One of the key challenges is the language barrier. In Africa there are three major languages spoken, or used in professional environments: French, English, some Portuguese. And trying to bring the community from all those different language backgrounds to focus on a project like AFRINIC was hard.
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You know, I got to thinking about—Tan Tin Wee beat me to this analogy but I’m going to use it anyway. If the ARPANET created atoms, then the Internet created molecules. And Tim Berners-Lee created DNA. And after that, it was just life in all its variations. So now I finally figured out, what is it that …read the full transcript.
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.
We’ve already been through several situations where new technologies come along. The Industrial Revolution removed a large number of jobs that had been done by hand, replaced them with machines. But the machines had to be built, the machines had to be operated, the machines had to be maintained. And the same is true in this online environment.
I have a few examples of things that are starting to happen. And you can see that AI normally stands for artificial intelligence, but I’ve often concluded it stands for “artificial idiot.” And the reason is very simple. It turns out that these systems are good, but they’re good in kind of narrow ways.
Where did the Internet come from? And in order to answer that question, you would have to have a pretty clear idea of what you mean when you say “the Internet.” I suspect that if we were to poll everybody in the room, we would have a variety of different, sometimes contradictory, sometimes incompatible, sometimes overlapping, definitions of “the Internet.”