Tech
Crypto? AI? Internet co-creator Robert Kahn already did this… decades ago
Robert Kahn has been a constant presence on the Internet since its creation – obviously, since he was its co-creator. But like many technology pioneers, his resume is longer and indeed his work prefigured seemingly modern ideas like artificial intelligence agents and blockchain. TechCrunch spoke to Kahn about how, in reality, nothing has changed since the 1970s.
The interview was conducted on the occasion of the awarding of Kahn (who is called Bob in the conversation) with the IEEE Medal of Honor: you can watch the ceremony and speeches here.
Sound familiar? Last year the IEEE awarded the medal to Vint Cerf, Kahn’s partner in creating the protocols underlying the Internet and the web. They have taken different paths but share a moderate optimism about the world of technology and a sense that everything old is new again.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Many of the problems, technical and otherwise, that we face today in computing and the Internet are problems that we have already seen and perhaps even solved before. I’m curious if you find anything particularly familiar about the challenges we face today.
Kahn: Well, I don’t think anything really surprises me. I mean, from the beginning I was worried that the Internet could be misused. But in the beginning it was a very willing group of collaborators from the research community who mostly all knew each other, or at least knew each other. And so there wasn’t much that went wrong. If you just have 100 people who don’t know each other, maybe that’s doable, but if you have a billion people, you know, you get a little bit of everything in society.
[CERN leadership] in reality they contacted me proposing the possibility of creating a consortium, which they then set up at MIT… and I had too many questions, most likely discouraging, like: what about disinformation? How will you control what happens? I thought there were approaches; in fact, we were working on some. And so, in a way, I’m not very surprised: I’m disappointed that approaches that could have made a difference weren’t taken.
I was reading about your “knowbots” – it’s a very similar thing to an AI agent, which has the power to interact in a less structured way than an API call or a simple scan.
The whole idea was launched in the form of a mobile program [i.e. the program is mobile, not for mobiles]; we called them know bots, which was short for knowledge robots. You told him what you wanted to do and you threw it: you know, book a plane, check email, watch the news, let him know things that might affect you, you just freed yourself; it would be to execute your orders over the Internet.
We basically made it available at that time, it couldn’t have been more unfortunate, right when the first real cybersecurity threat was happening: the Morris worm, in the late 1980s. It was done by accident by some guy, but you know, people looked and said, Hey, when these bad things happen, we don’t want other people’s programs appearing on our machines. As a formality, we just put it on the back burner.
But something came out of that that I think was very helpful. We called it digital object architecture. You probably follow some of the cryptocurrency work. Well, cryptocurrency is like taking a $1 bill and getting rid of the paper, right, and then you can work with the value of money online. Digital object architecture was like taking mobile programs and getting rid of the mobility. It’s the same information, except you get there in different ways.
Image credits: IEEE
It’s interesting that you talk about the architecture of digital objects and cryptography in the same kind of sentence. We have the DOI system, I see it mainly in scientific literature, obviously it is extremely useful there. But as a general system, I saw a lot of similarities with the idea of cryptographically signed ledgers and sort of canonical locations for digital objects.
You know, it’s a shame that people think that these digital objects should only be copyrighted material. I wrote an article called Representing Values in Digital Objects… I think we called them digital entities, just for technical reasons. I believe it was the first article to actually talk about the cryptocurrency equivalent.
But we’ve talked about connecting blocks since the last… back in the space age, when you wanted to communicate with the distant parts of space outside, you didn’t want to go back and wait for minutes or hours of delay in transmission to Earth to fix something. You want to have blocks in transit connected to each other. So you know, when the next block that might come a millisecond later, you can figure out what went wrong with the block before it was released. And that’s exactly what blockchains are for.
In digital object architecture, we talk about digital objects that can communicate with other digital objects. It’s not about people sitting at keyboards. You know, you can send a digital object or a mobile program into a machine and ask it to interact with another digital object that might be representative of a book, to go into that book and work and interact with that system. Or, you know, like an airplane: people think that airplanes have to interact with other airplanes in order to avoid collisions and such, and cars have to talk to cars because they don’t want to crash into each other. What if cars were to communicate with airplanes? Since these objects can be anything you can represent in digital form, you potentially have everything interacting with everything. This is a different conception of the Internet than that of a high-speed telecommunications circuit.
Exactly, the question is whether objects should talk to objects and enable that as a protocol, whether it’s a plane in a car. In the so-called Internet of Things you have a connected doorbell, a connected oven, a connected refrigerator, but they are all connected via private APIs to private servers. It’s not about a protocol, it’s just about having a terrible software service living in your fridge.
I truly believe that most entities that would have a natural interest in the Internet hoped that their approach would be the one that would take over [rather than TCP/IP]. Whether it was Bell Systems, IBM, Xerox or Hewlett Packard, each had their own approach. But what happened is they hit rock bottom. You had to be able to show interoperability; you couldn’t come in and ask everyone to get rid of all their old stuff and take your stuff. So they couldn’t choose a company’s approach, so they were stuck with what we did at DARPA. It’s an interesting story in itself, but I don’t think you should write about it (laughs).
If every house you enter had a different outlet, you’d have a big problem. But the real problem is that you can’t see it until you implement it.
I don’t think you can count on the government taking the lead. I don’t think he can rely on the industry to take the lead. Because you might have 5 or 10 different industries that are all competing with each other. They cannot agree on whether or not to set a standard until they have exhausted all other options. And who will take command? We need to rethink it at a national level. And I think universities have a role to play here. But maybe they don’t know it yet.
We are seeing a lot of reinvestment in the US chip industry. I know you were involved closely in the late ’70s, early ’80s, with some of the practicalities and working with people who helped define the computing architecture of the period, which informed, obviously, the architectures future. I’m curious to know what you think about the evolution of the hardware industry.
I think the big problem right now, which the administration has clearly noticed, is that we have not maintained a leadership role in semiconductor manufacturing here. He is from Taiwan, South Korea, China. We are trying to fix the problem and I applaud that. But the biggest problem will probably be the staff. Who will manage those sites? I mean, you build manufacturing capabilities, but do you need to import people from Korea and Taiwan? OK, let’s teach it in schools… who knows enough to teach it in schools, will you import people to teach in schools? Workforce development will be a big part of the problem. But I think we were there before, we can get there again.