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Vint Cerf Reflects On The Last 60 Years (computerworld.com)
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 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.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Percy Shelley
Injest all old formats (cooperation of publishers) of files, emails, etc. They are on HD after all. Just can't view them in modern apps. Especially not the cloud!
I have wordstar, macwrite, macdraw, word versions, etc, etc. Eudora, AOL, Yahoo, Mail
Dead man walking...
Loading...
"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.
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 effectively an AI, which he just stated he worries about the level of control conferred unto?
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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 Palestinians were a recently manufactured terrorist organization with no legal right to Palestine. When the Palestinians attacked Israel in 2000 they put their propaganda online on well produced websites like Indymedia, Electronic Intifada, and later the Daily Kos. Israel didn't. Now the most basic information about the conflict that everybody knew 20 years ago is difficult to find online.
Wikipedia is scrubbing information that conflicts the political agenda of the administrators who run the site, and they ban anyone who tries to keep the encyclopedia neutral. Their excuse is that everything in life is political, but it is not okay for their political opponents to try to do it. Their political opponents are not even allowed to use Wikipedia. They will ban you if your account has the same name as a Twitter profile that mentions reading Breitbart.
The Internet Archive has been deleting old books from their archive because they don't like the politics of the author. It is starting with white supremacists. It will not end with white supremacists.
Poor people can't have capital, so the only way they can fail is through lack of energy.
If you are running Free software, the specs for file formats are also open. Free apps generally do better with legacy support.
If you use Free/Open specifications, then they will exists a long time after you are gone.
At very least, if you are a company, if you are going out of business, or end of lifing a product, please publish details about specifications for obsolete products. This will help the future.
I also checked, Libre office will open word perfect docs just fine, as well as MS word back to version 1
Q) What's the difference between Vint Cerf and God?
A) God doesn't think he's Al Gore.
TYIHAWDFTTYW
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"I have files of text that were written 20 years ago in WordPerfect, except I don't have WordPerfect running anywhere..."
You may not have WordPerfect running, but I'd be surprised if MS Word can't largely read it; even if somehow the latest version can't, Word 2000 probably can. So, load up word, and re-save it as a genuine ascii-encoded plain text file. If no-one else has access to these documents, then you're the only one who can do it. If you're genuinely concerned about this, then YOU take responsibility for it NOW.
If ascii can't be read in the future, then it suggests the world is having serious problems, so some historic documents about the birth of the internet are unlikely to be of much interest.
Now file-formats for the long-term might be a problem, and the best answer to that would be to get the document homed somewhere that will preserve it; like the library of congress or wikipedia. You want your document to simply be one of millions that are curated en-masse; you don't want *anyone* having to make special provisions for just your document.
There are a lot more transexuals on the internet now then when he invented it. Does this mean that the internet causes gender dyslexia?
and they won't even know what the "Internet" was. Never heard of it. and don't care.
Read that out lout and store it on your wire recorders.
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. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
Put Vint as the author. Come on, I've done it, you've done it. Perhaps I should have said "an author", but by the time the final version is published, you-know-who winds ups as the lead or only author. Goes along with the credo -- there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't need to take credit for it.
Then there are those who need to take the credit, whether they deserve it or not.
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 1910. in color. in reasonable quality.
they will know what people wore. they will know what people listened. they will have the speeches recorded that both put people INTO THE FUCKING MOON and they have access to speeches about how there's a really great hot dog place in new york.
maybe this sounds pompous but really it's not - we just lived through the breakthrough into the computer era and in the past century the breakthrough to worldwide media - this is a once in the history of the world kind of an event that is such a watershed moment in perspective of HISTORY that he shouldn't be that much worried about people in the future knowing what happened here now - there's more books published than ever as well, in smaller quantities per printing - photobooks included.
also the way things have been going you now have BETTER access to 1995 data than you had in 2000. you now have much easier time running software from 1981 than you had in 2000 as well. he should be able to see that curve, but apparently has spent too much time with futurologists(who are ALL a bunch of fucking idiots and wankers and I still can't believe people give them money for giving shit predictions and being just generally full of shit and out of touch).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
These two human beings should be given a traitor's penalty:
Vint Cerf is human garbage who betrayed the country (and its allies) that allowed him to migrate to San Diego, California. Specifically, he exploited the ignorance of people who trusted him by knowingly promoting his TCP/IP stack for inappropriate use cases throughout government and industry and then advanced PPP in parity with Microsoft's illegal monopoly that, combined, allowed people sitting dirt-floors on the other side of the planet to simultaneously wreak economic havoc in the United States (both with spam/viruses, "Nigeria"-type phishing and forming international-labor-corporations to exploit their own people into bondage against unsuspecting American call center and tech workers) while also advancing their own countries technological advances by a hundred years without having to sacrifice one drop of blood saving the world from the Axis powers. It was so unnecessary --there was already a global digital technology in place at that time, the X.25 backbone and the rapidly maturing VANs (with X."PC" access points) properly engineered and evolved over 45 years for secure communications that ran from teletypes to multitasking PCs --all with free-market distance-based pricing (i.e., no $0 spam messages carrying PDFs filled with ransomware).
RMS is also garbage for sitting at MIT and using his tenure and salary to develop and implement failed economic policy in the technology industry to the detriment of the institutions and country he was supposed to serve. (The traitor even "wrote a song" about it on his way back from a trip to Cuba many years before the murderous communist dictator Fidel Castro left power and trade relations were reopened.) RMS is such a loser he could never even finish his GNU system --instead putting the easy applications layers out there on Vint Cerf's network for some poor bstrd that grew up on the outskirts of the Soviet Union to pickup and integrate with Andrew Tannenbaum's MINIX work and the clone specs for the IBM PC/AT.
As technology becomes less and less like "magic" to societies, History will look back on these two individuals as the instigators of the tipping point for the squandering of the Post-War-Era advancements of the West. (Can one even imagine North Korea having these kinds of capabilities without Vint and RMS?) Of course, by then, the solar system will have a series of new "Internets" that don't run TCP/IP and do have some form of distance-based-pricing/billing/identity-management (even if it's implemented at the wholesale level by the last-mile ISPs under changes to what we now call "net neutrality"). But what the Hell, all of the human life and drama we currently experience in OUR limited lifetime is waisted while the economy rebalances from this assault (sort of like a "lost decade" caused by the son of David Rockefeller's lawyer and a bag of dirty tricks running startups out of business and their CEOs into endings like Jay Miner's --using little more than the firmware and operating system monopoly that required government intervention and products from Vint's new employer to remedy).
I have several important (to me) files on 5MB removable CDC disk packs for Texas Instruments 990 computer running DX10 OS written in the OOF application. You laugh, but millenials like my kits look at those and think the same thoughts many of us do when we see the pyramids. I predict that computer archeology will be a popular major in colleges around 2030.
During the cleanup after the death of my mom my sister and myself found letters from my dad to his best friend. )send back to him when that friend died) Suddenly we got information that we never had before. We are both adults and even though the information was revealing, it was also meaningless.
And that was about letters that where written on paper and where people spend the time to write. Not on some emails send to say "I Liek U"
99% of communication is drivel and the 1% is drivel of a bit higher standard. There is no need to keep emails in almost any case.
There is a reason people forget things. It is because it is generally good not to remember everything. So what if I do not know the name of my kindergarten teacher? Would I be more functional if I did?
With emails as with everything, unless there is a very important emotional value, I throw things out after one year (generally speaking)
There is absolutely no reason to keep all your emails. None, whatsoever. It is called hoarding. "But I just looked up an email from 15 years ago yesterday" will be said here. Would it be a huge disaster if you where unable to find that mail? I doubt so. Helpful? Sure. Impossible to get on with life without it? Not really.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
And this is why academic libraries are creating repositories of material, and migrating them repeatedly each time formats change. If Vint Cerf gives his files to UCLA, they'll ensure they stay readable.
And you can even find accounts that delete a lot of interesting stuff as "deletionists" (typically with an unacknowledged bias, typically pro mainstream economics or medicine) and so get an education perusing everything they deleted. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
Some people seem to have a lot of time on their hands to find interesting stuff and delete it.