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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
Dead man walking...
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"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.
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.
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 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.
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't spend 10 seconds searching the internet for where to buy a copy of WordPerfect.
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.
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.
How about his vaunted AI to the rescue? We can teach machines to read facial expressions -- why not train them to make sense of orphaned text with embedded formatting markup? After all, there's LOTS of material to train with.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
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.