Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf (pictured centre before his presentation with the Lift organiser Laurent Haug) is an American computer scientist who is the "person most often called 'the father of the Internet'. Cerf has worked for Google as its Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since September 2005. In this role he has become well known for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, encompassing such areas as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPV6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model.
At the closing of the session, “New Frontiers” Cerf outlined his futures for society and technology. We were treated with a brief history of the internet, looking at the birth and the emergence of the next medium for the internet: mobiles, and how this will change our experience of the net. He touched on the global usage of the internet with the highest continental figure coming in at 578.5 million users from Asia, unsurprisingly, and a total global figure at 1.463.6 million users at the end of June 2008.
He outlined several emerging trends and potential grand futures, some of which I will detail.
As touched on the presentation by Bill Rose on Thursday, Cerf referenced to internet enabled products. Cerf also predicts we will see more objects that double up as an online access. He highlighted the surfer in California who made an internet enabled surfboard, and yes “surfing the net” was mentioned! He envisages billions of products with internet enabled.
Another emergence will be the standisation of non Latin Unicode characters in domain names, which is a difficult task to incorporate in the existing system but is close to being realized.
Cerf’s self-made description “Bit-Rot” described the problem, which will grow in the future, of compatibility of old files with new operating systems. What will happen when systems in use now become defunct and not maintained, how will we open our documents in 2040? How will we be able to interpretate and use previous, existing data?
The hot word of the three days: privacy. Some have argued we should throw caution to the wind and share everything: most have not! Cerf outlines the existing problem, which will only grow when more people have access to the net: how will we protect global privacy when the laws only cover national privacy? How will this be resolved? Will there be an internal Law of the Net? How will common agreements be made of what we think is acceptable on the net and will the legal system support this view?
Intellectual Property protection came up, which has not been discussed much at Lift09 – too straightforward probably. However what did get mentioned was the issue of control on copying. As the net essentially works by coping items, previous protection models which control copying do not really work and even recent models such as Creative Commons and CopyLeft will need to be further modified to find a system which continue to protect and reward but are compatible with the net.
He wrapped by looking at Interplanetary Internet, InterPlanNet [IPN] that I highly suggest you review his presentation of that, not a summary by me. (Again hover your mouse over the speakers for the correct person and again two language versions available.)
http://www.nouvo.ch/liftvideo
Cerf’s knowledge, background and mode of communicating was transfixing and he did bring up some futures which personally I can see and he certainly brought them into the wider domain.
There will be one final post next week. An update from the Chair of Wikipedia, Florence Dévouard who gave an update on Wikipedia and described some interesting developments.
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