INTERVIEW XI PART II “Remember to Breathe”

vint cerf

VP, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google

Co-Designer of TCP/IP Protocols

Technology Policy Developer 

Third Chapter Curious, Vol. 11, PT. 3

[Recorded February 4, 2025, via Google Meet]

“The most precious thing I have to give is my time.“ - Silvia Hartmann

CONTINUED FROM PART II]

INTERVIEWER:

”This has been a great example of what we want to capture in our interviews; curiosity about the world and how things work, how that is encapsulated in the indomitable human spirit. I’ve learned so much from each person I speak with, and it's been an honor to have this time with you today.”

VINT:

“You should look into one of Google’s recently developed tools, NotebookLM. The AI generative application takes written text and produces a dialogue using the content material. This output intends to express the content in the form of a dialogue.

It is astonishing how realistic and believable the exchange is. They can replicate human traits like interrupting each other, for example, and it's uncanny, as is a lot of the generative AI, until it all goes wrong, and then it gets weird. We have plenty of experience with the so-called hallucinations of generative AI. Artificial Intelligence is one such curiosity of mine.”

INTERVIEWER:

”It’s something that I have been playing around with more, and there are applications that make life easier for me as a writer. I don’t find it as menacing as I did at first. We still can’t and may never replicate human cadence and forms of speech flow that are natural to us, and maybe that’s a good thing.”

VINT:

“Some people at Google use these bots as merely a stimulus; a sort of brainstorming session. Of course, sometimes the results are a bit crazy. Its interactive character can be very effective.

I don’t use the generative bots that much. There’s something about writing my own words rather than cribbing someone else’s work, even though my writing probably would improve over time if I did that.

You could always feed an essay into the system and instruct it to clean it up, and you might find a better way of expressing things.”

INTERVIEWER:

“I'm like you. I write everything in long form and then transcribe it from—old-school. It takes a little bit longer, but it retains the feeling of what I want to say, though I’m sure it frustrates some people because it takes me longer.”

VINT:

“I think it’s a matter of whatever works! There is an argument that you retain more if you write it down by hand first. But, I don't mean in the sense that it's on paper; rather, your memory of what you wrote is reinforced by the act of writing.

I remember someone who argued that if you just copy works of very famous authors, you would begin to absorb their style. It's like muscle memory or riding a bicycle. Nobody can explain how they learned to ride a bicycle. One day, it just worked, and it's obvious that they were discovering balance and the mechanics of movement in that particular sense.

Then one day, they mastered the muscle memory that keeps them from falling off the bicycle.

If you ask somebody to explain in detail why you're safe on the bicycle, it would be hard for anybody to explain. It just suddenly falls in place.

Is your sense of balance, and everything else, in the lower noncognitive part of your body?

The repeated exposure to an experience is a very important learning mechanism, but I don't think we understand it very well—how it operates when everything clicks into place.”

INTERVIEWER:

“I always assumed it was muscle memory, but I try not to think about it too much, especially with skiing or biking, because if I think about it, that's when the balance starts to go.”

VINT:

“Yes, and as another example, if we had to think to remember to breathe, we'd probably all die of asphyxiation. I had, not a panic attack, but a moment, years ago, when I thought about thinking about breathing. I read something on that very function, and it starts to freak you out, but you can’t go there, or the cycle continues!

The cells are taking care of it, so you don't have to. The flip side of that, though, is if you've ever gone to bed frustrated because you couldn't solve a particular problem, in the morning, you wake up and you have a solution.

The implication of that is that while you were asleep, your brain was still working on something. I find it infinitely disturbing that my brain is performing functions that I don't know about, so what else is it doing when I'm not working? I think that's where my intrusive thoughts come in.

Then, there are dreams—that’s a realm I don't totally understand. I've tried to interpret some of my dreams, and sometimes it's like a book cover; you just want to slam it shut. Some people think that dreams are our brains sorting out the day's experiences.

We are re-experiencing, encoding, editing, and discarding a lot of what we were exposed to during the day to clear up short-term memory for the next day, filing them away in our long-term memory.

There are likely adjacencies we don't fully understand—how short-term memory turns into long-term memory, but it must go somewhere. We just don't fully understand what the encoding is.”

INTERVIEWER:

“It was a thrill to speak with you, to meet you, thank you for everything you are doing.”

VINT:

“Well, I'm happy to know that, and one always loves to talk about oneself.

Also, if you want to look at something else fun, The IPNSIG, which stands for Interplanetary Network Special Interest Group—that is the place to look at in the planetary net, but there's a second place to go, called Interspecies.IO, and that's another project that we have going where we're looking at cognitive capacity of non-human species and the possibility of their interaction over the Internet, facilitated by maybe AI and and things that can understand whatever that means, what the whales are saying, or the apes are grunting, what the prairie dogs are barking about.

We have a non-profit that's been in operation since 2013.

Peter Gabriel and I are on the board, along with a couple of other experts in the field of nonhuman cognition, so that's another fascinating thing that I've been able to do over the past decade or so.”

INTERVIEWER:

“Thank you so much for sharing that, and I will look into that.”

VINT:

“Well, of course, I enjoy the chat. So feel free to ask for more time if you like, because I find this to be very stimulating.”

INTERVIEWER:

“It was great to speak to somebody like you who has had a profound impact on my life since I was young—truly, thank you for your time.”

VINT:

“You too, bye for now.”

END

Recorded, Written, and Edited by Cameron Thompson for Third Chapter Curious, LLC, 2025