Vint Cerf, one of the founding “fathers of the Internet” and also a Google vice-president, warns people to physically back up their data and print out their digital pictures, literally, as he believes that we could be heading towards a digital dark age.
Cerf explained his nightmare during an interview with the BBC at a science conference in San Jose. He thinks that someday soon we may not be able to access our digital files with our computers anymore, just as we no longer can access floppy disks or open up a new .docx MS Word file with MS Office 2005.
“I worry a great deal about that,” Cerf told BBC. “Old formats of documents that we’ve created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed. And so what can happen over time is that even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is.”
This is true. Technology is a thing that is advancing really fast. Although, I don’t believe this “digital dark age” is something to worry about. Two decades ago, we were using floppy disks to store our valuable documents and we used VHS tapes to record our favorite TV shows and watch them later, and then came CD’s and DVD’s which now slowly becoming obsolete. But, that doesn’t mean we lost valuable data along with them.
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We simply adapted to better technologies. Instead of floppy disks we now have flash drives, instead of VHS tapes we now have Netflix, instead of DVD’s we now have cloud storage. We never lost anything, we simply adapt to better things no matter what the technology have to throw at us. Sure, there may come a time when we no longer need to depend on digital files or cloud storage, but I believe it will be long after we make the transition to better things.
And you know the irony is that even though Vint Cert is scared of a “digital dark age”, he’s now planning to preserve every piece of software for the future in the cloud itself.
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Follow @nrjperera – Roshan Jerad Perera