AI won't take away jobs, no machine is close to human intelligence: Steve Wozniak

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was in India for The Economic Times Global Business Summit, told reporters that he doesn’t believe artificial intelligence (AI) will end up taking away people’s jobs.

Speaking to The Economic Times, the 67-year-old Wozniak said that over a period of time, people end up losing jobs because of phenomena like stock market crashes and market bubbles. “These things come and go. But it’s not like the world is ruined,” he said.

Woz, the nickname by which he is widely known, pointed out that no machine ever sits down and says “Humm, what should I work on?” It is always humans that tell machines what to do. He added that humans are just building technology that will make things easier for them in the future.

Brushing aside negative comments about artificial intelligence made by other big names in the industry like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, Woz said that the machines we have now are not even close to human intelligence.

“Stephen Hawking said the same thing. I was saying the same things for almost two years before they were. Then, I thought a lot about it, what is intelligence. These machines are not even close to intelligence. They don’t work like the human brain. I studied human brain deeply, almost got my degree in psychology. There is no machine which sat down and said what should I do today? Machines don’t think that way,” he said.

Wozniak gave an example of a search engine like Google going through 80,000 pictures of a dog and still getting it right only some of the time. In contrast, if one shows the picture of a dog to a one-year-old child, he or she will be able to recognise a dog for the rest of their lives.