Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf visits South Africa

Vint Cerf, Vice-President of search giant Google and acknowledged as the “Father of the Internet”, was in South Africa for a short visit and was interviewed by Leanne Manas on SABC 2’s Morning Live TV show.

Cerf was visiting the country to assess Africa’s broadband and internet infrastructure at the Big Tent conference in Johannesburg, and took some time to sit in front of the cameras and discuss his feelings and ideas on the modern internet.

“I’m an engineer,” he started saying. “What I do is take what you perceive as science fiction and try to turn it into a reality. That’s my job at Google and what a lot of my colleagues at Google do as well, we engineer things. A lot of my time is spent on policy and making internet access easier, but I’m still an engineer.”

Vint Cerf playing Spacewar! on a PDP-1

“At Google, for example, we’ve recently just set up something with NASA I’ve been dreaming about for years, which is an inter-planetary internet. We’ve got the Rovers on Mars connected to our satellites and internet here, we have the satellites orbiting the sun and Venus connected and we’re getting everything laid down.”

“We’re building the ecosystem that will eventually be used when mankind moves to others planets. All of those devices and machines have their own intranet, of course, but they’re all connected and communicating. We even already have an interplanetary currency!”

Manas turned the interview towards his role in Africa. Google’s Big Tent conference is aimed at talks detailing how the internet is expanding its reach around the world and the Johannesburg talks were no different, noting how South Africa could benefit from growth in industry, mining and other trades through rapid adoption of the internet in those environments.

Cerf said: “Africa is a unique challenge but like all countries without complete coverage, there is scope to improve the Internet’s reach and introduce it into education.”

“In rural Africa and certainly South Africa there’s not access wherever you go. The kids in schools don’t use computers or the internet on a daily basis, putting them at a disadvantage with those who do. What we’re doing with our Learn with Google and Google Loon projects is to introduce the idea of the internet to these kids and give them the tools they’d need to be able to use them later in life when they have a job. Not only that, we’re also teaching them about the world they live in.”

Vin Cerf at the Big Tent talk in Italy

Cerf is proud of the internet today, something born out of his work on the TCP/IP protocol and his role in DARPA to get the ARPANet up and running. He laments the way his creation has been used for purposes that weren’t originally intended, like criminal activity.

“When we were working on the ARPANet we had an idea of what we were doing, what we would be unleashing on the world. Its a great tool and an enabler and unfortunately, there are going to be individuals or groups who use it for things that were never intended in the first place. But I believe that this is slowly changing through the behaviour of the users,” said Cerf.

“Take Youtube for example. We have hundreds of thousand of hours of new video coming in each day and its simply not possible to watch or pre-screen it beforehand. That’s why we rely on crowdsourcing to flag inappropriate videos and help us to keep it clean,” said Cerf.

“We can track the age of people flagging content through their user profiles and younger generations are thinking more critically about what they see on there. You know, kids will absorb information and anything they see or hear and that they’re becoming able to separate what’s real and what’s nonsense or hurtful or inappropriate at a young age makes me happy.”

Vint Cerf will be giving another speech and a Q & A session in Johannesburg later today (6 September 2013) at Jozihub. Those interested to see and hear what he has to say can find the details in this link.