90 percent of scientists say GMOs are safe. So why doesn’t the public agree?

During a keynote at Atlantic Design & Manufacturing 2017, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak shared his thoughts on open source, the Maker movement, and why engineers should build for themselves.

“In recent years the software has meant a lot more to me than the hardware advancements in terms in how we live our life,” he said, adding sobering remarks as to the latest hardware offerings from the company he co-founded. “I don’t remember anything catching my attention particularly,” Wozniak said.

What does catch Wozniak’s attention these days are trends like open source and the maker movement – both of which have grown from ideas and a spirit that he told the audience get right to the heart of why he helped start Apple in the first place. “In our first manual for the Apple II we put in every bit of my designs, software, and examples of other programs,” he said. “And everybody could pick it up and see how they could develop their own plug-in boards and software. It was very open source, and very favorable. A thousand companies started making accessories for the Apple II computer.”

Wozniak continued, “I love the maker movement because we started [Apple] with a demonstrable product,with a prototype that was working. I was not just an engineer, I did the whole thing – I brought up ideas, drafted them on paper, I sat down and plugged chips into boards, tested every single wire..”

A big thing Wozniak stressed to the audience was the importance of doing things for fun and for building things with yourself in mind rather than potential profits.

“You might go to Maker Faire and you see these things and you might think. ‘Who would want to buy that?’ But the people making it are getting the skills that could change their job in the future.”