Vint Cerf Reflects On The Last 60 Years (computerworld.com) 66
Computerworld celebrated its 50th anniversary by interviewing Vinton Cerf. The 73-year-old "father of the internet" remembers reading the early issues of the magazine, and reflects on how much things have changed since he gained access to computers at UCLA in 1960, "the beginning of my love affair with computing."
I worry 100 years from now our descendants may not know much about us or be able to read our emails or tweets or documents because nobody saved them or the software you need to read them won't exist anymore. It's a huge issue. I have files of text that were written 20 years ago in WordPerfect, except I don't have WordPerfect running anywhere...
Q: Do you think [creating the internet] was your greatest accomplishment?
No. Getting it turned on was a big deal. Keeping it running for the last some odd years was an even bigger deal. Protecting it from hostile governments that want to shut it down and supporting new applications at a higher capacity are all evolutions. The evolution continues... I don't know if I can point to anything and say that's the biggest accomplishment. It's one big climb up the mountain.
Looking ahead to a future filled with AI, Cerf says "I worry about turning over too much autonomous authority to a piece of software," though he's not overly concerned, "not like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk, who are alarmists about artificial intelligence. Every time you use Google search or self-driving cars, you're using A.I. These are all assistive technologies and I suspect this is how it will be used."
He also acknowledges that "I probably don't have another 50 years left, unless Ray Kurzweil's predictions come true, and I can upload my consciousness into a computer."
Q: Do you think [creating the internet] was your greatest accomplishment?
No. Getting it turned on was a big deal. Keeping it running for the last some odd years was an even bigger deal. Protecting it from hostile governments that want to shut it down and supporting new applications at a higher capacity are all evolutions. The evolution continues... I don't know if I can point to anything and say that's the biggest accomplishment. It's one big climb up the mountain.
Looking ahead to a future filled with AI, Cerf says "I worry about turning over too much autonomous authority to a piece of software," though he's not overly concerned, "not like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk, who are alarmists about artificial intelligence. Every time you use Google search or self-driving cars, you're using A.I. These are all assistive technologies and I suspect this is how it will be used."
He also acknowledges that "I probably don't have another 50 years left, unless Ray Kurzweil's predictions come true, and I can upload my consciousness into a computer."
Vint, your vanity is comical. (Score:2, Insightful)
Vint said : "I worry 100 years from now our descendants may not know much about us or be able to read our emails or tweets or documents because nobody saved them or the software you need to read them won't exist anymore. It's a huge issue."
Most people are not going to have even the slightest interest in such stuff.
The sad truth is that when you die, life will go on without you.
Here's a poem Vint needs to read, after he takes a couple of Xanax chased with
some 18 year old Macallan to soothe his por little ego
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This poem of Shelley was stored in printed form and thus available to you, 200 years later for reference.
I think that is exactly where Mr. Cerf is talking about.
These 200 years.
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Vint said : "I worry 100 years from now our descendants may not know much about us or be able to read our emails or tweets or documents because nobody saved them or the software you need to read them won't exist anymore. It's a huge issue."
He is not talking about himself.
It's about being left with a pile of unreadable historical documents in general. None.
No papers left for historical research.
No poems left for you to refer to.
Got it ?
Re: Vint, your vanity is comical. (Score:1)
in 100 years they'll be saying "cerf the internetz"
they have TOO MUCH. (Score:2, Interesting)
500 years from now, pre-2000 will be referred as the dark ages and post 2010 they have 10000x per year more pictures, news stories, personal posts and what have you than from years earlier.
if vint doesn't see this then.. well, maybe he should stop listening shitty futurologists and start looking at some historians.
basically... 500 years from now.. how many pictures of the eiffel tower in year 2010 do you think they will have access to? 10? 20? 30? or 1000 per day? either way, a hell of a lot more than from
Re: they have TOO MUCH. (Score:1)
With no twitter, instagram, snapchat, yt and what have you around, how do you think people in 200 years will access the 1000s of pictures available to you TODAY?
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Proprietary formats are against Osiris' will.
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Right, you get it. Vint Cerf is the nascissist/geek bully who pushed the crap IPv6 design on the world, arguably one of the most expensive blunders in the history of technology. A self promoting ass who does not deserve his fame. Pretty much everything credited to him was actually done by someone else.
Re:Vint, your vanity is comical. (Score:4, Insightful)
the crap IPv6 design on the world, arguably one of the most expensive blunders in the history of technology
Am I missing a /s?
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Right, you get it. Vint Cerf is the nascissist/geek bully who pushed the crap IPv6 design on the world, arguably one of the most expensive blunders in the history of technology. A self promoting ass who does not deserve his fame. Pretty much everything credited to him was actually done by someone else.
This is all verifiable.
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Yes they will. Do you think if we had the equivalent of emails from the 1500s they wouldn't be studied and written about? How about video of early man? Those would be precious, not ignored.
...unless Ray Kurzweil's predictions come true... (Score:2)
Dead man walking...
I don't worry. It's NOT a "huge issue". (Score:1)
"I worry 100 years from now our descendants may not know much about us or be able to read our emails or tweets or documents because nobody saved them or the software you need to read them won't exist anymore. It's a huge issue."
It's 100% garbage/noise. Nothing worth saving.
Oh God, What an unfortunate quote. (Score:1)
C'mon. Really? I thought we established that "uploading consciousness" is the retarded brainchild of weak B-movie plotlines, like The Lawnmower Man.
Is it possible for what was previously a single consciousness to exist in 2 places at once? Once a computer retains a persistent serialization of an entity, copies are trivial. How does one establish which is the copy, and which is the conscious original? If he uploads his consciousness into a computer, then how do we determine whether his consciousness is effec
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No. The argument is that, while an intelligent instance of an entity within a computer might achieve sentient, self-aware consciousness, it would not be "you" and thus, "you" would not live on. Duplicates of said entity would not even be each other.
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Gee, as if there weren't an entirely different degree of discontinuity between a bed of cellular activity proven to preserve a conscoiusness of a living entity, as compared to a transition from a cellular tissue netwrok to an electrical circuit which is not proven or otherwise known to support consciousness. Okay, sure, we're all in agreement.
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But just like magic, you'll mysteriously "awaken" inside the computer. Two places at once! All you gotta do is belieeeeeeeeeeeeve, bro!
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" How does one establish which is the copy, and which is the conscious original?"
I suspect you can't. Though some people, such as Robin Hanson, disagree, I think people may be legally limited to one running copy of their consciousness. There is another confusing matter. If we have the technology to read out a brain, the same technology should be up to the task of moving memory into the brain. This means reversible uploads and the ability to move between an uploaded state and a meat body state with conti
Solid (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing that was the most attractive was that you could create your own little world inside the computer, and it would do what you wanted it to do. I found that ultimately beguiling Something that would happen in a machine in one place caused something to happen thousands of miles away and that was very interesting, too.
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It's very easy in this era to forget what it was like to transition from lack of interactivity, to interactivity.
I'm not as old as Vint, but still was an adult when personal computers started to appear in the middle 1970s. Before that, very few people ever experienced electronic interactivity. You had TV, which was a push only medium, and radio, similar. When the MITS Altair and other similar personal computing devices became available, it was a radical shift: suddenly a machine would take instructions f
The Internet has a short attention span (Score:1, Insightful)
Back in the '90s when I was new to the web, I built up a large collection of bookmarks. About five years later I went through them. A quarter of the links were down and most of them were too old for the Internet Archive to have saved them. The sites are gone forever.
In the 1990s everybody knew that the P
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Already rewriting history. Israel's legitimacy was never "unquestionable" as you stated. In fact many Jewish people disagreed with the whole idea. It was quite a debate, and has been debated long after the UN vote. Clearly it's been contentious for decades.
The problem - and it's something Cerf is talking about - is that information is getting changed at a rapid pace. Articles in the NY Times and elsewhere get rewritten with no source to the original article. Wikipedia entries are scrubbed and while th
not the hive of scum and villainy you're looking 4 (Score:3)
Over and over, I see people slag Wikipedia, and it's either:
A) no specific claim that I can check out; or,
B) specific claim, hopelessly overblown.
Wikipedia is dysfunctional, but probably no worse than your average PTA meeting. In a city of 5 million inhabitants, you can probably find an opium den. In an encyclopedia of 5 million articles, you can probably find an opium den.
Universal dispassionate agreement farts rainbow-farting unicorns.
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In the 1990s everybody knew that the Palestinians were a recently manufactured terrorist organization with no legal right to Palestine.
Nice troll, bro.
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I'm Israeli and against returning to the old borders, but I still think that what you just wrote is stupid propoganda.
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I have tar archives from 1982 that I can still read on a modern Linux computer in 2017. I've watched people who went down the proprietary tool route ("it's the hot new thing!") struggle with proprietary file formats just a few years after the company hawking the tool went under.
It'll be most amusing the first time a big "cloud computing" service shuts down with little or no warning and millions of people had the only copy of their data stored there.
Stop me if you've heard this one before (Score:2)
Q) What's the difference between Vint Cerf and God?
A) God doesn't think he's Al Gore.
TYIHAWDFTTYW
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He doesn't have WordPerfect any longer? How about we crowd-fund the $99.99 for the latest version for him:
http://www.wordperfect.com/en/product/home-student/?hptrack=mmwp
Half the people here complain about how rich people are evil and have too much. If you own a computer, then compared to almost everyone else on the planet, you're rich. Time for you to put your money where your mouth is and donate money to prove you're not evil and so we can raise $99.99 for this guy, who apparently is so helpless he can
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open standards versus proprietary (Score:3)
I don't think it will be an issue to read many files because many of them use open standards. It's the closed source proprietary stuff that could be lost to time. However, it seems unlikely because we make emulators for all our dead hardware platforms and keep them accessible with their software.
Really, I think the worst case scenario here is that people in the future think that Comic Sans was used for everything. ;)
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I don't think it will be an issue to read many files because many of them use open standards. It's the closed source proprietary stuff that could be lost to time. However, it seems unlikely because we make emulators for all our dead hardware platforms and keep them accessible with their software.
Yeah, I think if you have it as a file we'll find a way to decode it, it's transitory online services like web sites, streaming, online game servers etc. that will be "lost". And for preservation not editing I think we'll converge on relatively few and long lasting standards. Like lossy pictures => JPG, lossless pictures => PNG, audio => MP3 (or maybe AAC), video => MP4/H.264 (once the patents expire), documents/presentations => PDF/A. Despite the actual content being a clusterfsck many use s
Lost and gone forever.. (Score:1)
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You have to be careful with media, once you start seeing signs of obsolescence, to copy the data to whatever is new and repeat doing this before you lose the ability to read the old media anymore (even if you keep it well stored).
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