Vinton Cerf on Where the Internet Will Take Us

Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist” talks about the direction of online connectivity and communication

  • By Brian Wolly
  • Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2010, Subscribe
 
Google Vinton Cerf
Vinton Cerf, Internet pioneer, sees a need to separate Web fact from Web misinformation. (Murdo MacLeod)

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Q & A: Vinton Cerf

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One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we’ve ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education.

The problem is—and this is true of books and every other medium—we don’t know whether the information we find [on the Web] is accurate or not. We don’t necessarily know what its provenance is. So we have to teach people how to assess what they’ve found. That’s a skill, a critical-thinking capacity, which is important no matter what the medium. It’s just more dramatic in the World Wide Web, where there’s so much juxtaposition of the good stuff and not-so-good stuff and flat-out-wrong stuff or deliberate misinformation or plain ignorance.


In the late 1960s, when Vinton Cerf was a UCLA graduate student in computer science, he helped design ARPAnet, a predecessor of the Internet. He’s now a vice president of engineering at Google, the search engine giant that owns YouTube and is extending its reach to mobile devices, publishing and journalism. He spoke with associate Web editor Brian Wolly about how the Web will evolve.

Ten or more years from now, how will we communicate with one another?
It’s very possible we will be more continuously connected. Even today, people have Bluetooth things hanging in their ears. There’s no reason they won’t have a video camera located in a buttonhole, maybe even a video projector. And there’ll be no need to carry a laptop or [computer] notebook, because any flat surface with reasonable visibility could become a display.

Virtually any appliance is going to be online. Appliances will talk to each other and to the power-generation system. Our appliances will pay attention to our preferences.

One of the real hard questions is, how will we keep up with all [the new applications]? Maybe our [computer] systems will be more aware of what our daily lives are like, what things we want to accomplish in the course of a day, and if that could be built into the software, maybe some of this stuff won’t even require our explicit interaction.

How will today’s young people benefit?
How old is YouTube? Four or five years, right? And it has become an enormous phenomenon. At Google we see 23 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube per minute, and I’m sure that will increase over time. So trying to project what tools will be available over the next 40 years is really daunting.

Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet’s impact on people’s ability to absorb information in a concentrated way, because we’ve become accustomed to looking up something, getting a snippet and being satisfied with that—as opposed to reading through and considering a weighty tome that goes into great depth.

I am reminded of the apocryphal story of someone complaining about the invention of writing because it would cause us to stop remembering things. Nonetheless, writing turned out to be pretty important. [Kissinger’s] complaint may or may not be a materially serious issue.

I’m not sure we know enough at this stage to justify a conclusion about the benefits of the kind of interactive, fast exchanges that take place in multi-user games [on the Web]. Are we solving problems, learning how to multitask? Is that a good thing? I don’t know. It’s a little bit like television. When it arrived there were many expectations that it would improve education and everything else. But what we discovered is there’s a finite amount of quality in the universe, and when there are more channels it has to be cut up into smaller and smaller amounts until finally, every channel delivers close to zero quality, and that’s where we are today, with a few exceptions.

One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we’ve ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education.

The problem is—and this is true of books and every other medium—we don’t know whether the information we find [on the Web] is accurate or not. We don’t necessarily know what its provenance is. So we have to teach people how to assess what they’ve found. That’s a skill, a critical-thinking capacity, which is important no matter what the medium. It’s just more dramatic in the World Wide Web, where there’s so much juxtaposition of the good stuff and not-so-good stuff and flat-out-wrong stuff or deliberate misinformation or plain ignorance.


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Additional Sources

“How the Internet Came to Be,” by Vinton Cerf as told to Bernard Aboba in The Online User’s Encyclopedia Addison-Wesley, 1993


 

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Comments (8)

I disagree with those who believe that wireless is the future. Wireless is certainly part of the future, but this is the same reasoning that leads those to state that tablets are the future and desktops are dead. Those who use wireless still have to meet at a hard-wired connection. Unfortunately, this will be the case for quite a while since data transfers over wired connections continue to out perform their wireless brothers simply on the basis of the energy is takes to overcome the resistance found through the distance. It stands to reason that wired bandwidth will not be replaced in the near future by wireless, though more consumers, or low end traffic users, will continue to move toward wireless usage.

Posted by Hunter on November 27,2012 | 02:51 PM

I admire Mr Cerf and his contribution to what the world now is. As a sharp mind he also has the humble to give his predictions as "this may..." come. Believe, if Mr Cerf says, it can be written on stone.(personally I'm proud of having met him on one of his many conferences, awesome!!)

Posted by Frank Reyna on April 7,2011 | 03:57 AM

Excellent article and observations on "Google's View" of the internet and its future as it pertains to the question "Is the data received accurate or in fact just someone’s viewpoint". Excellent question and one I have often asked myself.
Enjoyed your insightful comments and hope you offer more of your obviously clear perception on subject matter such as this. Thank you!

Posted by Jules Turcsanyi/Lockheed Martun Retired on October 15,2010 | 02:14 PM

This says it better:

"Mobile is the future, and mobile is wireless," California high school student Mitchell Kernot reasoned. "So, what they are saying is the future isn't net neutral."

-http://bit.ly/anXTQK

Posted by Mike on August 18,2010 | 05:50 PM

The content is poor. Could have been more detailed or have a few more questions for Mr Cerf to answer and/or ask him to elaborate on. Plus, Mr Cerf doesn't say much that is concrete but hypothisizes. I know the future is a guessing game because of the endless possibilities, but I still think his answers were too vague and that this article could have been alot better.

Posted by Andrew on August 18,2010 | 02:59 PM

The future of the internet is wireless, and Google and Verizon's proposal sell out that future. I'm incredibly disappointed that Vint Cerf is going along with this.It's like seeing the real Santa Claus doing commercials for Walmart.

Posted by Mike on August 17,2010 | 06:57 PM

It's not an apocryphal tale of someone complaining about writing. It's in the Phaedrus by Plato. In fact the invention of writing did have an effect on memory, as the practise of memorising great chunks of memory started to dissipate. The poems of Homer were probably composed orally.

Posted by Euan on August 16,2010 | 04:35 AM

I love this article! I like the way he answers, it seems like he is a clever person. I think that his definition of how is technology usefull to us is the greatest. Love it

Posted by Lizbeth on August 11,2010 | 09:55 PM



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