This post was written by Hatchet reporter Katie Willard.

Vinton Cerf is supposed to see into technology’s future.

Google’s vice president told a GW Law School audience Tuesday that the future will be layered with self-driving cars and internet refrigerators, but also threatened by burgeoning cyber attacks.

Cerf, known as one of the fathers of the Internet, is paid by the technology titan Google to predict how future technology will interact with society. He described the balancing act between encouraging society’s future tech-laden growth and taming that expansion from spinning out of control.

Take the self-driving cars that Google has tested in San Francisco, he said. The cars cover 400,000 miles with no accidents – except when a human is driving – and a car approaching an intersection for the first time will have all the information about the intersection gathered by other cars that were there before it.

However, he said, that technology raises many concerns.

“We’re put into a quandary about whether software is doing what it’s supposed to do—and not anything else,” Cerf said.

He described technology such as Internet refrigerators that alert you when your milk is about to expire, Internet-enabled photo frames where relatives can upload pictures and even light bulbs with internet that can track your electricity usage.

“It’s an interesting observation that the Internet works as well as it does for so many applications because it wasn’t designed to do anything in particular,” Cerf said.

But these inventions have their drawbacks, he said. Because it is now easier for you to send and receive information wirelessly, it is also easier for others to steal it.

He hit on the increasing concern over cybersecurity, one that was highlighted in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night.

“There’s no central control, there’s nobody that dictates who should connect to whom. It is a grand collaboration,” Cerf said.