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Apple’s Steve Wozniak Reveals His Love-Hate With Tesla, Facebook And The Joys Of Counterfeiting

This article is more than 4 years old.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is very wary of the monopoly power of big tech companies, like his own for instance. He’s had a love-hate relationship with his Tesla and quit Facebook because he didn’t like its “addictive nature.” He has done a 180 on artificial intelligence, shifting from a strong supporter of the discipline to coming to believe artificial intelligence isn’t intelligent at all. In fact, Wozniak, the man who put a computer on every desk in America, is a big fan of that little-regarded source of intelligence — the human being. Like you and me, when he has a tech or customer service question, he tries to find a way to get a genuine human on the line with him.

No doubt brilliant, in person Wozniak proved to be surprisingly warm, candid, wry and downright funny. Anyone who buys a machine so he can print out his own Departure of Defense security documents and then labels them “Department of Defiance Laser Inspector” complete with a picture of a guy wearing eyepatch has a very advanced sense of humor. And that’s before we get to the story about him printing his own two-dollar bills.

I and a short list of other journalists had the opportunity to interview Wozniak at the recent J.D. Power AutoRevolution event held in Las Vegas. Included on the conference docket were all the hot automotive topics the day — Electrification, Personal Mobility, Digitization, Digital Retailing, and Autonomous Vehicles. But in a refreshing change from other recent conferences, it wasn’t populated with pie-in-the-sky prophets touting etherware but was instead filled with solidly knowledgeable genuine experts given their best summations of what the future automotive landscape would really look like. With the bonus Steve Wozniak. 

Despite the fact that Wozniak is still affiliated with one of the largest companies in the world, he exhibited a healthy skepticism about the benevolence of giant tech companies. He pointed out that tech companies can use their ubiquitousness for ill as well as for good. 

“Some of the big tech, you do something good, you become a monopoly,” he said. “But now that you’re a monopoly, let’s say…you owned all the gas stations, almost all the gas stations, 90 percent. And now you’re going to start a car company, but you’re going to change the nozzle. People will only be able to put gas in your car if they go to our gas stations.”

Wozniak’s hypothetical nefarious scheme hasn’t played itself out in the auto industry, but in the tech realm that kind of consumer manipulation is common. 

“It’s using your monopoly position to take over other markets because you've got such a huge following that you control, and that I just see everywhere,” Wozniak said.

Very famously Wozniak quit Facebook years ago, and it was reported that he left because it was “taking all my data.” But he says the reasons he quit using Facebook were more nuanced than that. Not only was he rankled by the use of his data, but he also found the Facebook lifestyle addictive.

“I say it’s habit-forming, so habit-forming I only really used it for three months of my life the real way,” he told us. “And I said, wait a minute, I don’t like habit. It’s like addiction.”

So don’t look for a Steve Wozniak Facebook page. And don’t look for Wozniak to do an endorsement for Tesla any time soon either. He owns a Tesla, but he has what might be termed a complicated relationship with the car. He says he drives his Chevrolet Bolt EV more often than the Tesla, and he didn’t have much good to say about the Tesla’s Autopilot feature.

“I was totally sure we were going to have autonomous cars,” he said. “We’re going to just go anywhere. And after enough time of seeing supposedly the next attempt that was really going to get us there with Tesla, I guess like a lot of Tesla owners I got disenchanted. After a while we’ve seen how many mistakes it makes. The dumbest human in the world would know how to do this, handle this.” 

From behind the wheel of his Tesla, Wozniak says he has experienced enough problems to swing his enthusiasm for autonomous cars to deep skepticism.

“There are too many unexpected things,” he said. “There’d be a tire in the lane on the road in front of you, so you’d steer around it. A huge pothole. Steer around. You know, things like these that a human would do easily, and I don’t see Tesla possibly doing that. And I see so many navigation system mistakes in a self-driving car.”

Perhaps most unexpected was Wozniak’s confession (perhaps facetious) that he created fake identity documents and, even odder, printed two-dollar bills that he then applied to perforated pads and sold in sheets at a substantial discount.

“There was the time the Secret Service read me my Miranda rights here in Las Vegas, I gave him a fake I.D,” he told us. “It looked like a Department of Defense [ID], but I'd misspelled the ‘Defense’ part as ‘Defiance.’ You don’t notice that. It’s just a joke card. It said I was a laser safety officer and I had an eye patch on the picture.”

Perhaps the reason Wozniak was getting read his rights was the little matter of printing money. Yes, over the years Apple has certainly printed money, but in this case, according to Wozniak, the effort was more literal.

“I just had some two dollar bills on sheets, and they knew they were legal,” he said, “but they got upset. What are these? How do you get these and why are they perforated like that?”

Wozniak told us he printed the two-dollar bills on a “high-quality printer” and then pasted them into sheets.

“They meet the specs, the U.S. government specs, and that makes them legal tender by law,” Wozniak said. “Secret Service approved them three times. Now legal tender. And I'd sell a sheet of two dollar bills for five dollars.”

Happily, the bulk of Wozniak’s substantial fortune did not come from dubious attempts to replicate small bills. Instead, he gave us the personal computer, a gift that virtually all of us have found exceptionally beneficial [I wrote typing on my MacBook Pro.] What is nice to know is that he has a sense of humor about it all.

 

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