Transcript of the "Stories of Impact" podcast episode

The Digital Age & Human Flourishing with Vint Cerf

Tavia Gilbert: Welcome to Stories of Impact. I’m writer/producer Tavia Gilbert, and every first and third Tuesday, journalist Richard Sergay and I bring you conversations about the art and science of human flourishing. This week we’re bringing you a conversation with Vint Cerf, a man globally recognized as one of the “fathers of the Internet.” In recognition for his extraordinary contributions to the creation of Internet technology, Cerf has been awarded a U.S. National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And, drawing on his own experience with being hearing impaired, he’s also known as a leading advocate for technology to be made accessible to people with a variety of abilities. In fact, Cerf’s consideration of how humans can use digital technology to flourish is a natural extension of his lifetime of work as an engineer.

Vint Cerf: From the standpoint of science and technology and engineering, the important thing about flourishing is doing something that’s practical and useful. In the science world, there’s a step beyond that, and that’s understanding. Discovery. Curiosity-driven research, where you may not have a pragmatic purpose, but you just want to know: how does it work? So the science and technology and engineering are partners in a kind of flourishing. It is the sense that I’m doing things that are productive and useful. Evidence of that is always helpful if you’re an engineer like I am, if you can invent something or build it, it’s very satisfying if someone else is actually using it to their advantage. And so for me, the sense that what I am doing is helping other people, is a way of measuring flourishing. Part of human flourishing must be fulfilling your capabilities, from putting to work that capacity which you’ve been born with and have nurtured, the satisfying sense of contribution, that’s all about flourishing.

Tavia Gilbert: As one of the designers of the architecture of the Internet, Cerf’s work has touched the lives of billions of people. But even with that larger than life impact, his point of view about how to create positive change in the world is rooted in one-on-one service.

Vint Cerf: It doesn’t necessarily have to be at scale. Helping one other person can be very satisfying, knowing that you’ve made someone else’s life a little bit better because of something you knew or something that you were able to do. Knowing what you’re doing is somehow productive and useful, and satisfying, is a part of flourishing. But if you think of the community as the collection of individuals, if they are flourishing, it must be because they are working together, they are truly a community where everyone has a role to play and everyone’s contributions make the community better. And you could argue the same from the standpoint of a global perspective, where the entire population — somehow, each individual in that entire population — feels like they know their place in this complex system, and feel as if their place is positive and contributive. Now, not everybody has the same opportunity to achieve that objective, but even in the poorest part of the world, there’s still acts that people can do, or undertake, that are evidence of utility and productivity and care. How many times have you heard stories from someone visiting some of the poorest parts of the world, where the family shared what little they had because they were willing to do that, and wanted to do that even though it wasn’t very much. And so the spirit in which that sharing happens is surely an element of flourishing. I think perhaps one of the most important virtues is a willingness to commit to doing things that are positive and constructive. The idea that you care about other people, not just immediate family members, but 2 others who are part of your local community, neighborhood, household, country and state and so on — this sense of belonging must be a part of flourishing. If you don’t feel like you belong, it’s hard to feel as if you are flourishing.

Tavia Gilbert: Beyond lacking a sense of belonging in community, there are additional barriers to flourishing that Cerf recognizes.

Vint Cerf: Probably the most significant challenge has to do with that which interferes with well-being. And you can think of some concrete things that contribute to well-being, whether it’s a roof over your head, clothing, food and water, and sanitation and so on, all of the things we think of as human rights. In their absence, it’s hard for things to flourish. Then we need to go beyond that now, and that is the ability to learn and to become more capable of doing things. It’s hard to flourish if you don’t have a good education and don’t know how to learn, don’t know how to learn new things, don’t want to learn new things. Because a world that keeps changing requires us to keep learning. Anything that interferes with your ability to learn has got to interfere with your sense of well-being. The same argument could be made just generally about income levels, being able to support a family and yourself because of the work that you do is a really important aspect of flourishing. If you don’t feel as if you’re in a position to be capable of supporting yourself and a family, then surely your sense of well-being will be eroded. And I would point out, by the way, that for people with disabilities, this is a big challenge, because often it is assumed that they’re not capable of flourishing in the sense of being productive and being capable of supporting themselves, and that’s a bad assumption on the whole. And so that’s an area where generally speaking our society could do a lot better than it has historically. I’m hearing impaired and wear hearing aids, and by good fortune that has taken care of my hearing problems so I can function comfortably in a world of sound. But for many people with disabilities, employers often make the assumption, well, so-and-so 3 is disabled, they can’t do X or Y or Z. In some sense, that’s deciding for a person what they can and can’t do, when that decision should be the responsibility of the person with the disability, who has learned how to overcome it, how to accommodate it. So I think our societies generally don’t give credit to people for what they’re capable of doing, with or without some accommodation. And that’s a space where we all need to improve.

Tavia Gilbert: Though Cerf points to the power of the Internet to remove barriers to communication and to facilitate connection, community, and accommodation, he recognizes that the very technology he co-created has as much potential to harm humans as it does to benefit them.

Vint Cerf: I would argue that the opportunity to harness computer power and to effect collaboration among people is extremely powerful and has already demonstrated an enormous potential. Modeling, analytical tools that help us understand the dynamics of complex systems, to say nothing of things like machine learning and artificial intelligence — all of these have turned out to be incredibly powerful tools, solving problems that we could not solve before, often in time frames that are measurable in seconds or less. So I see the technologies of the Internet and computing as being enormously productive. It’s just that we have to learn how to use them in a way that limits the abusive potential of these kinds of powerful tools.

Tavia Gilbert: And again, Cerf identifies education as the key to how we can successfully navigate a constantly changing digital world and limit its potential harms.

Vint Cerf: I am a big fan of course of the idea that the Internet is an empowering tool. It lets us do things that we could not do on our own. Whenever you do a Google search, just by way of example, you are engaging a huge amount of computing power to go look through the entire World Wide Web to find the thing that you’re looking for. So the technology is just tremendously enabling. 4 However, it also enables people to do harmful things, which is the flip side of this whole story. And so, of late for example, we’re seeing the rapid propagation of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, various and sundry kinds of cyber-attacks, phishing and fraud and all kinds of bad things happen in the online environment. There are some technical things we can do to try to minimize or at least reduce those risks, but it also requires a certain amount of what/where functioning. Just like you teach kids to look both ways before you cross the street, you need to teach people how to be safe in the online environment. So you have to understand something about the technology and understand how it works, understand what tools are available to you to defend yourself against potential hazards. So that is what we might call digital literacy. And we should be teaching people early on how to accomplish and achieve that. We should also be teaching people how to think critically about what they see and hear. And we should apply that to virtually everything that we see and hear. It takes work to do that, but it produces a better outcome than simply running down some conspiracy theory and following the crowd.

Tavia Gilbert: Cerf never anticipated that such a practical tool as Internet communication would someday become weaponized, moving it far from its promise to help humans flourish and toward destructive ends.

Vint Cerf: There can’t be much doubt that the invention of the Internet, on top of which was added the World Wide Web, has produced an information universe, which renders information more accessible now than it ever has been in human history. Of course, the problem here is that everyone can contribute, which is wonderful, the trouble is that not everyone’s information quality is equal. And in fact, some people are deliberately contributing, polluting information if you like. So now we have the problem of distinguishing good quality from bad quality information. Hopefully the tools that allow us to discover information will also allow us to filter that information, in order to discover that which is useful and beneficial as opposed to discovering misinformation that will literally mislead us. So the Internet deserves some visibility there, but it’s its application — that’s the important 5 question: How do I use it in order to achieve benefit? There were hints of the social utility of the Internet, mostly coming in the 1970’s with distribution lists and email. We could see the kind of social engagement that distribution lists offered. But with the arrival of social media and the feedback loops that the social media generated, the rewards system that was invented by these companies, led to more extreme behavior in my opinion. So for example, how many likes do I get for saying something? Well, the more extreme things that you say, the more people you may attract, because extremism tends to attract attention. So we need to learn a lot more about the dynamics of social networking, we need to learn from psychologists and anthropologists, sociologists, and maybe even neurologists. And I don’t think the companies that make these products have as deep a knowledge and understanding about how they affect human behavior, and that’s an area which deserves more attention.

Tavia Gilbert: Does Cerf remain hopeful that humans have the potential to become wiser stewards of digital technology?

Vint Cerf: I do remain optimistic, although from time to time I do worry that we may blow ourselves off the planet before we have figured out how to be a constructive and flourishing society.

Tavia Gilbert: Despite the trend toward harmful manipulation of digital technology, Cerf still believes that we can create a culture that maximizes its positive aspects and minimizes its negative impacts.

Vint Cerf: I believe humans are teachable. Some of this is survival psychology. When we are confronted with an existential problem, theoretically we pay attention. I must admit to you that we have not paid attention to global warming and side effects of all that, we need to do something about that. Our solution to the potential of nuclear war was mutually assured destruction, which is surely one of the most cockamamie ideas imaginable, as opposed to simply getting rid of nuclear weapons entirely. But getting there is hard, all of these kinds of things have a politics of their own, and figuring out how to create incentives to get the right 6 outcomes, is of course exactly the kind of creative challenge that statesmen and other leaders have to exhibit. So, I’m still very positive that all of the technology that we keep developing has a potential and positive role to play, even though we’re going to have to do everything we can to keep those same technologies from being used in ways that are harmful. Machine learning has turned out to be a really powerful, but sometimes brittle, tool. So it’s important to understand that it doesn’t always work. It’s very good at discovering correlations, but it also learns bias if it doesn’t have adequate training materials. So we should be very careful about that. Also sometimes, it’s a little hard to explain why did it do X, for some value of X. Nonetheless, it’s turned out to be an incredibly powerful tool for achieving certain kinds of things like language translation and self-driving cars. And the recent development of vaccines, for example, against the COVID-19 pandemic is partly attributable to science and technology that’s been developed over the last 20 years, including things like gene editing and genetic sequencing. All of those things have been strikingly powerful and effective. So, in looking towards the future, I see an increasing number of such computational tools coming along that will allow us to achieve in real time what we could not do in decades or centuries. So I see this tremendous possibility of using computational power to solve hard problems in the future.

Tavia Gilbert: What kind of constructive outcomes does Cerf hope will result from that computational power?

Vint Cerf: The Green Revolution in the 20th century that produced enormous amounts of more food productivity than had been available in the past, surely ranks as one of the most important results of the 20th century. And so now we have the next 21st century challenge was to figure out how to use precision agriculture and different techniques, possibly even gene modification, in order to achieve the same kind of objective that we achieved in the 20th century, using fertilizers and some cross-breeding in order to increase crop yield. 7 The same argument could be made for medicine, where we start talking about a digital twin of the human being, how can we model you sufficiently in detail so that when it comes to diagnose a disease or to specify a treatment, we can specialize it for you and your physiology.

Tavia Gilbert: Though such technological breakthroughs are awesome to contemplate, what non-digital tools can we use to problem-solve? Cerf says that potential is about communication — both speaking and listening — and about humility.

Vint Cerf: Salesmanship and articulation, the ability to explain what it is you want to do, not necessarily exactly how to do it, but what outcome is desired, that’s a really powerful and important skill to learn, something which I repeatedly discovered over the years. The other thing is not to be afraid to hire or turn to people who are smarter than you are, because there’s leverage in that. And so I’ve had many colleagues who are a lot smarter than I am, and I’ve benefited tremendously from all of their creativity and their help and their energy. So, from the technical point of view, getting the opportunity to take an idea and push it to the point where it’s executable, so to speak, and implementable—it works only if you’ve figured out how to get help. I think probably the most important thing is to recognize that all humans have value and add value to our society. And we need to start on the assumption of good intent. If we start out on the presumption that people have good intent, we can begin a path towards flourishing writ large. And we just have to be prepared for the possibility that someone will demonstrate that they don’t have good intent, and at that point you have to put them in the category of avoid at all, (laughs) at all costs. But I would not want to put people into that category from the get-go, and unfortunately we see the kind of tribalism, if I could use that word, or polarization that assumes bad intent on any kind of interaction at all. And that’s a sad observation about current society. Communication is essential for a society to flourish. And listening is the other half of speaking. If you can’t listen, if you’re too busy trying to figure out what you’re going to say next, then you don’t have conversation. And in the absence of conversation, you don’t really have any ability to come to common ground. 8 And so my view is that listening is an essential part, possibly the most essential part, of achieving safe and flourishing societies, that we must learn to listen to each other, even if we don’t agree with a particular point of view. Until you’ve listened, you may not be able to properly analyze and respond to a point of view with which you don’t agree. And so here we are, we must learn to listen to each other.

Tavia Gilbert: We’ll be back in two weeks for a conversation with another leader whose focus is on human flourishing, when we hear from Angela Duckworth, UPenn professor of psychology and founder and CEO of Character Lab. Here’s a preview:

Angela Duckworth: We ought not romanticize adversity. We ought not say: “Poverty is great. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all felt marginalized and left out of conversations?” But adversity of all kinds is part of life. And if we don’t have an attitude toward adversity that says, there’s something that I will learn from this experience, even if I don’t wish it upon myself or others, I know that it’s part of life to have things happen that I don’t want to happen. ... I think a full life says, you take your good days and bad days and you try to make something honorable out of both of those.

Tavia Gilbert: If you appreciate the Stories of Impact podcast, please follow the podcast, and rate and review us. We are on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and at storiesofimpact.org. This has been the Stories of Impact Podcast, with Richard Sergay and Tavia Gilbert. Written and produced by Talkbox Productions and Tavia Gilbert, with associate producer Katie Flood. Music by Aleksander Filipiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer Michele Cobb. The Stories of Impact Podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation. 9