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Internet started with the military
The internet precursor, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) sent its first message in 1969.
The network's early iterations were reserved mostly for academia and the armed forces up until the late 1980s.
Decades later, the internet co-designer appears to be more comfortable with the company's recent work than some
of his protesting colleagues.
"The purposes of the Maven project, as I understood it anyway, had a lot to do with situational awareness so that
you could understand what's in the field of view — are there vehicles in the field of view? ... This is just to understand
what's going on," Dr Cerf told the ABC.
"Some people, I think, extrapolated from that kind of capability to all kinds of other things that they thought we shouldn't
be involved with."
Nevertheless, the debate over Google's new principles was an important albeit sometimes painful discussion to have, he
told an audience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
"I think it's early days yet, but the intent is to establish oversight committees that will evaluate projects before we start
them in order to assess the degree to which they might be harmful," he explained later.
Artificial intelligence is 'artificial idiocy'
Despite the fears of "killer robots" and weaponised algorithms, Dr Cerf suggested artificial intelligence is sometimes
best called "artificial idiocy".
"I can say that I've always been a little sceptical," he said.
For now, he is concerned these systems are still often "brittle". They are deep and narrow in their capabilities, and
no match for human ability.
Once you or I know what a table is, for example, you begin to know that any flat location perpendicular to the
Earth's gravitational surface could be used as a table.
"A lap, your chair, a real table, this stage," he said. "In just a few examples, we've generalised the notion of table.
Human beings do this really well.
Computers don't know how to do this well."
Internet is still vibrant
In fact, Dr Cerf would not countenance too much internet doom and gloom.
Besides the Federal Communications Commission's recent repeal of net neutrality in the United States, which he
did see as a serious setback, he suggested the internet ecosystem remained vibrant.
And the internet's co-parent isn't caught up by technological anxiety.
"I'm not persuaded that what we're living through is any more traumatic or dramatic than what happened in the
first half of the 20th century or the second half of the 20th century," he said, pointing to jet planes and televisions and radio.
Nevertheless, this future doesn't seem to involve much rest.
Dr Cerf suggested that lifelong education is essential if we want to survive the coming decades (he's now deep into microbiology himself).
"It's certain that there will be technological changes in eight decades that make the world look very different from what it
was when you went to school," he told the ABC.
"I think that's a really cool outcome, that we work and study and work and study and work and study in order to stay current."