Recent reports suggested that Apple plans to start producing cars by 2020, and had been aggressively seeking to hire experts in battery making. Tesla founder Elon Musk also claimed Apple had been offering his employees $US250,000 signing on bonuses and 60 per cent salary increases if they defected to Apple.

Mr Wozniak meanwhile said he had keenly watched the recent launch of Apple's first smartwatches, but was waiting to judge whether they would be worth permanent wrist space. He said he had previously tried other smartwatches, like the Samsung Galaxy Gear, but discarded them once the novelty had worn off.

App key to watch's success

He said the crucial factor would be whether an app emerged that made it hugely advantageous to wear the watch all the time. He said Apple Pay on his iPhone had proven very useful, when he had found places to use it, and he imagined it would be even better with a watch.

However when the devices go on sale on April 24, Mr Wozniak said he would be buying the entry level Apple Watch Sport, rather than plunging in with the most expensive models.

Apple Watch Edition will start at $14,000. AP

"If you buy the really high-priced ones, the jewellery ones, then you're not buying a smartwatch that has a bunch of apps … Like a Rolex watch, you're buying if for prestige and a label and a symbol of who you are," Mr Wozniak said.

"The fact is the difference between a $10,000 watch and a $17,000 dollar watch is only the band, and for an engineer like me I don't live in that world, that's not my world."


Mr Wozniak said he wasn't criticising people who wanted to buy the Apple Watch Edition, which will start at $14,000 in Australia, and said it appeared to be a nice watch, worth the sum of its expensive parts.

"I'm just not going to buy it for jewellery's sake until I know it's something I'm going to want around me and on me and use every single day continually as a permanent part of my life," he said. "Then maybe I'd consider looking into getting the nicer jewellery version."

Apple Watch Edition will start at $14,000. Paul Smith

It is Mr Wozniak's unhidden excitement at new technology developments that has made him a popular figure among tech enthusiasts in the decades since he left Apple. He will be bringing his take about future ideas to the World Business Forum in Sydney starting on May 27.

However he said he has started to feel a contradictory sense of foreboding about the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence, while still supporting the idea of continuing to push the boundaries of what technology can do

Humans superseded

"Computers are going to take over from humans, no question," Mr Wozniak said.

He said he had long dismissed the ideas of writers like Raymond Kurzweil, who have warned that rapid increases in technology will mean machine intelligence will outstrip human understanding or capability within the next 30 years. However Mr Wozniak said he had come to recognise that the predictions were coming true, and that computing that perfectly mimicked or attained human consciousness would become a dangerous reality.


"Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently," Mr Wozniak said.

"Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that … But when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines … well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice."

Mr Wozniak said the negative outcome could be stopped from occurring by the likely end of Moore's Law, the pattern whereby computer processing speeds double every two years.

The ever increasing speeds have happened due to the shrinking size of transistors, which mean more can be included in a circuit. But it has been suggested that Moore's Law cannot continue past 2020 because, by then, the size of a silicon transistor will have shrunk to a single atom.

So unless scientists can start controlling things at sub-atomic level, by developing so-called quantum computers, humanity will be protected from perpetual increases in computing power.

"For all the time they've been working on quantum computing they really have nothing to show that's really usable for the things we need … researchers can make predictions, but they haven't been able to get past three qubits yet," Mr Wozniak said.

Whereas a modern computer processes data in binary ones and zeros, Quantum computers run on qubits, which can be a one and a zero at the same time and can process hugely complex calculations in vastly reduced times compared with existing computers.

"I hope it does come, and we should pursue it because it is about scientific exploring," Mr Wozniak said. "But in the end we just may have created the species that is above us."