Cerf on science: The father of the Internet talks string theory, the physics of Angry Birds & more

Cerf on technology and government

It’s exhilarating to talk with this living legend about futuristic science and technology as it unfolds around us, but I know that Cerf sees more than a few threats to innovation, too.

At a recent conference on cloud computing, Cerf stated that he felt the government was overstepping its bounds in censorship of the Internet. Speaking about the Department of Homeland Security’s recent seizures of websites, he said such measures were “a blunt instrument that can and should be exercised much more carefully.”

In our phone conversation, Cerf expounded on that theme.

“The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That’s why we have laws… The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior,” he said.

“But there are extremes in both directions that don’t work very well.”

There is such a thing, Cerf explained, as too much privacy. Privacy for criminals would allow people with bad intentions to carry out their nefarious deeds unchecked. On the other hand, too little privacy would result in a crime-free utopia that would also be “unpleasant,” said Cerf, “because everybody knows everything” about their neighbors, their subordinates, et cetera.

“Where to draw a boundary between those two tensions so we’re protected from harm but we maintain a reasonable privacy in our affairs” is key, he concluded. “Finding that balance would be one of my highest priorities.”

But Cerf was speaking about how he would conduct himself if he were in charge of our government’s actions. As a technologist, what can he do? How should technologists approach this problem of stemming the tide of legitimate online crime while protecting freedom of speech and privacy?

“We have a responsibility to protect people and businesses from harm in the environment we’re working on,” Cerf said, continuing to say that developers, entrepreneurs, innovators and executives need to work with regulators on these issues so that the good things about the Internet can be preserved at the same time.

“I am so worried about SOPA and PIPA, I’m worried about governments that want to control access to and use of the Internet,” said Cerf. “There really are problems with privacy, with malware, with fraud. Those are all real problems, but we need to be thoughtful about how we go about solving those problems. You don’t want to kill the goose that’s laying the golden egg.”

Cerf on the future of technology

Our conversation moves back to the more pleasant topic: that of the golden egg. As our world takes on more of the trappings of science fiction, many technologists are predicting that some level of coding expertise will be a necessary skill in the next few years.

In fact, a few startups have been built around the idea that tech novices must learn how to write basic code. For example, Codecademy teaches JavaScript coding through a simple interactive interface. One of the company’s young founders, Zach Sims, told VentureBeat he sees code-writing as a very important skill for would-be employees over the next few years.

“While the entrepreneurial community has exploded within the past year or two, there’s a constant shortage of developers and a tremendous number of businesspeople trying to learn to code,” said Sims. “Programming literacy is going to be an incredibly important skill in the next few years, and we hope we can bring that to new groups of people.”

While Cerf acknowledged that coding is a valuable skill, he said that the increasingly common insistence that writing code will be a necessary function of daily life is “hyperbolic, from my point of view.”

Rather, he thinks code will continue to happen in the background, enabled by applications with layers of abstraction between human and bare metal.

“A lot of people who use spreadsheets on a daily basis don’t think about it as coding, but it is. It’s just simpler than if you were writing an operating system,” he said.

“Tech has allowed peole to cause software to happen… which is why the application space has been so vivid, more people are capable of doing it because it’s been made simpler.”

Ultimately, Cerf said, we will end up creating more code as byproducts of our actions, but we won’t be doing the programming ourselves.

“I hope it won’t be necessary for people to be programmers, but it is necessary for people to have an appreciation for what is possible because of science and technology… an abstract understanding of how things work.”

Cerf on moral technology

Finally, as our conversation came to a close, we drifted toward the topic of a recent op-en Cerf penned for the New York Times.

In this article, Cerf maintained that Internet access is not a human right. Nor, he said, is it a civil right. Rather, the Internet is simply a tool that has the potential to unlock new levels of access to human and civil rights.

He wrote,

“Yet all these philosophical arguments overlook a more fundamental issue: the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights. The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.”

This statement puts a large onus on us, the technologists, to constantly remember how closely our work connects people to possibilities, to freedoms, to expression, to information.

But, I asked Cerf, don’t we too often forget that responsibility? What about the apps we make that lack redeeming value or that actually serve to augment discord and apathy?

“I would like to imagine that technologists would feel that moral obligation,” Cerf responded.

He gives a great example: “I would love to see a version of Angry Birds that lets you go in and change the physics of the environment — the gravity, the elasticity — to give the players a sense of how the physical constants of the world work…

“What would Angry Birds be like if you tried to play it on the moon?”

It’s at least an educational premise and at best an idea that could turn millions of hours of mind-numbing entertainment into — who knows? — a solution to bridge that 65,000-year gap between Earth and Alpha Centauri.

“The kids are already excited about playing the game, it might be a very interesting experiment.”

Photo for image courtesy of Joi Ito.