LIVE: Steve Wozniak speaks on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress

Transmitter for that much, they came as a box full of parts and instructions on how to hook them together with soldering irons, tools, pliers, and winding coils. I made my own ham radio, so I was a builder. That was very important, not just learning to be an engineer, but when you're a builder, you make complete, finished solutions. That was so important in my life, much more than I realized. Nobody else had that. I can't believe, when I look back, how young and small I was for the huge complexity of some science fair projects I built with hundreds of parts that did digital stuff. So I was both an old analog engineer by the time, you know, after high school. I could have been a television engineer. A television repairman existed; they had repair shops back in those days. I understood the old analog television, but now I also understood digital enough to design my own computers. When I graduated high school, I didn't know that engineers designed computers. I thought engineers only made radios and televisions, the old analog stuff, radar, and that kind of stuff. I was going to be an engineer, but I had no idea that this thing that I loved so much, trying to teach myself how to design full computers, would be worth something. I just followed it because it was in my heart; it was my passion. Eventually, at the end of high school, I would get manuals for all the mini computers coming out, boxes about so big with switches for ones and zeros, lights for ones and zeros. I would get all the manuals for Hewlett-Packard ones, Digital Equipment, Varian Corporation, IBM, and a lot of other companies, Data General. I told my dad before the end of high school, I told him, 'I am going to have my own Data General 4K Nova computer.' 4K was the minimum you needed to type programs in. My dad said it costs as much as a house. I said, 'I'll live in an apartment.' I was going to have my own computer. It was a core value inside of me. I was going to have my own computer before I even had a house. So I kept watching every step of the way. When I discovered getting closer and closer to building a computer I could afford, there were a lot of great steps along the way. For example, with computers in those days, I could design on a piece of paper what little chips would make the processor. Today you just buy a microprocessor chip, but I had all the chips that added up and built a processor. I would design that, but the input, I could never afford input and output. Oh my gosh, a huge teletype, like you see in the movies in the military, those teletypes cost, you know, multiple cars to buy. That was going to be the hard part. I started thinking about, 'Oh, could I use an oscilloscope and drop pictures on it?' An oscilloscope is a digital equipment, but it's sort of a TV screen. Then one day I saw Pong, the game Pong. I loved video games. I loved arcade games. Atari was starting the arcade game industry, and I said, 'Oh my gosh, a television can be your output device.' And I knew everything about television. I could design all these chips that would put little dots on a screen to be balls and paddles. I built up a little Pong game. Then eventually I designed a game called Breakout for Atari. So I loved these games. While I was down at Atari with no sleep for four days and nights, no sleep, I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if these arcade games someday were color?' And my head started popping around to the old analog method of color with $5,000 worth of parts and long design with all these feedback loops and differential calculus. For some reason, my head said, 'Wait, what if I took a digital number, ones and zeros, from my computer memory and put it on the wire into the TV?' And I realized that every TV would think it was color. I don't mind violating the rules, going outside the box. There were no rules in all the mathematics of color TV that it should have worked, but it's the reason Apple's color first logo was six colors. So I was following this step and getting closer and closer to the computers. The ARPANET came along. Today we have the internet. How many devices are on the internet? Six, 10, 20 trillion? Okay, back then the ARPANET started. Six computers were linked up to each other across the United States. I wanted anything I saw or heard about, I wanted to be a part of and explore it. I went and designed a little terminal where I could type on a keyboard that cost hundreds of today's dollars back then. My TV was free because I owned it. I set it up so I could type to a computer across the country, or UCLA, UC Santa Barbara. There were six computers. I could go in, read files, and run programs and things. That was one step closer to the real computers. Then it came a club of people that believed someday we were going to own computer technologies, people were going to afford computers and look how much computer technology can do once we have it ourselves. Back then, it was only huge companies or the military that could afford the big computers. I'd always wanted one myself. So this club attracted me. I figured out the formula the first night of that club, a couple hundred people talking about, 'Wow, we're going to communicate so well and fast when we have computers, and we're going to educate better, and the geek is going to be important.' I designed my computer. Never raised a hand in the club meeting, never talked. But after the main part of the meeting, I would set up my TV and keyboard and start typing. I put my own computer there with a microprocessor, the brains, and the right kind of memory that was one-fourth the cost of what everyone else was trying because it was the right kind. You just need to be an engineer to do it. Oh my gosh, I'd be typing on a keyboard and it would pop up on a TV screen. Every computer before that day had a big front panel, middle panel with all these holes and switches and lights for ones and zeros. I had built that computer five years before on my own. I designed and built it and got the parts. I didn't want to do that. I wanted something that was more human: type on a keyboard like a typewriter, type and see the results, see the answers come out. Every computer before this period had a big front panel with ugly switches and lights that was geeky. Every computer since I showed that one off at the club has had a keyboard and a video display. I was sort of a hero in the club. I passed out my designs for free, public domain, no copyright notices, nothing. There was no industry yet anyway. I passed it out to all the people that wanted to create this big revolution in computers in the hands of individuals. So I was giving it out. Then, unlike the movie with Ashton Kutcher where Steve Jobs comes and finds me in a basement and hauls me down to a club, he'd never been to the club. I'd been there every day since the first day it started. I took him to show him the excitement.

I didn't hear the question right.

Ouch. I don't know what the question is. Tech disruptor? Is Apple still disrupting technology nowadays? I know I can go back to the Apple II computer. The Apple II computer was really the big start for Apple. It was so far ahead of anything else because it was the first time ever arcade games were color. Even though it was a computer, it was the first time ever arcade games were software. That meant that a nine-year-old kid in the language BASIC could make blue and green dots move on a screen and create a game in one night. Before that, it was a hundred chips with a thousand wires, an engineer working for maybe a man-year to get together a new game prototype. This was a huge change in gaming as well as computing. That one computer was so advanced. It helped us. We raised, we had an investor that believed in us. Mike Markkula donated the money, and he was the adult in the room. Steve and I were in our young 20s. We had no money in a bank account. We had no business experience. Mike Markkula told us who you have to hire, what positions, and what their roles and responsibilities were to have a company. So anyway, he invested in this. I turned it down at first because I had told everyone in my life I would be an engineer at Hewlett-Packard for life. I never would move up the org chart because when I was younger during Vietnam War days, I decided not to be political, never going to vote. When you move up an org chart, you get kind of political. I don't want to direct other people to do things my way. I just want to do great engineering, hardware and software, and show it off. That was the reason I built this computer. I finally accepted the money to start Apple because I realized we could start Apple and I didn't have to run the company. I could just be an engineer. That's what I wanted.

Again, the echo is so horrible in here. It's very hard for me. You cannot hear me?

I think that the skills of politics are very different than the skills for technology companies to have success. So in general, I don't know. It does make sense to run a government like a business, but I don't see that happening in the case of Elon Musk. When you run a business, you look around and you look for a consensus and a sharing. If half your employees feel one way and half the other way, you negotiate, you compromise, or you take one bit at a time. If you're looking to be efficient, one item at a time, maybe we can manufacture a different way or get a different part from somewhere else. But you don't just say everything is out and start fresh. So I don't like what's going on in that regard. All the big tech companies are just so big, it's like they own our lives. Used to be, when I came up with, we started Apple, you bought a computer, you ran some software on it, and you set up and ran your company or whatever with all this stuff, and it always worked. It was your own. Whatever setups you made worked. Eventually the internet came, then the social web, then high bandwidth. Nowadays, you have to subscribe, subscribe, subscribe to everything. Then once you've subscribed, you don't own it. You're going through somebody on the cloud. The cloud is a problem. It's not like the old days where you bought something, you owned it yourself, you protected it yourself, you kept it working yourself. Nowadays, you have to trust that every upgrade, I almost think, 'Oh my God, sometimes so often they're downgrades.' It seems something used to be easy is now hard or worse.

Technology companies are huge. If they're that huge and worth that much money, they have to have some political involvement. They've always hired, oh, I'm so nonpolitical, the guys that go to lunch with all the congressmen and push ideas on them. We've always had that. So there's some involvement. There's got to be some involvement. But actually taking direct roles, oversight of it, just because they've made it big in technology, I don't like that at all from what I'm seeing.

AI safety. Well, everybody notices AI has certain problems, so you should at least be aware of it. Everybody says AI should be regulated, but they just throw it out as a word because they're making AI. I've said for years now how it should be regulated. You should know if you're reading something that came directly from AI, not from a human that interpreted it and put it in their own words. It's coming from AI. You should be told which AI, how was it trained, what sources on the internet was it trained on, and you should have citations like scientific articles in scientific journals always have citations. You can look at a part of their article and click a number and you'll find out, 'Oh, here's the research or here's the article that they took that from as they build their case.' Those are citations. That means on AI, I'd really like if I got something, I'm told this is from AI, let me click on one phrase or one sentence and see where on the internet or wherever some other net it came from. That would help me judge a little better if it's accurate or not, if it's the right thing. If you read something, we humans have more of an emotional feel. If we're expressing an idea, we know that it feels good or bad. We know how other humans will take it. One of the things about that is if you get an AI report, it can be very complete and well written and proper grammar, but it's not necessarily the same thing that two different people would say. Three people, a lot of people, there's a lot of subjectivity in people. They are different. Trying to condense it all down saying there's only one answer here, there's only one type of rule, I don't like that. I like more of a sharing, everybody putting their own ideas into things. So that's a problem to be aware of. One of the things is if you just pass AI results on as your own, you lose the ability to think critically and to decide things yourself. It just becomes an easy escape. Look, I used to be able to add numbers in my head, and now I have to go, 'Hey Siri, what is five plus seven?' So you know, you get used to it. AI is going to be very helpful. Oh my gosh, I'm doing some work. AI can give me a lot of ideas to think in certain directions or where I might want to go. But the human has to receive it, interpret it, and then be able to put it into my own substance. For example, the world moves forward, especially the world of technology, moves forward with creativity, with innovation, that's new things that didn't exist before. AI is a real good reporter of things that are already in existence being said. Maybe someday AI will be able to think for itself and be innovative. Maybe someday it might even have a little emotional feeling. Maybe a person rescues an animal and I can cry when I read stories like that. I don't think AI cries. So understand, I believe in the AI, I just don't believe in the I so much. All my life, I was paying attention to the abilities of the brain that were much more capable than the speed of a computer. When I went back to college, I worked at, I started Apple with only three years of college. When I went back to college, I had to use a fake name because my name was Wozniak. My Berkeley diploma says Rocky Raccoon Clark. That's who I was. I was a psychology major as much as anything, and I wanted to study the brain. All I found out was we don't know how the brain's wired like we do electronic circuits. We don't even know that our memories are stored in the brain. We have good reason to suspect it, but we can never find the memory. The strongest relation you'll find, I came up with 40 years ago, you lose two things between the ages of six and ten years old. You lose your childhood autobiographic memories, things that happen to you, and you lose your teeth in those years. Everybody knows memories aren't teeth. I was just pointing out the books on memory are not even to this day complete enough. We could take a memory because the whole idea is we want to duplicate a brain. We want to take a brain and figure out a way, maybe a trillion instances in software, that equals a real human brain, not just what we call AI. I was at a company once where the engineers figured out how to make a brain takes nine months.

Give a real general description, have AI write a program and pass it on. I would want to inspect it and check it. It can be very helpful to me as a human to get what I need for my boss or my class in school. But it's just, I don't know. I just, like everyone else, hold back, look at it, try to pass on what you think is good. Will the problems increase? Not to mention some of the problems with AI, the deepfakes. I hate spammers. I hate the people trying to get your passwords and take all your money. I hate all this. Now they have one more tool, they have AI, so they can do a better job. AI can trick you into things. That's a method I'm not for. I believe things should be respected for their honesty. You can rely on them, you can count on them. AI is already demonstrating that it hallucinates and makes things up. If you just believe it, you're a sucker. I read jokes on the internet all the time, or I read a funny story about something that happened and I pass it on to a list of a hundred friends, and then I find out that it was made up, it wasn't real. So humans can make mistakes.

AI should be open source. Oh yes, everything should be open source in my mind. The principles behind, by the way, I'm one of the founders of the EFF, and those of you know what it's about, it's very much into privacy concern, civil rights, and open source. Open source is just the ability to go back, improve things, take somebody else's knowledge and improve on it, find a bug in it, fix things. Why keep it hidden? You're trying to keep a hidden advantage. If you're lucky enough to be in the key position like a big company, then other people can't intrude, maybe patents and all that. I don't know. I just believe in the right to repair, and I've stood up for it publicly many times.

For me, COVID was the best thing ever because I have a life of traveling a lot of places and speaking like this. During COVID, I got to stay at home. My wife and I took 40 trips in the car to every national park in California, every corner of California. We'd turn around and drive back. We could drive together and talk and listen to audiobooks and music. We'd carry our four dogs with us, our children. That was just wonderful. So a lot of people discovered that they could be quite productive working at home, and it's convenient. The workers like it very much. Nowadays, the thing is a company wants to have a management structure. Those at the top control the ones under them, control the ones down to the worker. You have bosses, you have managers in between. What do they have if everybody's working at home? They have a lot more control if you're there in one spot. There are certain types of communication and meetings that work out better in person. So I believe in the hybrid mode. It's good to have certain days that everybody can be expected, that's working together, can be expected to be together, and every day if they wanted. But other days, to a certain amount of time, they can work from home or anywhere in the world. This has really turned out to be a boon that we never knew that it could work, and now we do.

For 10 or 20 years, people would always be asking around the world, 'Oh, how do we have a Silicon Valley?' Well, it has to grow organically. But now it's really not like there's one place in the world. The formula is there. People have good ideas, start new companies, are innovative. It's popping up in about a dozen places in the United States, high technology levels, about the same number of people working in technology as in Silicon Valley. I don't think Silicon Valley is all that much necessary for anything new and dramatic in the world. It'll change the world. The next Uber doesn't have to come from Silicon Valley. I always like things to be shared. People have brains everywhere in the world. I like everywhere I go in the world for those people to be able to create their own innovations that are so good that become very world famous. That's how I grew up. When I was designing stuff, I was designing what I felt like doing. I was an independent innovator, an independent inventor, not really an engineer, an inventor. I want to leave room for those inventors around the world to this day. So I'm glad to see this idea of just Silicon Valley dispersing and other people learning from us. Who knows where it goes from here? But I expect, look at the interest here in Barcelona and so much development occurs here. People want to do it, and the wanting is more important than the knowledge. When I was a teacher for a long time, the teacher always teaches correct knowledge, but if you can make the students want to learn, you cannot stop them from learning. I decided wanting is even more important than knowing.