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“Forty years ago we wrote the script of the internet. Thirty years ago we turned it on,” says Cerf. “We thought we were building a system to connect computers together. But we quickly learned that it’s a system for connecting people.”
“You know where this is going,” Cerf continues, to a laugh, bringing it back to research in communicating with animals.
”What’s important about what these people are doing: They’re beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us, but share a sensory environment. [They’re figuring out] what it means to communicate with something that’s not a person. I can’t wait to see these experiments unfold.”
So what’s next? The internet of things, yes, and the ability for us to communicate with computers without keyboards and mice. And in addition to the internet of species, he even imagines an interplanetary internet.
“These interactions with other animals will teach us, ultimately, how we might interact with an alien from another world,” says Cerf. “I can hardly wait.”
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