Today Vint Cerf, Google’s “Internet Evangelist”, presented at Consumer Reports. He talked about the history and the future of the Internet. What he said was familiar to me but hearing it from him in the way that I suppose he has been performing continually for 50 years was a thrill. Vint Cerf is called one of the fathers of the Internet. There is information about him online and in books, and other people have covered that well enough.
At this presentation he was asked if the Architect character in the Matrix movies was supposed to be him. His answer was that no, we are all in the Matrix, and he is the architect of it, and the guy in the movie was the real human which inspired his creation.
He said that he had not had any discussion with the directors, the Wachowskis, and so he was unable to relay any information about their thoughts. He did say that the Architect’s presentation seemed more like his own than that of any other Internet pioneer he could imagine, and that people frequently tell him that the architect seems based on him. In my opinion, the Architect in the movie is dressed and styled entirely after the persona of Cerf. Cerf laughs and jokes continually and that is in contrast to the Architect’s detached mood, but otherwise, the Architect’s style of speaking seems modeled after Cerf’s clear storytelling style as well.
I am happy to have met him because now I feel like I met both a great scientist and a great supervillain.