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Robert Kahn has been a consistent presence on the Internet since its creation — evidently , since he was its co - creator . But like many tech pioneers his resumé is tenacious than that and in fact his body of work prefigured such ostensibly modern theme as AI agents and blockchain . TechCrunch natter with Kahn about how , really , nothing has changed since the ’ 70s .
The interview was conducted on the occasion of Kahn ( who go by Bob in conversation ) being awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor this calendar week — you may watch the ceremony and speech here .
levelheaded familiar?Last year the IEEE gave the medal to Vint Cerf , Kahn ’s partner in make the protocol underpinning the internet and web . They ’ve take different path but share a tempered optimism about the world of technology , and a gumption that everything old is novel again .
This interview has been edited for length and pellucidity .
A lot of some of the problems , technical and otherwise , that we ’re face now in computing and the net , they ’re problems that we ’ve seen and perchance even solved before . I ’m curious whether you find anything particularly familiar about the challenges that we ’re confront today .
Kahn : Well , I do n’t think anything really surprises me . I mean , I was relate justly from the get - go that the internet had the potential difference to be misused . But in the early Clarence Shepard Day Jr. it was a very uncoerced set of collaborators from the enquiry community of interests who all principally know each other , or at least bang of each other . And so there was n’t much that cash in one’s chips improper . If you have only 100 masses that do n’t recognize each other , maybe that ’s executable , but if you ’ve suffer a billion multitude , you acknowledge , you get a little bit of everything in society .
[ CERN leadership ] really approached me with the possibility of setting up a consortium , which they by and by set up at MIT … and I had too many doubtfulness , most probably off - putt , like what about misinformation or disinformation ? How are you hold up to check what goes on this ? I think there were approaches ; in fact , we were work on some . And so , in some ways , I ’m not terribly surprised — I am disappointed that approaching that could have made a departure were not adopted .
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I was reading about your “ knowbots ” — this is a very like matter to an AI agent , that is authorise to go and interact in a less structured way than an API call or a simple creeping .
The whole idea was launch in the physical body of a roving program [ i.e. the programme is fluid , not for Mobile River ] ; we call off them know bot , which was short for knowledge automaton . You recite it what you wanted to do and launched it — you know , make aeroplane reservation , check your email , count at the news , let you sleep together about things that might affect you , just freed you up ; it would be doing your bid on the cyberspace .
We essentially made it uncommitted at the sentence , it could n’t have been more unfortunate , just about when the very first cybersecurity terror was occurring : the Morris worm , back in the late 80s . It was done by chance event by some guy , but you have sex , people looked and said , Hey , when you ’re gon na have these spoiled things happen , we do n’t want other masses ’s programs demonstrate up on our political machine . As a formality , we just kind of put it on the back burner .
But out of that come something that was I opine , very useful . We called it the digital object architecture . You belike follow some of the work on cryptocurrency . Well , cryptocurrency is like take aim $ 1 Bill and getting rid of the paper , right , then being able to work with the value of money on the net . The digital target architecture was like carry the mobile curriculum and getting rid of the mobility . The same information is there , except you get to it in unlike elbow room .
It ’s interesting that you play up the the digital target architecture and crypto in the same sorting of judgment of conviction . We have the DOI system , I see it primarily in scientific literature , of course , it ’s tremendously useful there . But as a cosmopolitan organisation , I reckon a lot of similarities with the idea of the cryptographically signal ledgers and sort of canonical location for digital objects .
You have sex , it ’s a shame that people think that these digital objects have to be only be copyright fabric . I wrote a newspaper call representing note value in digital aim … I recall we phone them digital entities , just for technical reasons . I believe it was the first newspaper that really talked about the combining weight of cryptocurrency .
But we ’ve been talk about unite stop for the last … going back to the space age , when you wanted to communicate with the aloof parts of the out of blank , you did n’t want to have to occur back and wait for minutes or hours through transmission delays back to Earth to get something corrected . You want to have blocks that are in transit link together . So you have intercourse , when the next block that might arrive the millisecond later , you may figure out what go faulty with the mental block before it was give up . And that ’s what blockchains are about .
In the digital physical object architecture , we ’re talking about digital objects being able to communicate with other digital objects . That ’s not masses sit down at keyboards . You know , you could ship a digital object or peregrine program into a automobile and necessitate it to interact with another digital physical object that may be representative of a playscript , to get inside that book , do piece of work , and interact with that system . Or you fuck , like an plane — people think airplane need to interact with other airplanes for the purposes of hit avoidance and the like , and cars need to talk to cars because they do n’t want to bang into each other . But what if cable car need to talk with airplane ? Since these objects can be anything you may typify in digital form , you ’ve potentially got everything interacting with everything . That ’s a different notion of the internet than , you know , a eminent - speed telecommunications lap .
Right , it ’s about whether object need to spill the beans with objects , and enabling that as a protocol , whether it ’s an airplane in a railway car . In the so called Internet of Things you have a connected bell , connected oven , a connected electric refrigerator , but they ’re all link via private genus Apis to private server . It ’s not about a communications protocol , it ’s just about having a really risky software system service exist inside your fridge .
I really think that most of the entity that would have had a natural interest in the cyberspace had hopes that their own approaching would be the thing that take over [ rather than TCP / IP ] . Whether it was Bell Systems or IBM or Xerox , Hewlett Packard , everybody had their own coming . But what happened was they kind of bottomed out . You had to be able to show interoperability ; you could n’t go in and ask for everybody to get free of all their sure-enough stuff and take your poppycock . So they could n’t foot one company ’s approach — so they were sort of stuck with the stuff we did at DARPA . That ’s an interesting report in its own right hand , but I do n’t think you should write about that ( laughs ) .
If every house you walked into had a different power plug , you have a major problem . But the substantial issue is you ca n’t see it until you put through it .
I do n’t remember you could bank on governing to take the tip . I do n’t think he can swear on industry to take the lead . Because you might have 5 or 10 different industries that are all compete with each other . They ca n’t agree on whether there should be a criterion until they ’ve exhausted all other option . And who ’s going to take the lead ? It need to be rethought at the national stage . And I think the universities have a role to dally here . But they may not necessarily know it yet .
We ’re seeing a big reinvestment in the US chip industry . I know that you were closely involved in the late ’ seventy , former ’ 80s , with some of the nuts and bolts , and working with people who helped delineate computing computer architecture of the period , which has informed , of track , future architectures . I ’m rum what you think about the evolution of the hardware industry .
I think the adult trouble right now , which the the government activity has distinctly note , is we do n’t have we have n’t maintained a leadership role in manufacture of semiconductor here . It ’s come from Taiwan , South Korea , China . We ’re attempt to prepare that , and I acclaim that . But the bigger topic is probably going to be personnel . Who ’s going to man those land site ? I mean , you build manufacturing capacity , but do you need to import the people from Korea and Taiwan ? OK , let ’s learn it in schools … who knows enough to teach it in schools , are you going to import people to learn in the schools ? Workforce exploitation is live on to be big part of the problem . But I think we were there before , we can get there again .
