Vint Cerf’s Internet History Lecture at the University of Waterloo mixes humor and hope with words of caution

I had a few ideas about what I would hear at a lecture by Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet,” at the University of Waterloo’s Humanities Theater on Tuesday, June 11, for a public lecture titled “The Internet : past, present and future.”

Along with Bob Kahn, Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP protocol, which is the foundation for nearly all the technology we depend on today, from Slack and Instagram to remote surgery robots and autonomous vehicles. So I prepared for him to cover 70 years of Internet history, from his work on the ARPANET project in the 1970s to solving the challenges of the interplanetary Internet project today.

I did not expect an explanation of artificial intelligence (AI) hallucinations as an impression of Sigmund Freud.

“We provided an extremely creative and creative new environment for people. What they decide to do with it is their decision, not ours.”

Asked about AI’s impact on humanity, Cerf shared a story about asking an AI tool to write his obituary. The obituary got some things right, but Cerf noted that it also gave him credit for innovations he didn’t work on and even invented additional family members that don’t exist.

“What we have here is the artificial id and the artificial ego, and what we lack is the uber artificial ego to control the uncontrollable impulses of the artificial id.“

The comedy was to be expected. Cerf is known for being humble, funny and – at times – self-deprecating. It’s a reputation well earned. In his hour-long lecture, Cerf wove decades of history into a narrative of the Internet’s origins and the challenges of bringing it to the Moon, Mars and beyond — yes, the interplanetary Internet is a thing. Keeping up the pace at an almost breakneck speed, the 80-year-old innovator reminds you of George Carlin wearing a three-piece suit.

But it wasn’t all a joke. After the lecture, Cerf took the stage for an extended question-and-answer session, posing challenging questions about the current state of the Internet. An audience member asked directly if Cerf felt responsible for any of the negative consequences of the technologies created using the protocols he helped develop.

“All bad things, right?” Cerf said with a laugh before taking a serious tone.

“Personally, I don’t think this is a technological issue. I don’t even think it’s a regulatory question. I actually think it’s a societal question, he said. “We need new social norms that guide our behavior in the online environment. Now, whether we can get there, I don’t know. But I wish companies like Google and others would benefit from hiring sociologists and anthropologists to help us understand what the impact of these technologies is on the way our societies function.”

“We provided an extremely creative and creative new environment for people. What they decide to do with it is their decision, not ours. I will concede the point that there are bad things that happen and I would like to make them go away. But I refuse to take responsibility for other people’s decisions to abuse the system.”

BetaKit continued the conversation with Cerf after the event about the state of the system he helped create. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written and spoken about your concerns about a “Digital Dark Age,” in which we lose access to physical media or digital formats because technologies become obsolete. What is the risk?

The thing that really struck me is that our ability to store content – writing, images, video and so on – has eroded over time. Imagine it’s 4000 BC, and we’re using clay tablets to keep track of inventory data in a warehouse, and the warehouse burns down. The clay tablets are baked and if you can still read the cuneiform writing, we have stored that information for several thousand years in that medium. The next most common medium after this is sheepskin or calfskin. Then you get Papyrus, which doesn’t last as long unless it’s in a dry environment. Then you get to paper with cloth content, which easily lasts 500 years or more. But then you get wood pulp paper, which doesn’t last nearly as long. It can last 100 years at best. Then you get newsprint, which lasts three days if you’re lucky.

Then, you go to digital media. We have an eight-inch floppy disk for a word processor. The problem is that even if the discs survived and the tracks are still on the disc, we can’t find anything to read them. The same is true for five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks, and DVD ROMs.

It seems like the lifespan of the media we use to store digital content is shortening, and I’m actually worried that in our increasingly digital world, which secretly feels like everything should last forever, we’ll lose information because we don’t we do have the means to access it.

You talked about your work to make the Internet available to anyone who wants it. Today, over five billion people have access, but one of the blockers is not regulatory or related to connectivity. Instead, they have an accessibility problem. You and your wife are both hard of hearing, and I wanted to ask where you would like to see more efforts made to make the Internet accessible to people living with disabilities.

What’s really hard is that the people who make the software that makes the Internet useful don’t always have a very good intuition about how to make things accessible. If you imagine that simply putting on eyes helps you understand what it’s like to be blind, you’d be wrong. The same is true for hearing problems, you can stick wax in your ears, but it won’t really teach you what the hard problems of deafness are.

We need to train people in a way that gives them more intuition about how to make something achievable. One of the most powerful tools for training is giving people real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t. It’s really surprising how we come to understand the essence of good design from the examples that show you what is good and what is bad.

What about accessibility requirements, such as those in the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act here in Ontario?

It’s one thing to say you have to do it as a law. It’s something else to have the ability to do it. I see a lot of people who want to make things more accessible, but they don’t have the skills or intuition for design that is accessible. Then there’s another term that’s being used more and more now called usability, which doesn’t focus too much on disability, but just focuses on what makes something useful and intuitive.

I think we need a lot more catalogs and examples of things that do and don’t work and why they do and don’t work. The more people have these examples, the more likely they will understand what intuitive design really is.

I wanted to go back to the interplanetary internet. When I heard about the interplanetary Internet, I thought it was much further away than it really is. It’s here now. I think of the Wright Brothers who would be amazed by what flies in the sky today. You helped design the foundation that shaped the way we live our daily lives nearly 50 years ago. How is it to see what has been done today?

How did we get the internet to happen at all? The answer is a lot of collaborative work. An amazing number of people contributed and continue to contribute to the evolution of the system. And it’s the fact that the system accommodates contributions from people in so many different ways, and it continues to evolve and people continue to contribute.

“That’s a very powerful motivator to feel like you’re part of something bigger than you are.”

When kids ask me, ‘How do you make something big?’ And my answer is, if you are smart, get help from people who are smarter than you. That’s what Bob and I did. We assembled a team of really smart people. I really wanted to do this work and had different perspectives on what the challenges were and how they could be overcome.

We didn’t necessarily imagine anything we see today. But I think our model has as much simplicity as we could manage, which would still provide the necessary interoperability. That was always a very high focus: how do we maintain interoperability? Then you convince people to build to those standards because they had reason to expect that things would work.

That was, of course for me, the primary goal. Making things connected that otherwise wouldn’t be. The Internet has indeed succeeded in doing this. I don’t think any of us go around saying, “Look what I did.” Because it didn’t happen like that. What happened is that we found a way to allow a large number of people to contribute to making this thing work.

This is a very powerful motivator to feel like you are part of something bigger than you are. I know, that sounds so cliche. But that’s really what it was.

Images courtesy of the University of Waterloo.