Walter Bastian
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Western Hemisphere
Department of Commerce
(24:30)
Thank you John that was absolutely fascinating. And now we’re gonna have another fascinating presentation. Not to put you on the spot, Vinton. Privileged now to introduce Vinton Cerf, who as I mentioned earlier is the Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Mr. Cerf is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the internet and other platforms for the company. (24:55) Mr. Cerf is widely known as the co-inventor of the internet. Now I’ve heard Mr. Cerf speak before. I heard him in the Dominican Republic a couple of years ago and he takes you where no man has ever been. And I say that because he was also a technical a – and this is a part of his resume I do understand – he was a technical advisor to Star Trek. So, when you’re not inventing the internet, what do you do? Vinton. (25:28)
Vinton Cerf
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist
Google
(25:32)
Ah, buenas tardes. And that’s about all the Spanish you are going to get out of me this afternoon I’m afraid. First of all I want to suggest to you - I want to thank Walter for a very kind introduction and also for the opportunity to meet once again with our colleagues in North and South America and the Caribbean. (25:54) The title of this event speaks of competitiveness and I would like to suggest to you that that might not be the right model. I always worry the term competitiveness leads one to think that there is a fight going on and someone will win and someone will lose. (26:13) Its my honest belief that, at least in the technology world, it’s possible for everyone to win. And much of what John told you earlier, with which I quite agree, suggests that as well. That there are mutual benefits to extending infrastructure and to cooperating that creates greater GDP opportunities for everyone so I would - perhaps next year we can have an Americas Cooperativeness Forum – where we all learn to increase our GDPs (applause).
Now I need to warn you that I am just an engineer and at this point, rather an old one, so I’m going to try and say a few things that are intended to refer to economic policy. (27:00) Engineers speaking on this subject of course are quite dangers so I will excuse you for using the salt on the table as you consider my suggestions. Let me start, however, as John did, with some statistics. We’re both engineers and we’re really deeply attached to those. The internet has about 1.1 billion users on the net today. And I’m always very proud of that growing number except I remember there are 6.5 billion people in the world, so Google’s internet evangelist has another 5.5 billion to go. However, the distribution of the statistic is quite interesting. North America has about 233 million users. Latin America has about 96 million users, so the sum of our two continents adds up to a little over 330 million users. Asia already has 400 million users. (28:00) Now that’s in a much larger population; There’s China and India…56% of the world’s population live in what we would consider Asia…China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and so on. But there are 400 million users already and that number will clearly grow with time. Europe has 315 million users, of course the definition of Europe keeps changing because they keep adding countries every so often. But none the less, even together, North and South America and Europe will add up to about 600 million users, and that number will probably not grow much larger. The largest growth opportunity in the America’s is clearly in Latin America. The Middle East has 19 million, Oceania which includes Australia, New Zeeland and so on has 18 million and Africa has 33 million. Africa, of course, is a huge challenge because there are over a billion people living on the continent But we have only manages to get 33 million of them hooked up to the internet. (29:03)
None the less, things are changing rapidly there and part of the reason for that is something John alluded to several times, and that has to do with mobile technology. There are some 2.5 million mobiles in operation today. And its estimated that another billion will enter into the market during 2007. Some of them will be replacements, but it would not surprise me to see on the order of three billion mobile users around the world by the end of this year. Now there’s something else that’s important about mobiles; many of the mobile infrastructure supplies data capabilities. John gave that wonderful demonstration of how much better Borgy than some of the more common systems today. I spent a week or so ( two weeks actually) in India this year visiting Google’s offices in Hyderabad and Bangalore. And I was pleased to discover that my Blackberry actually picked up a substantial amount of data capability as I moved around in that area. I was also in Carola in the middle of Lake Vembanad, where I thought fro sure that I would be isolated (and looked forward to it). When I turned on my mobile and the GPRS service was running full strength and I got 300 emails. So I was sitting on a houseboat on my way to a hotel, I didn’t have the excuse that I was isolated in this remote part of the world. Now what did disappoint me, however, was to learn that many of the Indian users of mobile purchased the expensive models which did not have data capabilities, and so the statistics suggest a title wave of internet use will have to be a moderated a little bit until the cost can come down and people will naturally purchase these devices that are enabled in a way that John and I would both like to see happen. However, what is significant is that the implementation of the infrastructure for mobile include the data capability from the get go (31:05) That’s very important because it’s a draw to pull people towards that capability with new applications.
One of the things that I find very important as John does, is Broadband capability and I would note that most of the broadband facilities available today are not symmetric…in other world; you can pull data in from the net at much higher speed than you can push it out. That’s been ok for many of the internet applications of the past, but what we are seeing mow, is that the consumers of information are now becoming the producers of information. They’re pumping video into Google video, You Tube and other applications like that. They’re pushing data around from one device to another using one of the various peer-to-peer applications so that the population of internet use is changing it’s style of operation and there will be demand to transmit as quickly as you can receive (32:08). That will also contribute very strongly to the kind of scenarios John mentioned where you’re interacting with other people and you need real time interaction in both directions.
This leads to some other observations about challenges ahead. Today, the Internet that most of you are using is using the IP version 4 standard Internet Protocol version 4. This was standardized in 1977. It has the ability to accommodate only 4.3 Billion unique addresses. There have been techniques to overcome some of that limitation—they’re called “network address translation boxes.” They have some very bad properties including interfering with end-to-end security. We need to move on to the IP version 6 design which has 128 bits of address space, which multiplies out to 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses.(33:06) Now I used to tell everyone that that means that every electron in the universe could have its own web page if it wanted too until I got an email from somebody at Cal Tech that said “Dear Dr. jerk, there are 10 to the 88 th electrons in the universe and you’re off by 50 orders of magnitude—so I don’t say that any more. IP version 4 address space is allocated by an organization called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers). I presently chair that organization and I can tell you that the current estimates are that the last IP version 4 address block will be allocated by ICANN to the regional internet registries by around 2011. It’s not too early to start implementing IP version 6, and if you are interested I’m sure that John would be able to help you with some of the equipment from Nortel. (33:58) There is another big change coming in the internet—from the very beginning even with the predecessor network the arcanet, the only way you could express a domain name was to use Latin characters, but we are now about to change that. There has been a tremendous amount of work, very complex, technical work, to introduce non-Latin characters into the domain name system which are called internationalized domain names. We’re running tests this year at ICANN and we are anticipating the possibility of these top level domains being entered into the system that have characters of Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and so on. These languages will be increasingly important as the Asian population becomes a larger part of the internet. And that’s going to present some challenges for the people that make browser software, people that build other applications that are interacting on the net that make use of the domain name system. They need to be prepared to deal with these new character sets from the Unicode system. (35:06)
Well I want to mention one other thing and then I want to get into the economics issue. I have noticed over this past 5 years this phenomenon of the consumers becoming producers, the barrier to contributing information to the net has dropped to 0. Anyone who wishes can introduce content onto the network. The Wikipedia example is probably the most illustrative. I want you to think for a moment, those f you who have bumped into Wikipedia, (possibly as a consequence of a Google search since it frequently comes up as one of the first few choices on the responses) Imagine you are reading a paragraph on the Wikipedia and you see one word which is wrong or could be better stated in that paragraph… one word… you are free to go and make that change, to change that one word in the paragraph, and that now becomes available to everyone on the internet.(36:08) You would never publish a scholarly paper that has one word in it, and you certainly wouldn’t publish a book that has one word in it, and yet you can contribute that one word to Wikipedia and it becomes a useful contribution. This suggests to me that we have reached an incredible point where any human being with access to the internet can make contributions from one work, to books, to videos and the system will accommodate that. We have never had such a democratizing technology in the history of civilization, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how our social and economic systems adapt to that.
Well, speaking of conditions for economic development, I am very glad that John repeatedly used the word ecosystem, because I think this is absolutely the best way for you to think about information technology in the context of economic development (37:07) let me start out by observing that you cant have effective use of information technology, you cant have businesses that rely on it and produce products and services with it, without certain conditions being satisfied. For example, it would be good to have reliable power, if you don’t have reliable power it is very hard to run a reliable IT system. You have to have the right other elements of infrastructure—communication (something John mentioned), you have to have the ability to develop the communications environment, you have to have the ability to maintain it, you have to have trained people who understand how to build and operate these kinds of systems. If you are going to be serious about wealth creation, you have to have capital available (and it shouldn’t only come from outside the country) capital should be developed internally as part of you economic plan. (38:06) We need to have a fluid securities market so you can have people owning companies and have fluidity and equability in their ability to take their equity and move it from one place to another. You plainly have to have a stable government environment; you have to have a reasonably secure and safe environment, otherwise, it will be hard to encourage anyone to make investments of any value. They have to have believe that by making that investment that the investment will pay off, that its facilities will be preserved, and be safe for people to work. You need a trained work force, and again John mentioned the importance of education and I couldn’t underscore that more myself.
Now let’s talk a little about planning, how can you plan for economic development, what should you be doing, especially as you look towards the future, and not just next year or the year after, but 3, 5, 10 years out. (39:08) So what information do you need, that I hope you have, but if you don’t you need it? You need demographic information. What is the age structure of our country? How is it changing? Are we a graying country? Do we have many more people who are older? Latin America is a very young place, and it is increasingly young. More and more of the population is in the younger ages, and the older ages are in the smaller fraction. This is unlike countries like Japan who is completely graying, and in Russia, for example, where the population is even diminishing as well s changing to an upside-down triangle where more people are older than younger. That has a certain impact on your thinking about preparing your population to work. What jobs will they have available? What should you be training them to do? (40:02) What should they be learning? What kinds of opportunities will they have domestically? What kinds of opportunities will they have internationally? How can networking allow you to export your labor without exporting your people? Can we put them on the internet? Can we have them serve not only domestic markets, but maybe even more importantly international markets that need IT capabilities, that need products and services. In fact, in some parts of the world, may be better prepared to receive products and services from the work force outside the domestic workforce until the domestic market and its infrastructure catch up with the need and the demand. In India, you can see this happening where a great deal of the It activity there is in fact exported to other places which are more deeply dependent upon an IT environment. (41:00)
One question is, what kinds of training should you be planning? And another one is what kind of jobs can you predict will evolve? Something I imaging John would agree with (but we will find out after we get into our discussion) if many of the current jobs didn’t even exist 5 years ago (you can certainly say that of products, some products you use today didn’t even exist a year ago) that implies a substantial amount of change in the kinds of training that we may have to do in our schools. So you have to put all that data together in order to put together some serious long-term plans. And in the absence of that information, I don’t understand how you can adapt your own domestic environment to take advantage of information technology. (41:50)
I’d like to finish simply by making some assertions—these are unproven assertions so you are free to disagree with them when we get to the Q&A but I want to open up your thinking to way beyond the subjects that John and I have been speaking about today. I want to talk about trends. I am simply going to list some unsustainable trends, and when you have an unsustainable trend, you know that something will break, something will give, and something will change. So these are things to help you think about forecasting.
Unsustainable trends: increasing carbon emissions, the percentage of the population that is poor, the increasing expenditure of GDP for health (this is a bigger problem in the United States I thing that any other country), decreasing ecological diversity. The very, very unsustainable trends: persistence of oil production, the increasing number of nuclear weapons available, and the increasing number of countries that have access to them (43:00). Those are all examples of unsustainable trends that have to change, and if they don’t change, something is going to break. How about the sustainable ones? Is there any good news on the horizon? Well one is increasing computer power, network communication and storage capacity for lower cost. In fact, you could probably make a general comment that the decreasing cost of everything is a sustainable and continuing trend. Just to give you an example, 6 months ago I bought a terabyte that is 10 to the 12 th (that’s a trillion bytes of data) as disk storage for use at home for 1,000 dollars. Now before somebody leaps up like some guy did in Warsaw, and says I paid 300 dollars for mine, I’ll admit I over paid. But I got to thinking…I had spent 1,000 dollars in 1979 for 10 million bytes of disk storage on a thing the size of a shoe box. And I got to thinking, what would it have cost me to buy a terabyte of memory in 1979? Of course, if you do the math it’s 100 million dollars. Now I have to admit, I didn’t have 100 million dollars in 1979 (and I still don’t) but I could guarantee that if I had had 100 million dollars in 11979 my wife wouldn’t let me spend it on disk memory—she would have found something more useful to do with it. (44:22) the cost in communication, computing, disk memory, or any kind of storage has dropped dramatically and it will continue. Increasing globalization is another sustainable trend. I think that it is an inescapable trend. Increasing mobility of labor, including the virtual ability to move labor around (not just through the internet or what I would call traditional ways in India), but this most interesting comment that John made about second life in virtual environments which also allow this very fluid and flexible export of labor. (45:02) Increasing lifetime I think most (with the serious exception of AIDS which we must deal with) generally the trend is for increasing lifetime around the world and increasing productivity. Increasing urbanization—this is another sustainable and almost inescapable trend because smaller and smaller populations are required to grow food for the rest of us. Increasing human enhancements, technology of the 21 st century that allows us to correct things like deafness with cochlear implants, and some day optical implants for people who are blind. And even today there is research going on in Australia and elsewhere to repair people who can’t move their arms or their legs by having spinal implants that route nervous signals around bad spots in the spinal chord. (46:03) These are all trends which I think are predictable and will have an influence on what happens to us in this coming decade in the 21 st century.
So I’ll stop there, thank you all for your attention. We will now ask Walter to come up and moderate a Q&A session with the rest of you. Thank you very much.(46:21)
Walter Bastian
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Western Hemisphere
Department of Commerce
(46:36) Because we’re already starting to run behind, we’ll still do the Q&A but it will be a very brief Q&A. So I’m going to try to limit this to just two questions with the idea that those of you who are interested in pursuing certain aspects of these two wonderful presentations that we have heard, feel free to take advantage of these two gentlemen. We will entertain your questions in a bilateral mode. We will take two questions to get this started…we have a roaming microphone.
Mark Pearson
Global Atlanta News Service
(47:27) One of the subjects that has been discussed recently about Google is the whole idea about giving up information in order to have more accurate searches, that Google has tracked your web usage (where you go, what you look at) and in return for that you get more specific answers to your Google questions. But then on the other hand there has been a great deal of debate about privacy and other issues. Could you maybe comment about that and where you see it going in the future?
Vinton Cerf
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist
Google
(48:06) Let me first of all observe that this is a voluntary thing, we don’t force you to do this. If you don’t want to have Google keep track of the search session that you are in, you don’t have to. Let me make a small observation about the mechanics. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that you are trying to search for the term “jaguar”, it’s an ambiguous term, because it could mean the cat or it could mean the car, and if we are aloud to watch your interactions with the net as you react to our responses we can adapt our responses if we can infer from your searches that you are more interested in the cat than the car. The information that is obtained during one of these sessions is retained for the session, but otherwise not, so the risk factor is rather low in terms of personal privacy. You can turn off the function whenever you wish, or you might choose never to invoke it at all. Regardless of whether you use this, we are always trying to find better and better ways to try and infer intent from the questions that users are asking. One very simple example of this is to look and see what you clicked on from the response that we sent with all the various choices, and re-order the results based on our inference that you were more interested in this particular definition for example with the jaguar. (49:37)
John Roese
Chief Technology Officer
Nortel
Just two comments on that—Google tends to get the headlines around this topic, but this concept about bringing context into the communication ecosystem is not new and it always goes with the requisite “but what about my privacy?” discussion. My background—I was one of the people who created the technology that allows you to get identity or authenticate people on wireless network (something called 802.1X). When we first had this discussion people said “well I don’t want to tell the network who I am” and then they realized that if everybody did that, than anyone could be on that corporate enterprise network. There was a huge security vulnerability, so people were willing to…lets call it “force authentication” to protect themselves. (50:20) What we have learned since then is that it is all about context; these functions of identity, location, presence, proximity (what ever you look at) are just tools that give you the ability to refine a behavior. The trick is to always use them in a context that the user has some control over. In the cellular world, the concept of location is a very powerful tool if you’re dialing 911 and falling down from a heart attack you would kind of like the ambulance to go to the right place. On the other hand, you would potentially like to be able to say, “I don’t really want it to know where I am at” if I’m exposing that through a presence list to my friends and family. And the ability to control that neither makes the function good or bad, it just is a function. It is how we use it that ultimately is deciding whether or not it is for good or ill. And so personal control and making good interfaces that are exposed in a human centric way are critical in any of these new contextual technologies actually having value. (51:17)
Walter Bastian
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Western Hemisphere
Department of Commerce
Ok, one more question
Frank
Global Speak
One of the things that we do with this connected intelligence platforms—it is the bundling of great communication devices, but applying them to real-world economics. We’re kind of prototyping those things and needless to say (I’m sure you guys are aware) government often doesn’t have money to finance or underwrite innovation. Can you talk a little about 35 years from now go out when the grid is complete across the entire globe and Broadband is no longer a consideration, chips are no longer a factor. What does economic development look like and trade look like in 30 years? (52:10)
Vinton Cerf
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist
Google
You’re asking a couple of engineers to respond to this…that’s pretty interesting…beware of the answer you get. My first thoughts are that when we get to the point where it’s 35 years from now, all the things that John mentioned (everything that’s connected to everything) when all interactions and communications are instantaneous, literally the world’s information is available at your fingertips in ways more dramatic than today with Google and the other search-engines. In fact, at this point, I think the ability to amalgamate information from many different sources will in fact be one of the most powerful economic tools available. If you look at Google Earth today, you are seeing a method of amalgamating things that are geographically related (geographically indexed). (53:06) There is another organizing principal called time. Organizing things by time, looking into the past, projecting into the future is another organizing principal. The third organizing principal that I think will be very visible 35 years from now (if not next year) is organizing around people. When the people that you know, your network of contacts, and interconnections. All three of those organizing principals will become part of the intellectual ecosystem. As a result, the information that has always been at the center of any kind of economic progress, will be even more centrally situated, and your ability to use it effectively and to use computing tools effectively will be very, very essential. (53:53) If I were Ray Kurzweil, I would tell you that 35 years from now computers will be smarter than people, they will have more brain power than human beings do. Now I don’t happen to fully buy Ray’s argument, but it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that computer complexity will exceed the complexity and capacity of the human brain. If that’s true, all bets re off. It’s very hard to predict because the computers will be able to figure things out better than the people.
John Roese
Chief Technology Officer
Nortel
(54:27) It will be very hard to come up with an answer, except I’ll tell you there are two things we can benchmark against—the two big inefficiencies that, if that happens, start to become…lets say it goes to 0. The first is that if you are fully connected, if you are fully in this hyper-connected state, if information is at your fingertips no matter where, then the productivity impact can be measured by eliminating the productivity lost associated with the need to communicate or the absence of information. So, ask yourself how often do you spend in a state where you do not have access to information or you are going through a process to get that information. If it goes to 0, then how productive could you be? (55:06) The second thing that goes to more of the. Lets call it what’s possible once all of these things are communicating, is how much does technology and the interaction with it actually degrade from your productivity. Imagine a world where the communication ecosystem technology becomes fully transparent, that you no longer notice it, that it is no longer something that you think about, that you do what you simply as a human being would like to do and to do it in the presence of an infinite set of information, infinitely and immediately accessible wherever you need it, and you focus on the core human functions like living, educating, teaching, learning. We can measure all the impediments to productivity and if you take all of the constants to 0, or all the variables to 0, that gives you an indication of what is possible—it’s a rather large number. (55:56)
Walter Bastian
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Western Hemisphere
Department of Commerce
At this point, first I will close the luncheon. I would like applause for our two speakers who were fascinating. From here will go to the breakout session. (56:16)