Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs, predicted “horrible problems” in the coming years as cloud-based computing takes hold.
Wozniak, 61, was the star turn at the penultimate performance in Washington of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, monologist Mike Daisey’s controversial two-hour expose of Apple’s labor conditions in China.
In a post-performance dialogue with Daisey and audience members, Wozniak held forth on topics as varied as public education and reality TV.
However, the engineering wizard behind the progenitor of today’s personal computer, the Apple II, was most outspoken on the shift away from hard disks toward uploading data into remote servers, known as cloud computing.
“I really worry about everything going to the cloud,” he said. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”
“With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away” through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to, he added.
“I want to feel that I own things,” Wozniak said. “A lot of people feel: ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer.’ But I say the more we transfer everything onto the Web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”
Prior to Saturday at the Woolly Mammoth theater in Washington, Daisey and Wozniak had met once before, after a performance of the monologue in its original version in February last year.
Wozniak was moved to tears, but a year later Daisey came under fire when it emerged that sections of his one-man show dealing with the Foxconn plant in China where iPhones and iPads are assembled had been fabricated.
Public radio show This American Life, which had broadcast portions of the performance, went so far as to issue a retraction. Daisey, meanwhile, reworked his script, albeit without toning down his powerful delivery.
On the minimalist stage on Saturday, seated on plain wooden chairs, Daisey and Wozniak came across as a geek version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
The bearded, fast-talking Wozniak sported running shoes and a massive wrist watch. In the theater lobby, for Saturday only, one of the very first Apple I computers ever built was on display.
Many in the audience echoed Daisey’s concern about Foxconn’s work force, but Wozniak said he expected labor conditions in China to evolve as the nation grows richer.
“We know we [citizens and consumers] have a voice. We can speak [about labor conditions], but we can’t act like: ‘Oh, Foxconn is bad or Apple is bad,’” he said.
Daisey begged to differ: “I hear what you’re saying about that fact that everyone goes through an evolution, but it’s not as if the evolution was natural in the sense that we are the ones who brought the jobs there.”
While Apple designs its products in the US, all its manufacturing takes place in China — a sore point in an election year in which unemployment and a long-term exodus of manufacturing jobs overseas have been campaign issues.
DAMAGE REPORT: Global central banks are assessing war-driven inflation risks as the law of unintended consequences careens around the world, spiking oil prices Central banks from Washington to London and from Jakarta to Taipei are about to make their first assessments of economic damage after more than two weeks of conflict between the US and Iran. Decisions this week encompassing every member of the G7 and eight of the world’s 10 most-traded currency jurisdictions are likely to confirm to investors that the specter of a new inflation shock is already worrying enough to prompt heightened caution. The US Federal Reserve is widely expected to do exactly what everyone anticipated weeks ahead of its March 17-18 policy gathering: hold rates steady. The narrative surrounding that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) share of the global foundry market rose to almost 70 percent last year amid booming demand for artificial intelligence (AI), market information advisory firm TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said on Thursday. The contract chipmaker posted US$122.54 billion in revenue, up 36.1 percent from a year earlier, accounting for 69.9 percent of the global market, TrendForce said. Its share was up from 64.4 percent in 2024, it said. TSMC’s closest rival, Samsung Electronics, was a distant second, posting US$12.63 billion in sales, down 3.9 percent from a year earlier, for a 7.2 percent share of the global market. In the
At a massive shipyard in North Vancouver, Canadian workers grind metal beams for a powerful new icebreaker crucial to cementing the country’s presence in the increasingly contested arctic. Icebreakers are specialized, expensive vessels able to navigate in the frozen far north. And “this is the crown jewel,” said Eddie Schehr, vice president of production at the Seaspan shipyard. For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who heads to Norway next Friday to observe arctic defense drills involving troops from 14 NATO states, Canada’s extreme north has emerged as a strategic priority. “Canada is and forever will be an Arctic nation,” he said ahead of
Chinese entrepreneur Frank Gao used to spend long hours running his social media accounts but now outsources the chore to artificial intelligence (AI) agent tool OpenClaw, which is taking China by storm despite official warnings over cybersecurity. OpenClaw, created in November by an Austrian coder, differs from bots such as ChatGPT because it can execute real-life tasks such as sending e-mails, organizing files or even booking flight tickets. “Since January, I’ve spent hours on the lobster every day,” Gao said in an interview, referring to OpenClaw’s red crustacean mascot. “We’re family.” After downloading OpenClaw, users connect it to artificial intelligence models of their
RSS