What I’ve Learned: Vint Cerf

“It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play World of War­craft with your son. But you’re actu­ally inter­act­ing with each other. You’re solv­ing prob­lems. They may seem like sim­ple prob­lems, but you’re solv­ing them. You’re posed with chal­lenges that you have to over­come. You’re on a quest to gain cer­tain capa­bil­i­ties. I haven’t spent a lot of time play­ing World of War­craft, because my impres­sion is that it takes a seri­ous amount of time to play it well.

Humor is the only thing that allows you to sur­vive every pres­sure and crisis.

I find clas­si­cal music a very beau­ti­ful way to focus my thoughts.…

Peo­ple are invent­ing not only vir­tual places but new eco­nomic prin­ci­ples. We have econ­o­mists in the Sec­ond Life envi­ron­ment study­ing what peo­ple are doing, because these are real peo­ple mak­ing deci­sions. Maybe you want to have a dif­fer­ent hairdo or dif­fer­ent cloth­ing or a boob job — what­ever it is. Peo­ple will pay to enhance their avatar.

Repro­duc­ing isn’t nearly as much fun in Sec­ond Life.

At the roots, peo­ple are still peo­ple. That’s why Shake­speare is so pop­u­lar no mat­ter what the lan­guage.

The closer you look at some­thing, the more com­plex it seems to be.

Over a period of a hun­dred or a thou­sand years, the prob­a­bil­ity of main­tain­ing con­ti­nu­ity of the soft­ware to inter­pret the old stuff is prob­a­bly close to zero. Where would you find a pro­jec­tor for an 8mm film these days? If the new soft­ware can’t under­stand, we’ve lost the infor­ma­tion. I call this bit rot. It’s a seri­ous problem.

I’d like to know what the Inter­net is going to look like in 2050. Think­ing about it makes me wish I were eight years old.” [Esquire, via the Inter­est­ing Peo­ple mail­ing list]