Google's Vint Cerf Warns of 'digital Dark Age'

In recent interview with Pallab Ghosh, Google's Vint Cerf warns about 'digital Dark Age'. Vint Cerf, who is a Vice-president of Google, says that he is worry about all the images and documents, which we have saved on our computers or on other devices because in future we can eventually lost them. He believes that it could occur as software and hardware become obsolete.

Vint Cerf fears that in future our generations will have very little or no record about 21st Century, if we will face digital Dark Age scenario. He made his comment at science conference in San Jose, where he arrived in a three-piece suit, for annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science. We all know that he is an iconic figure, who love to define that how data packets moves in all over internet and he is the only Google employee who love to wear tie and suit.

Now his main focus is to solve this new problem of digital Dark Age, which is threatens to eradicate our past or history. Our memories, our life, our happiness, our sorrows and cherished family photographs now exist as bits of information on our hard drives or in cloud. But change is the law of nature and so technology moves on and we can lose them while accelerating the digital revolution.

What is Digital Dark Age? 

In report, Pallab Ghosh from BBC told that “I worry as Mr. Cerf told me that in near future you and I can experience the things like this because old formats of documents, which we have created in present they may not be readable in future when latest versions will come in existence and we all know that software’s backwards compatibility is not guaranteed.

And due to that in the presence of archives of digital content, we will not be able to scratch or use it as we may not know what it is. While promoting the idea to preserve each and every piece of software, technology and hardware he said that with the help of this idea we will be able to overcome from this issue and we can store them in the form of digital or in servers over could as things happens in a museum. If this idea of Mr. Cerf, will work, so our memories could be accessible for upcoming generations.

The recommended solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the operating system, application, and content together with the detailed description of the machine, which runs on and able to preserve that for long periods such as; 100 to 200 years.

And these digital snapshots will be helpful to recreate the past in the future. There will be companies in future who will provide these services and therefore I suggested to Mr Cerf that how companies will exist for hundreds of years and because of that we cannot guarantee that both personal and human history would be safeguarded in the long run.

But Vint Cerf replied that we are trying to capture X-ray snapshot and they will be transportable from one place to another and so it will be easy to move them from Google cloud to some other cloud or move it into a machine.