Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese and employer of Jobs and the Woz during their formative years, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow, with a couple at the beginning regarding the future intersection of business and technology. 

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Question:

With the Atari you were at the cutting edge of technology back in the day. If you were starting today, as a technology entrepreneur, what technologies would you focus on?

Nolan Bushnell:

I think that robots and entertainment will be very important in the future. I’m also very interested in businesses that will be enabled by autonomous or auto-drive cars. There will also be an interesting intersection between computers and biology. Harder tech, but important, is nanotech i.e. micromachines.

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Question:

What did you learn from trying the robot cafe concept — anything you’d like to bring back from it?

Nolan Bushnell:

I found that two-thirds of the population loved it and the last third hated it. Kids universally loved it, particularly ages 10-20. I think that adding games as well as automatic ordering will clearly be the fast food and the quick-casual structure of the future.

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Question:

What’s the biggest lesson you learned at Atari or Chuck E. Cheese that you wish you had known before you started?

Nolan Bushnell:

Don’t sell to big Hollywood studios. Atari had an extraordinary corporate culture that was destroyed within 2 years of the sale. I think that Atari would still be important today if that sale hadn’t occurred.

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Question:

Did Steve Jobs really stink that bad that he had to be relegated to work the night shift??

Nolan Bushnell:

Yeah. I knew that Jobs and Woz were fast friends and Woz worked days at HP. If I put Jobs on the night shift, I’d get two Steves for the price of one. A very good business proposition.

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Question:

How do you think new tech like the Oculus Rift and Google Glass can improve, dare I say evolve how people are educated today?

Nolan Bushnell:

I think that any time you can make life and tech seamless, you have the opportunity to affect the brain. The immersion of the Oculus Rift can give you a real sense of the Battle of Hastings or life in Dickinsonian England. Seeing the circulatory system from the inside has to be a learning experience. Google glass giving you data inputs for later analysis from your lab results clearly is a step in the right direction. If telephone or television (or any examples) early on get it exactly wrong, so will some of these technologies. But then we’ll figure it out.•

Too dumb to drive on their own, but very friendly.

Cnet has a Q&A with Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, who has returned to the board of the once-storied, long-struggling gaming company. In addition to comparing Atari to a successful child that graduated to drug addiction and jail as an adult, Bushnell waxes enthusiastic about auto-cars, the kind of vehicles that use software to do the driving. Google acknowledged recently that it has self-steering cars tooling around busy California streets and highways, monitoring traffic and god knows what else.

I know planes routinely use auto-pilot, but I think Bushnell is a little too sanguine about auto-cars in the near term, since a major psychological aspect of car ownership (in America at least) has to do with control and autonomy. (Thanks Newmark.) An excerpt:

“Nolan Bushnell: But the biggest thing for the near future is auto-cars, which will change everything.

Cnet: Tell me about that. Why do you think they’ll change everything, and how so?

Nolan Bushnell: It’ll be within five years, somewhere. The costs are there right now. The Google car actually was cost-effective. Think of no traffic congestion, highways that can hold 30 times as much traffic. Half the energy costs. It just goes on and on. The only issue is how powerful will be the Luddites.

Cnet: What do you imagine would be the chief objection of the Luddites?

Nolan Bushnell: The Schumpeterian creative destruction of entrenched interests. For example. every Teamster, cab driver, UPS driver, all these drivers will need to be retrained. Insurance will drop to a fraction of what it costs now. People don’t understand how horrible the average driver is. The number of body shops will be 20 percent of today. It’ll be disruptive, and they will not go away without a fight. Of course, bars will do a great business because drunk driving will be OK.”