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Daily Inspiration Quote by Vinton Cerf

"I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices"

About this Quote

Cerf isn’t making a cute futurist guess here; he’s issuing an architectural inevitability. Coming from one of the Internet’s chief designers, the line has the calm, technocratic certainty of someone who’s seen protocols swallow entire industries. The phrasing is revealing: “I expect” is modest, almost casual, but the prediction is expansive and oddly intimate. Not “computers” or “servers” but “household appliances” - the domestic backstage of modern life. The Internet, in this framing, stops being a place you go and becomes a condition you live inside.

The specific intent reads like agenda-setting. By naming appliances, cars, and “other mobile devices,” Cerf nudges manufacturers and policymakers toward a networked default: connectivity as a feature, not an add-on. It’s also a quiet assertion about standards. If everything is going online, everything will need common languages, addresses, authentication - the boring plumbing that determines who gets power later. A prophecy that doubles as a blueprint.

The subtext, visible in hindsight, is that convenience will be the public selling point while surveillance and lock-in ride shotgun. Networked appliances aren’t just smarter; they’re reportable, updatable, remotely controllable. “Autos” on the Net suggests not only navigation but telemetry, insurance incentives, corporate gatekeeping, and new failure modes where a software patch can brick a physical object.

Context matters: mid-2000s optimism about ubiquitous computing and “always on” connectivity, before the cultural backlash had a vocabulary for data extraction. Cerf’s 2010 timestamp is slightly off, but the arc is dead on - and the costs, as usual, were not in the press release.

Quote Details

TopicInternet
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Cerf, Vinton. (2026, January 18). I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-expect-to-see-a-lot-of-household-appliances-on-9694/

Chicago Style
Cerf, Vinton. "I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-expect-to-see-a-lot-of-household-appliances-on-9694/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-expect-to-see-a-lot-of-household-appliances-on-9694/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Vinton Cerf (born June 23, 1943) is a Inventor from USA.

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