With his three-piece suit and trim beard, Vint Cerf looks like Hollywood's idea of the "father of the internet" — or at least, one of its "fathers".

Along with Robert Kahn, Dr Cerf can claim that title. He helped build the internet's fundamental architecture in the 1970s — creating the transmission protocols that allow computers to talk to each other — when the project was still funded by the military.

Today, ties to the armed forces are causing trouble for Google, where Dr Cerf now holds the only-in-America title of "Chief Internet Evangelist".

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In late May, the New York Times reported that Google's involvement with the US Department of Defence's Maven Program, which aims to use artificial intelligence to assess video, had set off "an existential crisis" internally.

Employees resigned, morally opposed to the work that some feared could be used to facilitate drone strikes. About 4,000 workers signed a petition demanding "a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology".

By June, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had unveiled a set of seven principles to guide the company's artificial intelligence work, and promised not to pursue "weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people".

Google will not renew its Maven contract with the Pentagon.

Internet started with the military

The internet precursor, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) sent its first message in 1969.

The network's early iterations were reserved mostly for academia and the armed forces up until the late 1980s.

Decades later, the internet co-designer appears to be more comfortable with the company's recent work than some of his protesting colleagues.

"The purposes of the Maven project, as I understood it anyway, had a lot to do with situational awareness so that you could understand what's in the field of view — are there vehicles in the field of view? ... This is just to understand what's going on," Dr Cerf told the ABC.

"Some people, I think, extrapolated from that kind of capability to all kinds of other things that they thought we shouldn't be involved with."

Nevertheless, the debate over Google's new principles was an important albeit sometimes painful discussion to have, he told an audience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

"I think it's early days yet, but the intent is to establish oversight committees that will evaluate projects before we start them in order to assess the degree to which they might be harmful," he explained later.

Artificial intelligence is 'artificial idiocy'

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced the company's artificial intelligence principles. ( Getty Images: VCG/VCG )

Despite the fears of "killer robots" and weaponised algorithms, Dr Cerf suggested artificial intelligence is sometimes best called "artificial idiocy".

"I can say that I've always been a little sceptical," he said.

For now, he is concerned these systems are still often "brittle". They are deep and narrow in their capabilities, and no match for human ability.

Once you or I know what a table is, for example, you begin to know that any flat location perpendicular to the Earth's gravitational surface could be used as a table.

"A lap, your chair, a real table, this stage," he said. "In just a few examples, we've generalised the notion of table. Human beings do this really well. Computers don't know how to do this well."

Internet is still vibrant

In fact, Dr Cerf would not countenance too much internet doom and gloom.

Besides the Federal Communications Commission's recent repeal of net neutrality in the United States, which he did see as a serious setback, he suggested the internet ecosystem remained vibrant.

And the internet's co-parent isn't caught up by technological anxiety.

"I'm not persuaded that what we're living through is any more traumatic or dramatic than what happened in the first half of the 20th century or the second half of the 20th century," he said, pointing to jet planes and televisions and radio.

Nevertheless, this future doesn't seem to involve much rest.

Dr Cerf suggested that lifelong education is essential if we want to survive the coming decades (he's now deep into microbiology himself).

"It's certain that there will be technological changes in eight decades that make the world look very different from what it was when you went to school," he told the ABC.