Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has lost faith in autonomous cars for the time being.
Wozniak has flip-flopped in his opinions about the technology over the last few years.
In May 2017 he claimed driverless technology is the ‘biggest, most obvious moonshot,’ in current times, pointing to Tesla as the most promising company in that field.
But just months later he did a 180, and said he doesn’t ‘believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says.’
Now, Wozniak has doubled down on his doubts surrounding autonomous technology, stating at a recent event that he has ‘given up’ on self-driving cars.
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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has lost faith in autonomous cars for the time being. Wozniak has flip-flopped in his opinions about the technology over the last few years. But now, he says he has ‘really given up’. File photo
Wozniak made the comments at Mastercard’s ‘Connecting Tomorrow’ event in Barcelona.
During his talk, he said he’s ‘lost faith’ in the abilities of self-driving car technology and doesn’t expect to see them used widely on the roads anytime soon.
‘They have to drive on human roads,’ Wozniak said, according to Arabian Business.
‘If they had train tracks, [there would be] no problem at all. I don’t believe that sort of “vision intelligence” is going to be like a human.
According to Wozniak, autonomous cars will struggle with unforeseen circumstances that are common in a real-world driving scenario.
‘Artificial intelligence in cars is trained to spot everything that is normal on the roads, not something abnormal.
‘They aren’t going to be able to read the words on signs and know what they mean. I’ve really given up.’
It’s a far cry from his position on the matter just last year.
In an interview with Bloomberg in 2017, Wozniak said self-driving cars are ‘probably the biggest, most obvious moonshot,’ at the moment.
The technology, he said, could ‘hugely’ change our lives.
And, when asked who might bring about the next breakthrough technology, Wozniak says his bet is on Tesla.
‘I don’t know, I think Tesla is on the best direction right now,’ Wozniak said.
‘They put an awful lot of effort into very risky things,’ he said, pointing to electric cars and self-driving cars as example.
‘Everybody needs transportation in our human life,’ Wozniak said.
‘So ideas of boring holes underground to get around traffic problems in big cities, ideas of the Hyperloop to accelerate traffic without having to take airplane flights.
In May 2017 Wozniak claimed driverless technology is the ‘biggest, most obvious moonshot,’ in current times, pointing to Tesla as the most promising company in that field. But just months later he did a 180, and said he doesn’t ‘believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says’
‘So I’m going to bet on Tesla – so many of these off the wall different directions, and they start with a car.’
By January 2018, however, he’d changed his stance.
‘I believed that stuff,’ Wozniak said at a conference in Sweden at the time, addressing Elon Musk’s claims that he would be able to build a car that could drive itself across the United States by the end of 2016.
‘Now, I don’t believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says.’ ‘But I still love the car,’ he added.