Moving boulders with pebbles

VINTON "Vint" Cerf likes to solve tomorrow's big problems. The man known as one of the fathers of the Internet has made a career out of looking for the core problems of nascent but potentially break-out technologies, and then figuring out fundamental and elegant ways to solve them. Whether it is the TCP/IP protocol that continues to form the backbone of the Internet, the Internet of things, the digital dark age or artificial intelligence, Mr Cerf is looking for that one nudge to right the big boulder rolling down the hill.

"Let me give you a little parable," the 73-year-old says one morning at the Singapore headquarters of Google, which since 2005 has hired Mr Cerf as 'Chief Internet Evangelist'.

"This is the boulder and the pebble parable. So, let's imagine that you live in a little town and there's a big boulder up on top of the hill. And one day the boulder comes loose, and it's rolling down the hill, and it's going to destroy the town. And you're too small to really stop the boulder, right? So the question is, what do you do? Besides maybe run away, but you're the hero.