take the greater market share, simply individually as a company, I'm sure Apple tree will probably wind up on pinnacle in mobile phones."

Wozniak likewise created some blogosphere buzz when he was quoted as maxim Apple had acquired language-software maker Dash, a tip that turned out to be incorrect. Last calendar week, he made repeated mention to the similar company that Apple really did purchase, chosen Siri.

Wozniak appears most excited about these types of software, which interpret what yous're saying and interpret that into actions readable past computers.

"Somewhen, we might only be wearing our computers like a picket and speaking to them," he said. (He's already there; he wears a touch on-screen iPod Nano with a band around his wrist.) "Every step of the way, things get less in our way. It'south less like the technology is there. Information technology's more like our thoughts become direct into the actions that we want."

That's the platonic future, he said.

Technology romanticism aside, Wozniak says his favorite device is a laptop: the MacBook Pro.

His hesitations about the world'south reliance on computers sometimes fade into fond memories of the early on days of computing. The first Apple computer was a homebrew distributed for free.

"I didn't design this computer to make a lot of money," Wozniak said later when the tour stopped in front of the original Apple reckoner, a wooden and silicon contraption that's crude effectually the edges. "I wanted to accelerate the world'south advocacy in the social revolution that it would crusade. Then I gave away my designs for free.

"Just eventually, Steve Jobs came and said, 'Why don't we build it for (consumers)?'" he continued. That was after his so-employer Hewlett-Packard "turned me down five times on the idea," he said.

Whether computers piece of work all the time or non, the formula certainly worked to make Apple a wildly successful business organisation. And it gives Wozniak time to observe the revolution he helped make.