My last question for Vint Cerf was about the future. What does a guy who helped create the internet think the net, and the society built around it, might look like in 20 or 50 years from now?

"That's really hard," said Cerf. "20 years ago there was just the bare beginnings of commercial access to the Internet. The World Wide Web was sitting in Tim Berners-Lee's head, maybe there was a little bit of code, but it was not broadly distributed." With that caveat out of the way, he plunged in:

Looking ahead, we can say several things. There will be substantially more connectivity available. No matter where you are, you will have access to this online facility. That turns out to be very important, because the cloud computing notion has utility only if you can get access to it whenever you need it, in the capacity that you need it. I see a lot of utility in cloud computing and I anticipate that it will be increasingly available.

Another change I'm pretty sure will happen over the course of the next 20 to 50 years is the way we interact these online systems, or even with local ones. Today it's keyboards and mice, but I expect interactions, conversational interactions, gestural interactions to be normal.

I may be personally instrumented in some ways, so that my locale is known, or at least my devices know where I am -- that way my questions can be related to this information, something like, where is the nearest restaurant?

I expect to see much more interesting interactions, including the possibility of haptic interactions - touch. Not just touch screens, but the ability to remotely interact with things. Little robots, for example, that are instantiations of you, and are remotely operated, giving you what is called telepresence. It's a step well beyond the kind of video telepresence we are accustomed to seeing today.

This image of little robots is different from the typical autonomous robot you see in the AI world. They could be sitting in a conference room, representing me -- not autonomously, but allowing me to be in more than one place at the same time. They can move around, interact with things, talk to people, see like everyone else can.