Google's Deputy Warns: A Lost History Awaits Humanity

The Deputy President of Google has warned that a vast amount of digital content—from blogs to tweets, photos, and official documents like court rulings and emails—may be lost forever as the necessary programs to view them will disappear. According to The Guardian, Vint Cerf warned that humanity faces the danger of a 'forgotten generation or even a forgotten century' in a future where files related to old computers will become 'useless waste.' Cerf suggested that to prevent such a fate, humanity must create a 'digital treasure trove' as soon as possible, where old software and hardware can be recycled regardless of their production time. Cerf stated, 'When you think about the documentation of our daily lives, which is constantly being created digitally in the form of emails, tweets, and various internet-generated content, you will realize how much of our history we will lose.' He emphasized, 'We do not want our digital lives to gradually fade away. If we want to preserve it, we must ensure that the digital products we create today will have the capacity to be retrieved in the distant future.' The warning from this cyber expert highlights a strange irony in our behavior, where we have digitized music, photos, letters, and other documents in hopes of preserving them for a long life, yet this very characteristic has become their Achilles' heel in transitioning from today to their future. Meanwhile, while researchers strive to archive digital files for years and centuries, the programs and hardware needed to review these files are increasingly becoming inaccessible. According to Vint Cerf, 'We continue to indifferently turn all our data into something that could itself be the beginning of an information dark age. We convert everything we think should be preserved into digital format, and in the process, we fail to realize that merely converting files is not enough; we must take further steps.' Cerf also recommended, 'If you have photos that are very important to you, print them out.' This is the first time humanity faces the problem of suddenly losing its achievements and history. Humans have long recorded their stories, including in ancient civilizations, using cuneiform on clay tablets or leaving their chronicles on papyrus for future generations. Thus, researchers centuries later could study them using only their 'eyes.' However, the story has changed; in a distant future, if someone wants to learn more about our culture today, they will encounter a pile of 'PDFs,' 'Word documents,' and hundreds of different formats that can only be reviewed through access to specific software. The Deputy Director of Google explained the danger facing humanity by recounting that in 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln and how Lincoln had hired those who ran against him in presidential elections. To prove this theory, Goodwin traveled across America, finding one by one the paper letters of the people involved in this matter: 'In today's world, these letters are written in the form of emails, and the possibility of retrieving them after 100 years is gradually decreasing.' Nevertheless, creating software capable of reading old files is only half the battle. The difficult part is obtaining the necessary legal permissions to copy and maintain software before their 'death' arrives. When computer and software companies shut down or stop supporting a specific product, they will likely consider selling the rights to their old products. According to Vint Cerf, it may be necessary to change copyright and patent laws as needed for the future—a future where the flourishing internet era will be considered 'the past': 'It's about preserving this heritage for hundreds to thousands of years.'