We're the only type of organization in the world that understands

that great things can happen when no one's in charge.

>> Remember the 70s and 80s?

>> I like to use three letters to describe this period.

BTI, before the internet.

[MUSIC]

>> The world was literally a world of stovepipes of information.

All determined by what system you happened to be on, and

what system you made a phone call to, in order to use the computer.

>> Large computer companies figured out how to connect their computers together,

but these were all separate systems.

And companies like IBM, Apollo, and

Digital Equipment Corporation liked it that way.

>> They viewed these propriety networks as a competitive advantage,

because they figured, if they could just keep people all wrapped into one network,

then people would have to buy their equipment.

>> At about that time, the National Science Foundation issued a call for

proposals to upgrade the overloaded NSF net,

which connected research institutions across the country.

>> So our proposal from the University of Michigan was a proposal to build

the first large-scale Internet.

>> An internet that would be open, and not controlled by any one company, provider,

or government.

>> We heard informally through the grape vine it was likely we were going to win,

and of course, John Armstrong, who was our partner at IBM,

he was the head of IBM research at the time.

When I called him to tell him we were going to win this,

he said, well, he said, are you sure this is a win?

[LAUGH] Because of course, we knew that we faced this enormous challenge.

We were young and aggressive and optimistic.

>> And they labored for many months, sometimes around the clock,

with a growing staff and cramped quarters, racing to meet the NSF's deadlines.

And they were ready to go a month early, in July 1988.

>> We turned this network on, the network that it replaced

was built on 56 kilobit communication lines.

Think about that for a moment, 56 kilobits as the main network for

all of the science in the United States.

It was saturated, it wasn't performing well for that reason, and

it was overloaded.

The network we turned on was one and half megabits, one and

a half million bits per second, so a big step up.

Rather than thousands of computers connected the network, we were starting to

have hundreds of thousands of computers connected to the network.

And furthermore, the internet is an internet, right,

it connects a bunch of different networks together.

And so we had to cope with more and

more networks being attached to the network backbone that NSF tnet was.

We had ambitions for what it would mean for

the future of the world by the time we were a year or so into this effort.

And we didn't want to fail, because we knew if we couldn't meet the challenge,

that all the people out there who wanted to go back to the old way of

stovepipes of information, where everybody gets their own little

nickel from every time they access it, would say, I told you so.

We knew this thing wouldn't work, and we need to go back to the good old,

safe way of doing networking, none of this new NSF stuff.

Scientists don't really know how to do networking, that's telecommunication

companies, and that's computing companies that know how to do networking.

But we kept it going, and at the end, we had millions of people on the network,

and millions of computers on the network.

And people could no longer say, this won't work, because it was clear that it worked.

>> Hello, and welcome to our teach out, we're coming to you, right now,

live from the University of Michigan.

That video was of Doug Van Houweling, who is sort of my co-teacher in this.

And Doug, that was 30 years ago,

that you're talking about something 30 years ago, and so we're 30 years in.

And in this teach-out, we're gonna wanna talk about the past 30 years,

and the next 30 years.

When you started this whole thing out, sort of where were your thoughts?

>> We knew, Chuck, that this was going to be big for science and higher education.

We didn't know it was going to be big for the world, the way it's turned out to be.

>> It's almost like it was big for the world, and then it almost got bigger.

>> [LAUGH] >> Right, I mean, it's become the world,

and it's its own space.

Certainly, I was a user of your network for many years, and it was so amazing.

But the fact that it sort of becomes a world unto itself is

I think what's gonna really affect the next 30 years the most.

>> I think you're right, I think the thing that we

sort of have some way found ourselves in is a world that's transformed.

In much the same way that the airplane transformed the world, but more.

>> So one of the things that we want to do here is,

we want to involve you the viewer as much as possible.

We have a little thing here, if you are in the chat in YouTube,

we will see your comments, and we'll try to answer them live.

We've got some things to talk about, but ultimately you can

change our agenda in a moment by just appearing on the YouTube channel.

The first thing, we've been taking questions from people all along, and so

let's cue up our first question from Alex.

Talking about sort of the socioeconomic benefit of the internet.

>> Hi, my name is Alex and I'm from,

>> Okay, well,

we're experiencing some technical difficulties, let us know, see if-

>> Hi, my name is Alex Firstlaw, and

I'm from Farmington Hills, Michigan.

And my question for the teach out is, has the Internet helped or

hindered people's ability to move up the socioeconomic ladder?

Looking forward to the class tomorrow, and hearing what everyone has to say,

thanks, bye.

>> You got some good stories about that?

>> Well, I don't think there's much doubt, Chuck,

that the answer to the question is yes.

And I think of two ways in which I think it's been particularly beneficial,

the first is in the less developed world.

Where the Internet has allowed people who have formerly been

barely able to survive, subsistence farmers and so on.

Because of the Internet now, to move their product directly to the market,

without middle people, and it’s changed their lives.

The second one, of course, is the kind of thing that we're doing right now.

I mean, there are now literally millions of people across the world that

have access to universities and education they never would have before.

>> So One of the things that I noticed is the economic expansion of the 90s.

So if you go from 1900 to 2000, all the way through that time period,

it seemed like a lot of fun, and the stock market went up really great.

But the way I explain that decade to people is,

that was the decade that the Internet began to change commerce and society.

And so there was a whole lot of profit being made, but

I also think at the same time, there was a lot of negative transformation.

Where some of the middle-class jobs were being automated away, and

so have you thought about that?

Some of the effect of before the Internet and

after the Internet, and what the basic shape of the economy is?

>> Well, there's no question, what the internet did was,

it created a bunch of new companies.

But those new companies disrupted the old way of doing business.

And as a society, we are very much coping with those kinds

of side effects, there's no question about that.

I think it has opened the world up for, People who are less than 30 or

40 years old, and it's made things more difficult for people our age.

>> I love the use of the word coping there,

I just love the use of the word coping there.

Because I think some of the things that we're doing in these MOOCs and

the teaching is, in a sense,

retrofitting a population to be successful in a new world.

So it's kind of a meta thing, where the Internet kind of changed things and

moved things around and disrupted things.

But the Internet may also be the solution to those things.

>> And I think we'll talk a lot about this during our teach-out, and

I'm sure we'll get questions.

But in fact, this very rapid change in our society puts a lot of pressure on society.

And we have not yet figured out how to deal with all this change.

In fact, the technology is racing ahead faster than our ability to build

the institutions, governmental and other, that actually cope with it,

we'll talk a lot about that during the week.

>> That sounds great, let's go to our next question from our viewers,

this one we're gonna have to read.

>> Hi, my name is- >> Zabi and Brian, on the past, present,

and future of the Internet.

We'll probably have to read this one, right, is it up?

>> Yes.

>> Right there.

>> Okay, so Zabi asks, who first invented the Internet, and how?

What is the internet gonna look like in the future, is the internet and

digitization gonna be a danger or a threat?

And if those involved in the development of the internet had

realized the extent to which and the speed at which it would take off,

is it likely they would have done something differently, and if so, how?

Let's start with the differently part [LAUGH].

Would you have done anything differently, Doug?

>> So it's important to say that the role that I personally played

in the development of the Internet had to do with taking a technology that was

developed [COUGH] to support scientists and link their computers together.

And take that technology and make it available to people all over the world,

for their own purposes.

So when the Internet started, it was something the Department of Defense used

to help computer scientists connect their computers together.

There's a lot of rumors about how it was built for atomic bombs, uh-uh,

it was just a research project.

>> Practical tool.

>> Yeah, just a research project.

>> It was also to save money.

>> Yeah, right.

>> Everybody didn't have to get computers,

sharing- >> That's right,

they didn't all have to buy all these computers,

they wanted to share the computers.

But then, when the National Science Foundation needed to connect

their supercomputers together, they said, well,

if they did it that way, we can do it that way.

And they decided to use the very same networking protocols as

the Department of Defense.

Which at the time was a radical decision,

because there were a lot of other competing stuff out there that, well,

the video you saw talked about that a little bit.

But then when we got all of those people from all

of those universities on the same network,

the thing just exploded.

It was incredible, and because we need to remember, it was still for

science and for universities.

The Internet wasn't yet, in the late 80s, available to the general public.

But where do you think the knowledge engine of the world is?

It's in the higher education and research community.

And those people all just started putting all the stuff they knew on the Internet.

Before long, you wanted to know something, where'd you get it, the Internet.

>> Absolutely, so let's see- >> And so I think,

would we have designed it differently?

Well, if we had known about the security issues,

we probably would have tried to figure something out about that.

But it's a tough tradeoff, because the benefit of the Internet

is that it's open, it's available to everyone.

And the problem with security is, it tends to close things down.

And whether or not a secure Internet at the beginning would have lead to

this explosion of knowledge?

I think it's an interesting question, I'm not sure.

>> Another interesting question is identity,

right, you're a person, right?

But you might be DVH at U Miss, you might be this,

you might be crazy Doug guy the superhero on the weekends, I don't know.

But I mean, there's identities confungible on the Internet.

>> So one the things that we decided back in the early days of the Internet

is that [COUGH] we wouldn't have a big central government system.

That we would actually try to make this as distributed and simple as possible.

Well, if we had insisted that everybody walk

up to a window with a driver's license before they could use the Internet,

it wouldn't have grown the way it did.

>> Yeah, and that's the ultimate problem, is that it's always two sides of things.

Do you want freedom, or do you want sort of control?

And I think we're gonna touch a lot on those things.

Let's see, where we at, let's go to our next question from Richard Lancaster.

Okay, so this one's from the forums just a little bit ago.

So the Internet was designed and developed in largely different times.

Do the fundamental presumptions and design, for example of openness,

need review and overhaul?

Which is really kind of what we were just talking about,

right, so that's a tough one.

>> Well, and it depends on who you ask the question to, right?

So [COUGH] let's just pick two examples,

the first example is a government.

And a government is busy trying to figure out how to deal with all of

the implications of the Internet.

Ranging all the way from terrorists using it to instrument their plans,

to financial people engaged in fraud.

The government wants to have more control over the Internet, right?

They can't figure out quite how to cope with all of this openness and so on.

But let's take the other end, you're a guy or a gal, and you've got a business idea.

And what you want to do is, you want to put your business on the Internet, sort of

like Napster was in the early days, when music was first on the Internet.

>> If there was a committee- >> Like Facebook was.

So suppose you had to go to the government committee to get permission to

put your business on the internet.

>> By the way, it will be six months before we can even talk to you,

cuz there is a long line of people that wanna talk to us.

>> And then the companies that were already on the internet, the Facebooks and

the Googles,

will say to the government we don't want you to spend a lot of money on that.

What's really important is that you make things better for us.

And guess who's got more people in Washington DC talking for them?

The big companies.

>> Right. >> So, the danger of creating a structure

that has more capability of management in it,

is, yeah, it does [LAUGH].

>> Yeah, and so, I mean, let's go to Kayoko,

the next question that we have.

Leads right in, in the near future, does somebody, nation or

big company control more of the information?

Who?

>> What do you think?

>> I think it comes down to, who can you trust, right?

Who can you trust?

it is a heavy

responsibility to make decisions that are going to change society.

And while we might think a government may be able to make a decision,

it's really difficult.

And so this kinda leads in to the assign numbers folks,

the Internet assigned numbers folks.

And maybe take a little time talk about to the extent that there is a few little

places that it kinda works it's way up to in domain name systems and routing, etc.

But I think those are rather unique organizations that

kind of give us as much control as we have over the Internet.

And they're pretty much hands off to the extent that they can be.

>> So one of the values that motivated the original

invention of the Internet protocols,

was this value of simplicity, and openness.

And those values have mainly persisted until the present.

And the way the internet is governed,

is perhaps the best example of how those values.

So, on the technical side, the Internet is

governed by an organization called the Internet Taskforce.

>> The IETF. >> Yeah, the IETF, and

this is a bunch of professionals who get together in meetings on a regular basis,

and they discuss the issues that face the internet.

They come up with new protocols- >> How many people end up in these

meetings these days?

Hundreds, who are actually active,

continually active on the technical committees and so forth.

And that's how the Internet gets defined as it goes forward.

That's how the new Internet protocols,

like PV6 got defined, that's how all of this happens.

That's how it has happened since the beginning of the internet, by the way.

>> Since the Arpanet, right?

Because it goes back to the Arpanet.

>> Yeah, yeah, from the Arpanet forward.

And then the other thing is,

it's good that people don't need to understand this,

but when you type a domain name into the Internet like

google.com, like facebook.com, umis.edu,

that has to get translated into an Internet address And

there is a organization that is responsible for that.

And it's basically start off being

the Internet Address Naming Authority, IANA.

And now there's a global not-for-profit, that takes care of that.

But both of these organizations, are non-governmental, not for

profit organizations, that are multi-national.

Which means that no single nation, or

single company, winds up with dominant control over the internet.

>> So that always has seemed interesting to me that in a sense if

the US government wants some IP addresses >> Yep.

>> For a domain name, >> Yep

>> They have to ask a little tiny,

>> Nonprofit.

>> Nonprofit company.

>> Yes.

>> And if Russia wants some addresses they ask this little tiny not for

profit company.

And I mean I assume you know some of the people that work there.

>> Yeah. >> How do they make decisions?

I mean, it's a heavy weight.

>> With great difficulty, they make decisions.

Let me tell you.

>> Okay.

>> [LAUGH] There are people, of course, they're a board, and

people who, they are from all over the world.

So first of all, there are all these cultures that have to come together.

So there was a recent decision to greatly expand those last three letters.

>> Like .shop, and .online, and .learn, and

>> All that stuff and-

>> Instead of a .com, .org and a .net.

>> And that was a hard decision, it took them a couple years to figure that out.

So it's done pretty slowly, but it gets done.

And in the final analysis, no one can claim that the,

individual organization controlled it.

Because everybody had to come to a conclusion and an agreement about it.

>> So I wonder, I mean the internet is now 30 years old and

the people that worked on it were in, in there early and mid career.

What will happen in your mind when the first generation

of those internet pioneers like Vint Cerf, etc.

They're still influential.

>> Yes. >> But they're all getting older, I mean,

>> We are.

>> Have you thought about what might happen when first generation of Internet

people can't just walk into a meeting and say that's wrong.

>> Well that's already happened, that's already happened.

The really wonderful thing,

I think, about internet governance is that there is

enormous input from folks who were relatively early in their careers.

I think they tend to look at, I'll call them their elders,

for sort of philosophical guidance, but not for technical guidance any longer.

>> Well it's very complex now, right?

We think we kind of understand TCP/IP and there's a little field here and

we think we could build a router.

Let's see, a lot of chatter about monopolies and controls on the YouTube,

should we go to the monopoly question?

Yeah let's go to the monopoly question let's do that.

Now is this one I gotta read?

Yes, when I think I gotta read.

>> Right here.

>> Yeah, so this,

it actually gets to something we talked about before we started.

About, sort of like, the internet itself, and

then the applications on top of the internet.

And these are like these, telescopes,

through which we view the internet, that naturally limit it.

So, Jamie says, algorithms for ranking and reputation may not be sufficient

to sort of help us deal with the information overload.

How can a new company compete against already established companies

that have search engines?

I love Google, but it's a monopoly, and that's a problem no matter what.

>> Well, first of all let's be clear, Google is not a monopoly.

There are a number of companies that are in the search business.

>> Right.

Microsoft would probably disagree with the fact that Google is monopoly.

But if you look at market share in the search business,

Google is the dominate company.

There's no question about that.

>> Right.

>> Now I think that's an important, I think that's an important distinction.

And the reason I say it's important is because the internet is,

has been traditionally a place where people

with new ideas can bring their idea and

bring it on to the network.

And the wonderful thing about the internet, at least to the present day,

is that if you put something on the internet at point A all over the world,

and if Ensurf had it's way all over the universe.

You'd have access- >> Just a little longer than Pluto.

>> Yeah, right.

[LAUGH] You'd have access to that application.

>> Right. >> Of course, that's what allowed things

like Facebook and so on, to just sort of explode.

>> Well I think that's what people don't always realize,

is that the internet is not sort of a piece of paper that you are reading,

it's really cooperating applications, right?

>> Exactly. >> There's like a Facebook thing on your

phone and then there's a Facebook thing on a server somewhere, and they're talking.

>> Right, so the thing that has happened here is when we started the internet,

what we called the internet was just those communication lines that moved all

this data.

>> Right. >> And the software called TCP/IP.

>> And it was amazing by the way.

>> That managed all that, and it was the wonderful thing about that software was,

it was designed from the beginning to be scalable.

So every time you added a new computer to the internet, the internet got

more ability to do its business because the computer

actually contributed its computing power to the computing power of the internet.

>> It's a network good, which means if the N, the benefit of N is N squared, right?

It grows.

>> It's incredible, but that was the network.

And then people discovered, if I put my service on the internet over here,

then everybody all over the world is going to get access to it.

>> Right.

>> That's the question.

Is it still true that if you put your application on the Internet,

everyone all over the world is gonna get access to that application?

>> Well, it's certainly not automatically and 100% true anymore.

>> Now there are some good things.

So it used to be that if you're gonna put your application on the Internet you

had to build a computing forum to support it.

>> Yes.

>> Not anymore.

>> No. >> You just go to the cloud and

get a bunch of computing services.

>> $5 a month.

>> Yeah, whatever it takes.

>> $5 a month, and you're on most of the internet.

>> And of course, if you're enormously popular,

then you just get more and more and more.

>> Right.

>> But that brings up the question of how do you pay for that?

And that's where an interesting question is.

And that's what I think ultimately we need to spend some time talking about.

>> So we have a user question that's really on topic about.

Let's go to the Pasquale question under marketing because I,

that like dig us right into- >> Exactly.

>> I think one of the hardest problems.

>> Hello everyone, my name is Pasquale Salamone and

I would like to share the following question with you.

Have you ever worried that the internet might be changing for the worst?

Why and what concerns you?

Well, I noticed that marketing efforts are becoming more and

more frequent on the internet, specifically on social media.

Therefore, I wonder if the internet of the future requires

users to pay a fee to have browsing experience with no commercials.

>> Well, I don't know.

Chuck, you and I we're talking about this a little bit earlier today.

You know, we've became accustomed to

these Internet services becoming free.

>> Right. >> Because sitting off the side or

across the top, are all these commercials.

>> Jumping up in front of you from time to time.

>> Yeah, more often than I'd like for sure.

>> Yeah.

>> Well would you rather have it that way or

would you rather pay five dollars a month or a dollar a month?

Would you rather have the internet be like magazine subscriptions used to be or

would you rather have the ads?

What would you like?

>> Well I'll tell you what,

this question that we just saw, it made me think about it in a different way.

So I've been watching YouTube and

it keeps saying, do you wanna pay for an ad-free experience.

And I'm like, you selfish, whatever, right?

I mean, why would I do that?

I'll just skip them.

And the problem is, is that if we force these

companies to make money by selling us ads then we're forcing

them to build software that is tuned to maximizing our viewing of these ads.

So they can't build software that makes me maximally happy, right?

I mean I might want this software to do x, y, z, a, b, and c but it's not in their

best interest because I have forced them, by not giving them money,

I have forced them to build an advertising-based software.

I hadn't thought of it that way until like super recently.

>> Until we got that question, yeah.

[CROSSTALK] >> Til super recently.

And so now I'm beginning to think that I should immediately pay YouTube $5 a month,

and literally everybody should do it.

And I'm not, we're not advertising for YouTube here but-

>> Or Google, or Facebook, or

whoever it is, right?

>> Right, that in sense that if I'm paying the money,

then at least maybe my desires matter, right?

>> And you know there are examples where this works, involuntarily,

think about Wikipedia.

>> Well yeah.

>> Okay, I mean we, well I don't know I can't speak for you, but

I contribute money to Wikipedia every year.

>> I do, I do.

>> Because- [CROSSTALK] >> Right before January 31st,

December 31st I do.

>> Because I sort of think, what have I gained from this-

>> We've all gained a lot.

>> [CROSSTALK] Remarkable resource this year?

>> As teachers especially. >> And

I say it's worth a lot more to me than my contribution.

But you know those contributions means that this open knowledge

resource is still there.

They don't sell ads.

>> Yeah and [COUGH] that's really difficult, and

the thing that I read the other day that really

kind of stuck out at me was that our newspapers.

>> Yeah >> They depend on Google and

Facebook for all their revenue, right?

So what's stopping Google or

Facebook from sort of not showing you everything that you wanna see or whatever?

And I'm thinking now, I've gotta go pay for these newspapers too.

Because if I don't,

then their money comes from a source that will eventually control them.

So we got any good questions?

>> I was just looking at the questions here, to see what's coming in.

How would you assess the depth-of-distance thesis today,

in the light of proliferation of videoconferencing,

collaborative software programs, and cloud computing?

What do you think about that?

>> Well I certainly think that, the key thing I think is

somewhat unquestioned is that the difference

between 10 miles and a thousand miles isnt all that great anymore.

Right, and so if you're not in the same room or even a mile away and

you're going to use some kind of remote technology to interact, you can as easily

interact with someone in China or Japan or somewhere like that as across the hall.

Now, whether or not you're in the same room,

I think there's tremendous value in being in the same room.

But the death of distance as cost is,

I think, a wonderful thing.

And I think it is certainly a side effect of the Internet.

>> So I remember when the Internet, first of all,

sort of got just barely to the level

where you could actually dependably do a voice call over the Internet.

And then, a few years later, where you could start to depend on being able to do

a video call over the Internet, a lot of people said, you know what's gonna happen?

People are gonna stop traveling.

They're just gonna use the Internet to get together.

Well- >> Not true.

>> Not true, hasn't happened.

>> Travel's gone up.

>> Yeah. >> It's become less expensive and gone up.

>> And then I sort of thought about the history of communications.

When we got telephones, telegraph didn't go away for a long, long time.

And [COUGH] now that we've got videoconferencing, telephone,

we talk to each other on our phones all the time.

It hasn't gone away.

What happens, I think, and I don't have good data to back this up,

is that, if you give people more ways to connect with one another, they do.

And once they've done that, then they use every other means of communication,

including travel, to do their business together or to live their lives together.

So I think what's happened here is the world has gotten enormously smaller.

>> Right, and that's kinda the death of distance.

And also, the death of distance is not just that you can make a phone call or

video call to someone from Japan.

It means that you're going to want to get together with the person from Japan.

Maybe not every day, but once a year or once in a while, you feel this need to be

close to these people who are your really large circle of colleagues and friends.

>> I mean, you have students all over the world, Chuck.

>> Right.

>> And I know that you travel to places to get together with them.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> How many places have you been?

>> 60 places, 60 places.

>> Yeah, see what I mean?

>> Well, what I tell people about that is, I say,

[LAUGH] It's funny, because the idea is that,

when I'm teaching, I get lonely as the teacher.

>> [LAUGH] >> Right, I'm alone.

>> Cuz they're not right there in front of you.

>> Right, I'm in a room just like this, and there's cameras.

And the students are listening on the far end.

And we're having a good time.

But then I miss that other side of that conversation.

And so I get in the plane.

And I invite them to come to office hours.

And we sit around, and we never talk about Python or TCP/IP or anything like that.

We just talk about life, and we get together.

And so that is kind of a death of distance.

But it's also sort of a great increase in the desire to be with people from farther

away, I think is what you're saying.

>> Well, and from my perspective,

this has opened up our world in a rather dramatic way.

Let's see what else we have here.

>> So this one here, about the retailers losing jobs, I think that's a good one.

I get it from Kevin.

I sense we do not know where the Internet's heading and

has massive positive impact, which we've talked about already.

But I can see a lot of retailers losing jobs,

caused by a huge change in many industries.

And is the TV and audio streaming gonna dominate bandwidth and

slow everything else?

There's really kinda two questions there.

>> Yeah, there are. >> What is the-

>> But let's talk about that first one.

>> The retailer, let's talk about the retail part.

>> So [COUGH], The interesting

question to me is, how, in the long run,

are we going to strike a balance between what we were just talking about,

wanting to be with the people and with the things that we're making decisions about,

versus sitting in the comfort of our homes and making those same decisions?

>> Right.

>> And what we've learned so far is,

it's sorta hard to sell food and clothes- >> [LAUGH]

>> Unless you're there with them.

Now, there's a lot of effort to make that go away.

But at least so far, that's been true, right?

But of course, then you look at other things like

buying a computer or a TV set and so on.

You look at the specifications.

You decide what you want. You don't really feel that much need to go

to a store to get it.

>> I always go to the store because it might be cracked.

>> Okay. >> And I don't wanna return it, right,

I mean- >> That's interesting, that's interesting.

>> All my televisions, I buy in person.

>> In person, so have you ever bought a television online?

>> I haven't.

Have you? >> So, yeah,

I've probably bought- >> A big one?

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Were they cracked? >> No!

>> [LAUGH] >> They figured it out, buddy.

[LAUGH] >> Okay, I guess.

>> Chuck, they figured it out.

>> I guess if they all came back cracked- >> [LAUGH] With as much as they've got at

stake, they figured out how to deliver those things.

>> So one of the things that, so obviously,

there's all kind of transitions.

And when Walmart shows up in a town, right,

the retailers- >> [SOUND]

>> And so

it's not like just online has done this.

Do you think that there is some sort of counter effect of the sort of

loss of low and mid-scale jobs, with the fact that everybody can have more stuff?

Cuz it's cheaper to deliver.

It's cheaper to manufacture.

And things like shipping, that whole distance has gone away.

Shipping from China to United States is not a big deal anymore.

Do you think there's sort of a positive,

at least from a people can have things that, I mean.

How many large TVs do people have in their house now, that had little, tiny TVs?

>> Or none. >> Isn't that a benefit somehow?

And the Internet, I think, had to do with that.

>> Maybe, maybe.

>> Okay.

>> Maybe. So it's a dislocation.

And some people are benefiting enormously from it.

And other people are finding it difficult to realize the way they'd like to live.

And I think one of the problems as a society that we've now got is,

the Internet and the other technologies that go along with it are just pushing

things forward so fast.

>> Coping.

>> And this- >> After coping.

>> This coping thing is a big problem.

And I don't think governments have yet figured out how they can react to that.

I mean, one way to do it, the way that's easiest for our government,

is to sorta try to slow things down, right?

>> Put a tax on those things.

>> Yeah, put taxes on things and just, in general,

make it harder to do things, regulations and taxes and so on.

Some of those are needed, of course.

But I don't think that's going to be an adequate answer as we go forward

in the future.

I think we're gonna have to understand that

these new technologies are going to affect different people differentially.

And we're gonna have to put in programs to actually equalize some of those problems.

I'll pick a non-Internet example which is currently a big controversy.

And that's coal and coal mining.

So we've got a bunch of people who mine coal,

who are no longer making a living like they were used to.

Coal mining is probably not the best thing for the world.

So how do you make those things come together?

And governments somehow have to figure that out.

And I don't think our governments are moving rapidly enough.

I think what they're trying to do is say, that's not really happening.

Let's just ignore it.

>> So here, I have a different theory on the coal thing.

>> And that is My theory is, teach all coal miners Python.

>> [LAUGH] >> So they can all learn Python and

they can become data scientists and

they can have really good jobs and their lungs are in better shapes, right?

And they sit in their beautiful little idyllic towns and they type Python in.

>> And that means that we've to get Internet in to all those rural towns.

>> Correct, that's, that indeed.

>> Yes we do.

>> But then there's a problem.

>> Yes, sir.

>> What happens when everybody knows Python and

now there's a GLUT of Python programmers?

I don't have an answer for this.

>> So the point that I made originally is the same point I'm making to answer your

question.

This technology change is gonna continue to rush forward.

>> Right. >> And what is today's coal miner is

tomorrow's Python programmer and what comes after that is unknown.

And somehow, we as a society have to understand

>> I feel better now!

>> How to move better through those transitions.

>> So at some point just because maybe learning Python doesn't solve all

humanities problems doesn't mean that we shouldn't try now.

Because it's a good thing for now, and it's a good progress to make.

>> No, we have to take each step, yeah.

>> And then we will realize, you can't learn Python when you're 9 years old and

then be 70 years old.

And have worked Python your whole life, because things will have changed.

>> Well, and so this takes us back to the original subject, right?

We could have decided, well, this Internet thing,

it would be better to have each manufacturer with their own network.

It's simpler,

doesn't challenge society so much there won't be such big problems in the future.

So we could have decided and we almost didn't decide.

>> Yeah, like if we all had DECnet we would have no social impact whatsoever of

the network if we had just used DECnet in the very beginning.

>> Yeah, that's right, we almost didn't decide that we would go with ISO which

was a regulated top down networking system that was being developed in competition.

>> Some of the high energy physics people wanted DECnet.

They thought that was way better.

>> Yeah, but the point is we could have done that and

then we wouldn't have Internet today.

So one of the interesting questions for

all of you who are involved today, is would you have chosen that world?

A world that was without the Internet?

I don't know,

we're gonna be interested in hearing what you think about that going forward.

>> So, let me ask you one last question and then we wrap up And

it comes from YouTube and it's been on here for a while.

In your mind why did we make ARPANET and the Internet?

Why did the people who made it, who paid for

it in the first place not you and me that were kind of later consumers of it.

But what's your explanation as to why in 1963 or 1965 or

whenever it was that little germ in someones mind said, let us make this?

>> There are two answers to that question.

The first answer is the person who the people who actually built it and

the second one is the people who paid for it.

>> Let us hear them both.

>> Okay, so the people who build it, it's like Everest because they could.

>> Yeah.

>> I mean they had this vision in their minds, Nick Lyder had this

vision in his mind of society that would be tied together with networks and

information resources.

And that's, and it was that vision and the computer scientists who

were a part of that vision, that's why it was built by those guys.

Now, the federal government,

the Department of Defense looked at that stuff and said.

It would be kind of neat if we could have an organization that

was built on knowledge that was available everywhere so we will pay for it.

>> It's great that you started with Licklider and the vision, right?

>> Yeah. >> The vision is a social change.

>> Yeah, it's absolutely a social change.

And it's all about knowledge, available across the whole world,

assisted by information technology.

>> And the end of distance.

>> Yes.

>> And reducing the effect of distance.

>> Exactly. >> Can we bring our last slide up?

If we bring our slide up cuz we're at 1:45,

that's how long we were scheduled to go.

Let's bring our last slide up and

talk about what we want folks to do coming up next.

Haven't seen it yet Well, I know, here comes our

>> [CROSSTALK].

>> Here it comes. >> Yes, here we go.

Okay, so, this is the first of four sessions.

They're live, we have no idea what's gonna happen.

>> [LAUGH] >> We'll have technical difficulties, and

people will get nervous and scurry around, and we'll fix things, and

sometimes we have to do it more than one time.

We have a session Wednesday and Friday, at 1 o'clock, Eastern time.

We are recording all of these and

we are going to put them up in Coursera with subtitles, etc.

And Wednesday at 1 o'clock, Friday at 1 o'clock.

Then we're gonna kinda chill a little bit.

And we're all gonna come back at Thursday, a week from Thursday.

And what we want you to do is we want you to listen to what we have to say,

change the direction.

Get us to go in some other way we've got a forum You can post a video,

you can give us audio.

You heard some people talk on audio and you saw some YouTube videos.

We want you to be part of the show.

Doug, do you have any sort of closing thoughts?

>> I've loved all the questions we've gotten here and I'm sorry we haven't

been able to get to all of them but believe me, we've got them all recorded.

We're gonna look them over and we'll try to get back to more of this on Wednesday.

Don't hesitate to tell us if you think we've missed something really important.

Or if you really disagree with us about something,

because that's what we want to know.

>> Okay. >> Thanks.

>> Cheers, see you in two days.

Live Session 1 Recording: Monday, October 30th

The Internet and You

Meet the Instructors