Google's Vint Cerf warns of 'digital Dark Age'

He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a "digital Dark Age".

Our life, our memories, our most cherished family photographs increasingly exist as bits of information - on our hard drives or in "the cloud". But as technology moves on, they risk being lost in the wake of an accelerating digital revolution.

"I worry a great deal about that," Mr Cerf told me. "You and I are experiencing things like this. Old formats of documents that we've created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed. 

"And so what can happen over time is that even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is."

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