A Digital Dark Age

           February 15, 2015

I personally am scared about where computer technology is going.

Right now, I could call the current time period a “Digital Dark Age.” When hardware and software become obsolete, humans will have no record of the 21st Century. People in the future will not know about their past. Our life, our memories, our most cherished family photographs increasingly exist as bits of information - on our hard drives or in "the cloud". But as technology moves on, they risk being lost in the wake of an accelerating digital revolution.

An example of a concerning thing related to this is compatibility with older versions of programs. One such example is the development of the recently announced Apple Watch. The Apple Watch will only work on an iPhone 5 or higher. Eventually, Apple will likely make newer models of them that work only on a 6, or possibly even the newest model iPhone. This is pressuring people to buy new phones, which do not work as well due to Apple adding extra features to default apps such as Maps that are unnecessary. Yet, the development of the iPhone is also subpar. Newer versions of iPhones often have additional features that are either already obsolete or useless, or they remove helpful features. For example, if Apple ever dared to try and remove the headphone jack on a future iPhone, people would be stuck, either being forced to spend $150 on Bluetooth headphones, or get a lower quality experience without them.

I have an idea myself of preserving every disk drive and every piece of hardware as a server in the cloud. If this works, items could be stored in accessible servers for generations, and our ancestors could see documents from the past. The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. That digital snapshot can recreate the past in the future. But obviously, a company would have to do it. I would need a company that could be around for hundreds of years, and not many companies last that long. While it would take a lot of fundraising, it is necessary to keep our future ancestors aware of our past.

I am nervous about how humans will fix this problem. If you have an idea, please comment it on this post.

Vinton Cerf

Age 73

Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google