I think Steve Wozniak is great because how can you not, but I am willing to wager there will still be some humans driving cars in 20 years, though the Woz predicted there won’t be in his keynote speech at the Gartner Symposium. Hyperbole aside, he is right that driverless is gaining speed, even if the ETA is MIA. The Apple co-founder also gave voice to his concerns about surveillance enabled by technologies, though he acknowledges that war has likely been lost. Two excerpts about the address from Divina Paredes at Computerworld.

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“It was a magical experience… like Disneyland all the time.”

This is how Steve Wozniak described his experience driving his Tesla car on autopilot for two nights in a row.

The co-founder of Apple and chief scientist at Fusion-IO, said the car was making decisions on on the road, and his hands need not be on the wheel. “It was just a wonderful feeling.”

“Self driving cars is the biggest technology for the future,” said Wozniak during his keynote at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo at the Gold Coast.

“In the future, self driving cars will avoid problems humans make,” he said. They will have artificial intelligence. They will see speed limits, red lights and people walking across their path and even any kind of obstacles.

“In 20 years, no human drivers will be allowed except for the young kids at Disneyland.”

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“Every purchase you make, every place you go, your face is being recognised, every keystroke you type on your computer, somebody could be looking at your computer at what you are doing.”

“It bothers me…I am very much on the side of civil liberties and protecting privacy,” he said, adding that he is one of the founders of the US Electronic Frontier Foundation that advocates for these rights.

“Humans should be much more important than technology,” he said. “But we lost the battle to machines 200 years ago. We will always fire a human but not fire a machine that makes our cheap clothing.”•