SPRINGFIELD - Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak spoke with MassLive before his talk at the MassMutual Center Friday night, touching on subjects like technology startups and improving the nation's education system.
"The Woz" is credited with inventing the personal computer. He said his goal was not to make money, but to make something that was valuable to people, and he had a passion for working with computers.
Other people have similar dreams, and there are ways to make them come true, he said. Before the one-on-one interview in the green room, Wozniak visited the computer education program Tech Foundry and spoke to tech-savvy high school students about their ambitions, urging them to pursue happiness above all else.
Steve Wozniak:
One of the first things I did was I went to bookstores. I could buy all these computer manuals on programming languages that had no classes for them. I couldn't take the classes, but I sure could learn.
MassLive:
You told the students at Tech Foundry that you don't have to get your knowledge from other people and books. You can think for yourself. That's an important message.
SW:
The message isn't that it's possible, because that's obvious. The message is that ... you can come up with something better than the book. That was exactly how I operated. I didn't care how people had done it before. I could probably come up with better things and, eventually, I developed really good skills at it.
MassLive:
There are a lot of people who may have ideas that are potentially ground-shaking, real moneymakers, but they may not know how to get them into stores or how to get them into people's hands. What do you say to someone who has a great idea and they just don't know how to execute it?
SW:
I usually say, if a 15-year-old kid ever got that idea, and paid attention to every little subject that came his way in school and the university, in books and on the Internet, he might be the one that makes it happen. Usually, you know, you get an idea and a lot of people just say, "That's a great idea. I'll tell other people." No, it's the people that turn it into something real. Working models, virtual models on computers, whatever it takes so that people can experience and feel it. Make it into a product that the masses of the world can get.
MassLive:
So you don't keep that idea to yourself. You go far and wide looking for opportunities to share it.
SW:
There's a mixture. If it's such a good idea, it's so out of the box, no one's ever done it before, most people won't believe in it anyway. That's not how things are done. Going back to personal computers, you can share it all you want; I gave away the design that became the Apple computer. I gave it away publicly before Steve Jobs even knew it existed. I wanted to help other people be able to build their own computer, have a useful device in their life.
Nowadays, it's critical to making good products to keep them secret, certain aspects of them. I'm still for openness, that when you create something, try to make it open to everybody in the world on every platform. Apple doesn't do that. But you should keep your project secret so that the engineers can create the absolute best thing they can come up with without outside interference. Telling them what's right, what they like, what they don't like. They shouldn't hear that in advance. Leave that to marketing later on.
MassLive:
So, you can teach yourself how to do these things if nobody else is available to teach you or if you don't want anybody else to know about it.
SW:
If you're independent, you still need some strong management. You still need at least, hopefully, one mind looking over the total product to make sure that it's consistent, it's good, it's well-performing and it's not cluttered. You still need someone who really cares about using it, doesn't want it to become a jumbled mess. Just because engineers can make it, doesn't make it good.
But you still need a lot of independence to come up with every idea you can and not be afraid to make the changes, tweak, and don't release the product until it's ready. Enough value for the price it's going to be sold. And I say that based on a lot of mistakes Apple made. Huge mistakes in the first 10 years.
MassLive:
Even now, they make mistakes. Maybe they have the smartest engineers in the world creating products, but they only discover flaws once they hit the market.
SW:
I look at Apple as an exception to that. Not counting problems and bugs in a product. That'll happen just because we're humans and we make mistakes. I'm talking about the quality level of the products from Apple. Where's a low-quality product? We were able to do that before the iPhone, but the iPhone was kept very secret. It wasn't shown to Bill Gates and others. It came out and it was so obviously ahead of things that it just grabbed your imagination and your wants.
MassLive:
Do you think that schools are doing enough to nurture these dreams and really encourage people to use their imaginations so they can come up with these ideas and execute them?
SW:
That's a difficult question. I can't necessarily say that I'm right or wrong. I would say no in some regards and yes in others. Schools teach us how to learn. ... They don't give us the skills. Every skill that was valuable in my life? I got it (outside) of school.
A strong set of formulas can lead to a solution. You have a goal you want to achieve and you can work on it with mathematics and it's right or it's wrong. Is that right for every single person? I say that, no, not even math, not even science is meant for every person. Some heads just aren't into that way of life. In school, we say that everybody has to take these subjects, but I wish you could diversify early. Your third year of college, you get to start heading toward a major. Why not in middle school? Why not say, "I'm interested in the maths and the sciences and I want to skip history and writing." Other people love to write and they should be able to go off and write as much as they want. Schools teach you that being smart is being the same as everyone else. Knowing exactly the same things as a million other people your age in the country. They weren't your answers. They were learned out of books and they weren't thought out.
Schools have a problem with money because they're underfunded. And the reason they're underfunded is that money for schools comes from the government. That means you get a larger slice of the pie if you have more votes. A family of five with kids in school gets no more votes than a family of two that doesn't need to pay for schools. That's unfair that a family of five isn't counted more strongly, especially for education money. We're always going to be shortchanged. That is wrong. It's as wrong as blacks not having the votes and women not having the votes and poor people not having the votes when we started our country. Maybe someday, it'll get undone. You've got a teacher with 30 students, and the teachers would rather teach 30 kids poorly than 20 kids well because they get more money. You'll find a few exceptions.
Some day, we'll have one teacher per student, I hope. It'll be a computer that looks at your facial expressions, that knows your feelings, that cares for you, that knows your family. When computers are conscious, they can do that. And if it becomes your best friend, it'll be your trusted guide to what you should learn and you can go as fast as you want in the things you love, and you can skip the things you don't love.
MassLive:
Do you think that's possible in our lifetimes?
SW:
I think it's possible even, maybe, 20 years from now. You'll have to fight the infrastructure of schools that exist by today's methods once computers are conscious. But there's so many problems with artificial intelligence, I don't know if we want it or not. For education, it would give every student their best friend in their pocket. It would know their heart and soul better than other humans do. It's going to be your little device that you're going to trust. It will know to take you in the right directions and not the wrong ones for you. You'll enjoy the education you get that way.
The problem is, if you think of any ideas on how to improve education that are based on what he have today, you're no smarter than a million other people thinking the same way. So I won't be able to come up with any good solutions for education other than, five people should have five votes. I do believe in that.
Computers didn't really make a difference in how smart he come out, how good of thinkers we come out from our education, primary or university-level. So what could be in the future? If computers get conscious, it'll be like an artificial human teacher, and I think maybe that would be successful, maybe not. It's the only idea I can come up with that's so different that maybe it'll pan out. Who knows if I'll alive then?
MassLive:
The entrepreneurial landscape in a lot of regions is blossoming, and this is one of them. If you want to start an innovative company, maybe you don't need to go to Silicon Valley or Boston anymore. Maybe you can do it in Middle America or in Springfield. Do you think that's a fair assessment?
SW:
I hear that thinking almost everywhere I go and I totally buy into it and believe in it. ... You have to have a few successes locally that spin out other ones. How did Silicon Valley start? The inventor of the transistor moved there. It was an accidental early step that you couldn't have planned.
It's the most interesting thing in the world. The products are intriguing to everyone who uses them, young and old. Inspiring the young is really where it starts.
Spreading information and how to make life better because of it. That's the future.