Unlike other commencement speakers who have recently seen backlash for hyping AI, Steve Wozniak got applause by reminding graduates at Grand Valley State University: “You all have AI… Actual Intelligence.” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said today’s AI is still only an attempt to imitate the brain, while the real advantage humans have is the ability to think differently, solve problems creatively, and build things they would want for the world to use. “It would take too long to go deeply into what I think about AI,” the Woz said. “But we’ve been trying to create a brain… And we haven’t been able to do it.” “I was a psychology major, and we don’t know how the brain is wired like a circuit is,” he said. “We don’t even know how our own memories, what we’ve done, are in the brain.” “I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain,” he added. “Yeah. It takes nine months.” “Your importance to the world is going to be how you’ve affected the world and all that, but it’s really yourself,” Wozniak said. “And you should always try to think different. Don’t follow the same steps as a million other people. Think: Is there something I can do a little different?” “I was so shy, I couldn’t talk to anyone, so I thought I might as well go about figuring out little tricks that couldn’t be in any books,” he said. “When we started Apple, did I want to make money, start a company, start an industry? No. Those were just steps to get my computer to the world.” “The best products come when you have a good mind, and you’re designing it for yourself, the one you’d want to use. The user interface the way you would want.” He said the struggle to use computers as tools to make the world and our lives better is important and shouldn’t be abandoned, and the rise of cloud computing, subscription-based software, and AI threatens to turn that arrangement upside down. “Steve Jobs and I, starting Apple, we wanted to use technology to make disabled people more equal to regular people – blind able to see,” he said. “Look around you. Look how we’ve succeeded at that.” “Everywhere you go, look at the sidewalk, and people are walking around bumping into things, looking at their iPhone,” he joked. “The human being is more important than the technology,” he said. “We’ve kind of lost that battle these days.” “For a while, we had quite a hold on it,” he added. “Now, you have to subscribe to everything. You have to go through the cloud, and somebody else owns it — and owns you.” “No. I’m tired of that,” he said. “Okay, do your best.”
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