The most anticipated speaker at this year’s biggest tech community gathering in the Baltic states LOGIN was one of the co-founders of Apple Inc. a great engineer and programmer Steve Wozniak. The organizers of the event described him as “one of the greatest game changers of this century”.
He started his speech with a reminder that he has been to Lithuania before when he was involved in introduction of computers in our country’s education system.
Altogether, the great and powerful Woz, as he is commonly referred to, has been heavily involved in education his entire life. He says, that his father made him believe that education is very important, because it will get you a job. When Woz was a child he told his father that he wants to become an engineer and a teacher. As it is now clear, his intentions did not go downwind.
According to Woz, it is very important to get inspirations and to know things that you can pursue later in life when you are young. He himself grew up in times when world was learning to use transistors, evolution of which made him believe, as it turns out, that everything in life becomes better as they go on to be smaller, lighter, use less power, are faster and cheaper.
The age of transistors came about because of one similarly great British computer scientist Alan Turing who created a machine which could solve anything that is definable. However, when Woz was little, computers were farther from common people as space travel is from them today.
S. Wozniak grew up near the Silicon Valley, where a lot of young entrepreneurs were starting companies that make transistors. The surrounding buzz let Woz believe that building your own is far better than just thinking about ideas how the thing you want can be built.
Do computers make us happier?
The next part of S. Wozniak’s speech started with a question, if computers do make us happier? And if not, then what are they for? He says, that there is a road to make us feel perfectly happy built in every single one of us and we are constantly striving to achieve that goal. Even though we are far away from it right now, we are on our way there.
What computers do is they save us from a lot of thinking. In a good way. They calculate answers better and faster than us and this lets us think about even more complex questions that are not crunchable by a machine. Computers think clearly and logically, while humans are capable of more creative and abstract thinking. They are not necessary a solution to many of the most complex problems in the world, but they can give us a hand.
“We will never understand the circuit of the mind”
S. Wozniak says that almost all his life he believed that understanding human brain was impossible, however, latest technological breakthroughs and ongoing researches have slightly changed his perspective and now he thinks it might actually be possible, but only very far away in the future.
“It takes tens of thousands of hours to do something very well, however some people think that I was born with this skill of engineering or programming,” – explains Woz about his long career in computer industry and many successes in it.
Woz also believes that many of the greatest ideas happen after long and hard hours of work. For example, he thought of cheap color monitors when being half awake at the Atari headquarters.
The progress of computer innovation, according to him, is their adaptation to human condition, like when computer mouse brought the interaction from one to two dimensional experience. Even today many new technologies adapt to forms that are already habitual and not the other way round.
A great example would be Apple iOS software program Siri, which lets a person have a very humanlike conversation with his phone. Or the internet, which replaced brains of many professors: “Did we design internet to replace a brain? No, it just happened”.
In the future S. Wozniak waits for 3D printing. However, he thinks that it will not become as commonplace as computers or phones, more like workshops in garages, when you might not have it yourself, by you will certainly know somebody who has one.
EBN reporter Edgaras Savickas