The Signal: What would you consider the most important technological advancement of the past 100 years?
Steve Wozniak: There are so many that are so important. You know, to tell you the truth I think the television made the biggest difference, but I’m going to say it’s the personal computer and the internet: the combination that makes the internet possible because that really accelerated everything and tied us together as one world more than any one device ever did.
As far as just personal enjoyment, and that’s a big measure of life too, the television is up there, the cell phone is up there, but I would say the internet because it really gets us thinking and gives us answers a lot faster than ever before and that’s what the future depends on…
TS: How important is a college education now with the ease of access to information?
SW: You get information in college, you get academic learning in courses, and then you go to work and you find out oh my gosh what you really got was sort of training of how to get through assignments, how to get though developing projects, and that applies to your work life.
But the actual specifics that you spend a lot of time learning, literature, history, really don’t apply to the job—it’s finding out in this company who talks to whom, who comes up with ideas, how do the get evolved into projects or products…my classes really didn’t matter as much as I assumed they did. Looking back that is what almost everyone will tell you.
College is really a social experience. It is like the most fun time of your life. For the first time you are in command of your own decisions: what I’m going to do to this day, what my interests are, how I’m going to study based upon peers, but how do I make life worth while and enjoyable? And that’s the main part of it.
College education is equally important even in today where you could theoretically get courses like classrooms on your mobile and computer devices and I think that’s going to continue. For example, we have televisions now and we have movies, we have DVDs, we have tapes—people still go to the movies. There is a lot to say about the social experience and being with other humans, and that gets missing if you are just totally with your machine.
There are different kinds of students; there are different kinds of people in the world. Some of them adapt very independently to learning from, let’s say the information that are only on the pages of a book; and today’s book is electronic and it’s visual and it’s in front of your eyes. You deal and interact with it very quickly where is with a book you sort of have to read it you have to answer a few questions and you might find out a day or two in class whether you were even right on your answers. So theoretically we have sped up the learning process, it’s hard to tell.
I was one of those independent people. I would very much love just to sit on my machine and tune in to some great university courses. You still have to do a lot of work— with your own muscles, your own hand writing, your own thinking— to stay up with a course. There’s other alternatives too that we have has all along. You could take a certain course, in phycology or something, and you could be so interested in it that you buy your book on Friday and you’re halfway through the book answering questions on paper and everything just because you love the subject so much and you are halfway through the book before you start class on Monday…
I’m hoping for the day when computers are like humans, when they really have a consciousness and they understand you emotionally. They have feelings for you and it shows. They look at your facial expressions and know where you are sitting today and when it is time to maybe change the subject and explore your personal life. And I think that day is going to be a really great day to take on the educational task.
TS: What type of influence do college aged students have on the advancement of technology?
SW: It’s easy to look at all the real revolutionary changes that were so important that big companies didn’t see. You find companies like Yahoo when it started and Apple and Netscape back in the days of browsers…Google and Twitter and Facebook, some of these companies that mean so much in our lives. They come to mean a lot more than the company that makes our asprin[p1] . It’s just a personal connection with these companies—they somehow had some vision and saw things were changing.
One thing that I find that when I was young my head was a lot freer; it would go in some strange directions…it didn’t have to go where people had gone before. I didn’t like competition so why did the same thing everyone else is doing? A million people will probably be better than me at it. I look for different things that haven’t been done, ways to make something possible that wasn’t possible before. So that type of thinking is much more common in young people who haven’t got a job and a responsibility and a need to pay apartment rentals and [have a] lack of free time. Also it helps, as far as college students, a lot of them say “oh my gosh I’m free! This is my time to party and have fun,” but that takes away from [it].
What you should really think about is you want to have a really good life. You want to have the things in life you really want to have if you really want to peruse that work as hard as you can. Nothing comes easy. Nothing comes instantly. You have to go through many, many steps of doing better and better work that builds on itself. It’s not a college course but it’s like mathematics where you have to learn addition and subtraction before you learn multiplication…
You’ve got a history behind you that allows you to do that big thing. If you think of it, do it while you’re young and now you’re just really set for life. You have a lot more than money. The ability to make future decisions on products or services that people need in their lives and that’s really rewarding. I expect all the next really great changes, I expect them to come out of young people right out of college. Sure, you get the occasional exception, a company like Apple, that manages to still think that way: to take the risks and try very new things that are very different. It is much more common to see it come out of college. Those were the favorite days of my life for advancing my own brain, not in terms of how much I knew about computers, but in terms of how much I loved and wanted to be a part of it. The more I learned the more I was inspired to even have my own computer someday when it was unheard of. Motivation come from thinking about things when you are young, which is very important and can take you in different directions older people with jobs and lives really can’t do as well. Keep that in mind but don’t throw away your youth because that’s when you can really make it for yourself and just have a wonderful life from then on.
TS: What type of influence do college aged students have on the consumption of technology?
SW: You almost always say oh my gosh, look at trends—whether it be music or whatever—of young people and those generally over a later period of time become the common thing. Well a lot of young people now oh it’s very, very easy to just email somebody anything you’ve got. But it might be a song, so there is an issue of copyright that are thought of differently by younger people than older people that have been around and have friends in the creation business. Eventually those younger people grow up and they wind up in politics and running companies and they’re really in charge of running the show. So their values, the values of the young people, move forward.
As for the sort of devices they have taken to when my kids were very young the would pick up these texting devices…that’s become the way of today. The habits that young people get into are really how they live their life. And let’s say you’re an employer and you’re looking down at the younger people…make your institution very acceptable in working along with the modes of life these younger people are used to because then they will become more closely connected to your institution.
TS: In the next ten years how do you think humans will be exchanging information? Music? Movies? Art?
SW: Ten years is a tough time frame because you can always make predictions way out in the future now and computers will be doing it for us…well in movies you still go to a real movie theatre so you want to use your forms of art as background to social life. It’s kind of nice if you’re at a party and there’s music playing in the background…Everyone that goes to a concert, for example, has already got the CD, I probably shouldn’t use the word CD, they’ve got the music and they’re still going. There’s got to be a different reason for going. A lot of art is oh my gosh I want to be around somebody that I’ve put in my mind as a symbol of greatness and want to be around people that think the same way, and that might really be what art really is…
You can always look at today’s technology and try to extend it a bit. It’s hard to predict. You can always look at today’s technology and extend it a tiny bit: we’ll have mobile devices and we’ll be sending little Youtube videos to everybody. We already do these things so it’s hard to think of something so new that is going to be the standard way of doing things in ten years. If you can imagine that you can probably invest your money and make millions of dollars very easily knowing what the trend is going to be. When we started with computers it was totally obvious, like the laws of physics, that some day computers would be storing songs, and that someday they would be storing movies and little cards that would fit in your hand to watch movies—totally predictable. But nobody could stretch their minds that far, no company could really take a course that could really capitalize on it, because it is so far out and you don’t know if other things are going to come about and what the real technology is going to be in the future….if I could think of them I could be the riches man in the world, but it never works out that way.
TS: Some have called you a “hack-tavist.” What are your thoughts on hacker culture and how it affects society?
SW: I have never done any bad hacking—tried to take over computers, tried to shut them down, and there are some bad people. Really probably the worst are in governments who are totally trying to steal information and mess up other governments. They are really on the far end of bad. The hackers that I’ve met are really just like myself and they would like to explore things and see things that even other hackers don’t know –to be the first on some specialized knowledge about how things work and how you might be able to disrupt them [and] make them work in other ways other than they were intended. That is sort of a goal and it equates to a certain type of power. Those are called white hat hackers.
Yeah, there are probably some bad black hat hackers that are trying to steel money out of bank accounts and things like that, but I swear I’ve never used them. A lot of hackers really want to find weaknesses in systems and help the companies get them fixed and that’s like the real goal. Hacking is treated like any type of intrusion into a computer [and is] treated like a crime way out of proportion than it really is. It’s almost like a when you’re young, especially on a college campus, there are people that are joking, “hey maybe we can do this,” and it’s really small-time stuff…
TS: I have heard that Tetris is your favorite video game. If you could modernize Tetris how would you play it?
SW: Favorite is hard to say, I certainly have played it the longest because it is an easy little escape. For 20 years I just sat down with my guitar a couple of time today and played it for relaxation. Sometimes if there is a Tetris machine hand and I need a break…a little Tetris or some other little simple game is just really an escape.
Tetris is 3-D, I don’t know. I can kind of imagine there is a camera pointed at you and you just sort of use your hand a gestures to guide pieces right where you want to. But I don’t think I’d like a game different then where my fingers learned it on one particular device…in my lifetime, 60 years, even in the computer era, there were only a few games that became modern standards that they will kind of be with us forever, and maybe a couple of board games too…yet there are tens of hundreds of thousands that have been produced and only a few have the real level of being something different, but they’re very, very simple to understand and it starts a whole new category of game, and Tetris is certainly one of those.
TS: How important is it to enjoy your work? Do you think that value is something that is neglected?
SW: I think there are different people… life is all about how happy did you live your life. Now some people seem to be real tense and stressed and yelling at people all day… and I think that is their form of happiness, you know I can’t judge it. For me it was really just laughter, like the way you laugh at jokes, the way you laugh at things you enjoy in life and I always believe their should be a strong connection with their work and your play…
TS: Speaking of fun, any good practical jokes these days?
SW: Yes, I do practical jokes all the time. And I do so many and I them so casually that I don’t really keep a good memory in my head. If one occurs to me that I did I will break out in laughter. Usually early morning in the shower I often think of one of the jokes I did in my life or even recently. I can’t say one right here yet I do them every day
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, inventor of the first Apple computer
WHEN: Jan. 30th @ 3 p.m.
WHERE: Student Center Ballroom
Open and free to public
