Vint Cerf is well known in the computing world as one of the ‘Fathers of the Internet’, having – alongside Robert Kahn – designed the TCP/IP protocol and architecture that brought the internet into being. He is a former Vice President of Google and the recipient of numerous awards, including the ACM Alan Turing Award, the U.S. National Medal of Technology and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2012 he was appointed by President Obama to serve a six-year term on the National Science Board.

Vint began his talk by discussing society’s discomfort with the rapid advancement of technology, in particular AI, explaining how we have been in exactly the same position of fast technological change since at least as far back as 1895 with the discovery of radioactivity through to the advancement of electricity, Einstein’s destruction of Newtonian physics and the discovery of DNA. He explained how, back in 1895, Physics thought its job was more-or-less complete but we now understand that we know just 5% of how the universe works with 25% being Dark Matter and 70% Dark Energy. As a result, he suggested the best course for a student would be a career in Astrophysics as the chances of winning a Nobel prize is high!
Vint then spoke about his career in technology, born from the need to manage the resources of US military defence with a new command control system that would see technology shifting from wires to radio and satellite communication. With Robert Kahn, Vint developed ARPANET in 1969. This was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and the first computer network to implement the TCP/IP protocol stack – thus the technology for the technical foundation of the Internet was born. In 1989, this foundation enabled Tim Berners-Lee to invent a new layer known as the ‘World Wide Web’ with its own network protocols.

Using one of The Oratory’s Ex Umbris Learning Culture motivational quotes, “Data, data, data! I cannot make bricks without clay”, Vint explained how this quote from Sherlock Holmes, published in 1892, is still true to this day. Data is everything and without it, no algorithm can work. The challenge we have now is that with so much data, it has become hard to decipher the good data from the bad, posing risky consequences such as false medical analysis. Deciphering and managing data is what is needed to enable technology and AI to move forward. This need paves the way for new jobs such as ‘Prompt Engineer’ - just like the need for the new role of Webmaster of the 1990s - something Oratory students should perhaps consider when thinking about their own future career pathways.

Ending his talk, Vint spoke about where technology is taking us and how society has come to rely on computers to model the world in which we live. He spoke of hollow-core fibre research at the University of Southampton, which allows light to travel roughly twice as fast as through
glass fibre enabling advances in telecoms, manufacturing and data transfer. Also, the work of DeepMind, the London-based AI research lab that has successfully used their AI model AlphaFold (itself based upon AlphaGo that managed to beat the world champion Go player, Lee Sedol, in four out 5 matches in 2016) to predict the folded shape of over 200 million proteins that could then be used to find the correct match to combat diseases.
In Assistive Technology, Cochlear implants, screen readers, optical and spinal implants are all developing rapidly, as is an internet for the solar system – an interplanetary network that will support space exploration and repurpose the redundant rovers of older space missions. Software itself is an endless frontier.

Dr Julian Murphy says, “It was truly inspirational and educational, both as a history lesson and a glimpse into future developments, to hear this talk from someone who has played such a pivotal role in shaping the information technology revolution.”

Many thanks to Ken Carter, former teacher at The Oratory School and founder of Henley-base charity, SpecialKidz, for making this incredible talk possible. Thanks also to the students of St Andrew’s School, Berkshire and the Computer Science students of Langtree who attended this this event.