It’s obvious that the Internet is a tremendous success, and the world is not prepared to live without it anymore. At the same time, it has never been designed to provide the services it is assumed to do today.
We’ve designed systems not really well anticipating the kind of users that would really use them, thinking that they would—or maybe not even thinking—that they would be used in the same way that they were in the 1980s and 1990s.
The greatest threat to the security and stability of our Internet today is distributed attacks, distributed denial of service attacks in particular. The Internet was built on a foundation of it works because everybody cooperates and we all agree. And that was a great environment when you pretty much could name everybody who was on the Internet, or you got to where you could name all the sites and you know, you could name all the organizations.
We’re at a time of huge expansion of the Internet outside of the kinds of Internet connections and devices that we’re familiar with. We’ve seen some of that over the past few years as we’ve moved from laptops, desktop computers, to smartphones and tablets and we’ve seen a big increase. Right now instead of a tablet and a laptop at home, you’ve got a tablet, two iPhones, and a desktop computer.
I was participating in a European Commission project, and it was really a surprising period. In less than ten years, the whole Internet changed.
I think he would to some extent be surprised that business has hijacked the Internet in a certain sense. That the entertainment industry…I’ll just pick on them but other industries too, that’ve basically exploited that sort of delivery vehicle that was made not really with them in mind but they have gained such a dominant position in dictating how and where the Internet goes.
In some ways, I helped put the “inter” into the Internet because it was the first time these administratively-different networks were connected together and could connect together as they wished.
There’s lots of fears. So one major fear would be privacy. So privacy is something which we used to take for granted. Now we cannot. The other major fear I have is centralization.
I would hope that ten or twenty years from now we live in a world in which Internet access is taken almost for granted, and that it’s conceivable that the Internet—the name “Internet”—will actually fade and we’ll just consider it part of the infrastructure that we’re used to just like you know, there’ll be a plug in the wall for information services over the Internet.
The main fear I have, and I believe most of my colleagues have, is to see the Internet more fragmented than it is, and much more fragmented than we wanted it to be. When we designed it, we developed technology which was due to be open, which means that everyone knows the technology, everyone can develop it, and everyone can improve it as well.
I think one of the things I want to say from the start is it's not like AI is going to appear. It's actually out there, in some instances in ways that we never even notice. Read more →
I think it’s interesting to note that computer science has paid relatively little attention I think to some of the problems that come up with very-large scale library automation and public access to information. I think that these are hard problems and also fruitful problems from a computer science point of view. Read more →
If you were to ask me what the crisis in the present is, as an evolutionary biologist I have to go back millions of years and try to connect all the dots, going back to man as a single-celled organism to present time, and saying what is it that is causing modern consternation? More importantly, is there a pattern? Has this happened before? Were there some ordinary people like you and I, shopkeepers in Rome, who were standing around and saying, "You know, our leaders don't seem to be on top of our problems. They seem to be getting worse one generation after another." Read more →
We should not judge the work of AI on the basis of whether it can be distinguished from work done by us, because what's the point. We want AI to produce work that we presently cannot even imagine. That may seem to us meaningless—and even nonsensical—but it may be better than what we can produce. Read more →
When many of the people in this room were beginning to lay the groundwork for the network in the 60s, I was working as a political scientist and worrying about communications patterns and how those worked. Read more →