The internet is facing a range of threats that could imperil both the technology and the people who use it, according to the people who helped create it.
We are becoming increasingly reliant on a technology that is more fragile than we realise and we could be plunged into a “digital dark ages” that will leave us unable to access our own history, warned Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet” and recipient of the 2019 World Leader in AIWS Award.
The web is also becoming an increasingly central part of our life but that means “there are consequences when it doesn’t work as intended” or used by malicious people, he warned. As the internet becomes nearly ubiquitous, it has allowed people to use it for damaging purposes, such as ransomware, he warned.
“The consequences of [the increasing availability of the internet] are that it’s accessible to the general public, which it wasn’t in its early evolution,” he said. And the consequences of that are that some parts of the general public do not necessarily mean well, and so their access to the technologies enabling, in many ways, very constructive ways, but also in some very disruptive.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/vint-cerf-father-internet-b2582067.html