Vint Cerf on the future of the internet

Image Credit: UCLA Newsroom

Although Vinton Cerf’s name rings a few bells when heard, it doesn’t elicit immediate recognition when compared to the likes of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. I choose to compare him to some of the greatest inventors the world has ever known because he’s an inventor himself–and a pretty admirable one, at that.

In the 1970s, Vinton, commonly known as Vint, and his colleague Bob Kahn (another name that should ring more bells) set out to come up with a way to move packets of data between computers and networks. In the course of time, they were able to develop TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). TCP/IP might not be as fundamental an invention like the telephone or the light bulb, but it’s one of the key elements that make the Internet work. Without Vint and Bob, who knows what the Internet would be like today?

Vint currently serves as Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist. As part of his responsibilities for the latter job title, Vint meets and gives talks regularly to schoolchildren and students about his long career in technology and on the future of the Internet as well. Vint reveals that he’s particularly keen on encouraging “kids to be as curious as they should be” as they are “shielded from a lot of the way things work.”

There’s a lot of truth in this statement, but maybe one reason why Vint is all for pushing this trait is because he used to be quite a curious one himself. Vint built up his interest in science and engineering by playing around with a chemistry set when he was around the age of 10, eventually figuring out how to make thermite bombs (which are dangerous and shouldn’t be what kids are to build from such sets, by the way.)

Vint first got involved with computer networking when he was obtaining his MS and PhD degrees from UCLA, and he hasn’t stopped working on this field since. In fact, his current project with NASA involves extending the Internet far into the reaches of outer space, dubbed as “Interplanetary Internet.” Old spacecraft that have already completed their missions will be used in the project. It might seem a lot like what you see on cartoon shows or on science fiction movies, and Vint is actually in agreement with that. “It sounds like science fiction,” he says, “but engineering is turning science fiction into science fact.”

As for the future of the Internet on planet Earth, Vint contends that it’s all going to be about mobile technology. Being able to connect devices to one another will eventually become more important, and it wont be limited to just mobile phones or Internet-enabled tablets or computers anymore. In fact, Vint predicts that the technology will eventually extend to include common household appliances and even automobiles in the future.

With regards to the future of general science and technology, Vint is upbeat as well, saying: “I wish I was eight years old because I really want to know what happens in the next 50 or 60 years.”

Source – The Telegraph