Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
There are days when I really wish someone would come along and make me their pet.
I think I'd like it. I think I'd feel looked after.
I am delighted, then, to hear that Steve Wozniak seems to sympathize.
In March, the Apple co-founder suggested the future will be ." He feared we'll become the pets of computers.
Now, it seems, he's thought about the idea of being fed and watered regularly by a caring master or mistress and decided: "You know, that sounds cool."
Woz was speaking today at the Freescale Technology Forum in Austin, Texas. As TechRepublic reports, he admitted that he had worried about the future. Now, however, he said of robots: "They're going to be smarter than us, and if they're smarter than us, then they'll realize they need us."
We would all like to believe that if others are smart, they'll realize they need us. This has, at least in my experience, led to a lot of lonely nights in bars reading a book and musing about the artificial intelligence of people sitting next to me.
Woz, though, has decided: "It's actually going to turn out really good for humans. And it will be hundreds of years down the stream before they'd [robots] even have the ability. They'll be so smart by then that they'll know they have to keep nature, and humans are part of nature."
It's quaint to think of us as part of nature, where often we seem such interlopers. Surely Woz was being marginally mischievous.
But perhaps not, as he added: "I got over my fear that we'd be replaced by computers. They're going to help us. We're at least the gods originally."
How lovely that we might be kept around because of our godly qualities. How odd to think that we might be godly, though. When I look around the world, I'm not sure how much godliness I see.
Still, this is clearly reassuring to Woz, who said he can't wait for the Internet of Things, because it will help him to stop thinking.
I don't feel like thinking anymore, either. So let us close with what may (or may not) be Woz's last words on the future: "We want to be the family pet and be taken care of all the time."
I think I'll start a Kickstarter looking for potential sponsors right now.