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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
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."
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.
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