Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who used to be gloomy about a distant future dominated by artificial intelligence, now believes it would be good for humanity in the long run. Super smart robots would keep us as pets, he believes.

"They're going to be smarter than us and if they're smarter than us then they'll realize they need us," Wozniak told an audience of 2,500 people at the Moody Theater in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday. The speech was part of the Freescale Technology Forum 2015.

Another view of #AskFTF2015 of interview with @stevewoz at the ACL theater in Austin. Lookin' good @InVisionComm! pic.twitter.com/Ote6sfzPMf — Lexi Nicholas (@schmexay) June 24, 2015

“They'll be so smart by then that they'll know they have to keep nature, and humans are part of nature. So I got over my fear that we'd be replaced by computers. They're going to help us. We're at least the gods originally," he explained.

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The timetable for humans to be reduced from the self-crowned kings of Earth to obsolete sentient life forms sustained by their own creations is measured in hundreds of years, Woz soothed the audience. And for our distant descendants life won’t really be bad.

“If it turned on us, it would surprise us. But we want to be the family pet and be taken care of all the time," he said.

"I got this idea a few years ago and so I started feeding my dog filet steak and chicken every night because 'do unto others,'" he quipped.

Wozniak, who invested some $10 million into an IA firm, used to refer to artificial intelligence as “our biggest existential threat.” The concern is shared by some leading IT experts, inventors and scientists, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking.