Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was hospitalized for a stroke early Wednesday while attending the World Business Forum in Mexico City, several reports noted.
Wozniak confirmed the report via text message to ABC News, saying that he felt dizzy while working on his computer and could not walk, ABC News reported. An MRI scan taken in a hospital revealed that he had suffered a “minor but real stroke,” the ABC News report noted.
Wozniak, who was scheduled to speak at the conference in the afternoon but could not due to the illness, was discharged from the hospital and said he would be returning home to the U.S., according to the report.
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, had a minor stroke while attending the World Business Forum in Mexico City on Wednesday, he confirmed to @ABC News.
He is out of the hospital and is “flying home” to the U.S., he said. https://t.co/ti16hqWhpH
— ABC News (@ABC) November 9, 2023
Former CEO of Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina and Bangladeshi microfinance pioneer and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus were also billed to speak at the two-day event in which Wozniak was to be the final speaker, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
Wozniak, 72, co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976 but left nine years later to pursue various other interests including competing in “Dancing with the Stars” and judging the entrepreneurial talent show “Unicorn Hunters”, the AP report noted. Popularly known as Woz, he invented the first Apple computer, the BBC reported. (RELATED: Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Says Most People Should Delete Their Facebook)
Wozniak was a co-signer alongside Elon Musk of a March 22 open letter calling for a pause in advanced artificial intelligence experiments.
“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” the letter read in part.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter further stated.