Vinton G. Cerf

Photographer: Robert Severi

Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy, MCI

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The Internet. My prediction in 1977 that 32 bits of Internet address space would be sufficient was pretty stupid. We're now talking about IPv6 [Internet Protocol version 6], which uses 128 bits of address space—that's 10 to the 38th addresses. That should be enough till after I'm dead, and then it's somebody else's problem.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The rate at which people are contributing information to the World Wide Web.

"Nanotech will affect almost any arena, because with it you can construct new kinds of materials. The effect of our ability to manipulate atoms—for example, the use of DNA devices to assemble various kinds of structures for all kinds of purposes—is going to be dramatic.

"The other thing to watch is neuroelectronics: the ability to interface technology with our neural system. My wife, Sigrid, has had a cochlear implant since 1996. This once profoundly deaf person now uses the phone, recognizes accents, and listens to movies and recorded books. I also see the possibility of augmenting ordinary human senses. Imagine an optical implant that's sensitive to a broader range of light and that could be tuned to different wavelengths. I've been thinking about reprogramming Sigrid's speech processor so that it can take in VOIP [voice over IP], which would come in as electronic signals transduced into neural signals, bypassing the audio component entirely.

"I'm excited about the potential of quantum computing as well. We know that a small bit of brain tissue does a lot of processing in parallel, and it doesn't need transistors. But sometimes you don't need to emulate nature: planes don't flap their wings, though the shape is taken from nature."