Robert Kahn has had a consistent presence on the Internet since its inception – obviously, since he was its co-creator. But like many tech pioneers, his resume is longer than that, and in fact his work foreshadowed seemingly modern ideas like AI agents and blockchain. TechCrunch spoke with Kahn about how, in reality, nothing has changed since the ’70s.
The interview was conducted in celebration of Kahn (who goes by Bob in conversation) being awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor this week – you can watch the ceremony and speeches here.
Looks familiar? Last year, the IEEE gave this to Vint Cerf, Kahn’s partner in creating the protocols that underpin the Internet and the Web. They have taken different paths, but share a tempered optimism about the world of technology and a feeling that everything old is new again.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Most of the problems, technical and otherwise, that we face today in computing and the Internet are problems that we have 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, I was afraid from the start that the Internet could be misused. But in the beginning, it was a very voluntary group of collaborators from the research community who all knew each other, or at least knew each other. And so there wasn’t much that went wrong. If you only have 100 people who don’t know each other, maybe it’s doable, but if you have a billion people, you know, you get a little bit of everything in society.
(CERN management) actually approached me with the possibility of creating a consortium, which they then created at MIT… and I had too many questions, probably off-putting, like what about misinformation or disinformation? How are you going to control what happens? I thought there were approaches; in fact, we were working on some. And so, in a way, I’m not terribly 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 is empowered to go and interact in a less structured way than an API call or a simple exploration.
The idea was launched as a mobile program (meaning the program is mobile, not for mobiles); we called them knowledge robots, which was short for knowledge robots. You told it what you wanted to do and you got it going – you know, making plane reservations, checking your emails, watching the news, finding out about things that might affect you, you just let it go; that would be doing your bidding on the Internet.
We basically made it available at the time, it couldn’t have been more unfortunate, around the time the very first cybersecurity threat appeared: the Morris worm, in the late 80s. was done by accident by one guy, but you know, people looked and said, Hey, when these bad things are going to happen, we don’t want other people’s programs showing up on our machines. As a formality, we kind of put it on the back burner.
But from there came something that was, I think, very useful. We called it the architecture of digital objects. You probably follow some of the work on cryptocurrencies. Well, cryptocurrency is like taking a $1 bill and getting rid of the paper, right, and then being able to work with the value of money on the net. The architecture of digital objects was like taking mobile programs and getting rid of mobility. The same information is there, except you access it in different ways.
Robert Kahn accepting the IEEE Medal of Honor.
It’s interesting that you mention the architecture of digital objects and cryptography in the same kind of sentence. We have the DOI system, I see it mainly in the scientific literature, of course 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 materials. I wrote an article called Representing Values in Digital Objects… I think we called them digital entities, just for technical reasons. I think this was the first article that actually talked about the cryptocurrency equivalent.
But we’ve been talking about binding blocks for a while… in the space age, when you wanted to communicate with the distant parts of space, you didn’t want to have to go back and wait for minutes or minutes. hours due to transmission delays back to Earth to correct something. You want the blocks in transit to be linked together. So, you know, when the next block might come a millisecond later, you can figure out what went wrong with the block before it exits. And that’s what blockchains are for.
In digital object architecture, we talk about digital objects capable of communicating with other digital objects. These are not people sitting at a keyboard. You know, you can send a digital object or a moving program into a machine and ask it to interact with another digital object that may be representative of a book, to enter that book, to do some work and to interact with this system. Or you know, like a plane – people think that planes have to interact with other planes to avoid collisions etc., and that cars have to talk to cars because they don’t want to crash into each other . What if cars needed to communicate with planes? Since these objects can be anything you can represent in digital form, you potentially have everything interacting with everything. It’s a different concept of the Internet than, you know, a high-speed telecommunications circuit.
That’s right, it’s about whether objects need to talk with objects, and enabling that as a protocol, whether it’s a plane in a car. In what’s called the Internet of Things, you have a connected doorbell, a connected oven, a connected refrigerator, but they’re all connected via private APIs to private servers. It’s not about a protocol, it’s just about having a really bad software service living in your fridge.
I do believe that most entities that would have had a natural interest in the Internet were hoping that their own approach would take over (rather than TCP/IP). Whether it was Bell Systems, IBM, Xerox or Hewlett Packard, each had its own approach. But what happened was they kind of hit rock bottom. We had to be able to demonstrate interoperability; you couldn’t come in and ask everyone to get rid of all their old stuff and take yours. So they couldn’t choose one company’s approach – so they were kind of stuck with what we were doing 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 power outlet, you have a major problem. But the real problem is that you can’t see it until you implement it.
I don’t think we can count on the government to take the lead. I don’t think he can count on the industry to take the lead. Because there may be 5 or 10 different industries all competing against each other. They cannot agree on whether a standard is appropriate until they have exhausted all other options. And who will take the lead? We need to rethink it at the national level. And I think universities have a role to play here. But they may not necessarily know that yet.
We are seeing significant reinvestment in the US chip industry. I know that you were closely involved in the late 70s and early 80s, in some practical aspects, and that you worked with people who helped define the computer architecture of the time, which has of course influenced future architectures. I’m curious what you think about the evolution of the hardware industry.
I think the big problem right now, which the administration has clearly outlined, is that we haven’t maintained a leadership role in semiconductor manufacturing here. It comes from Taiwan, South Korea and China. We are trying to resolve this problem, and I applaud it. But the biggest problem will probably be staffing. Who will manage these sites? I mean, you’re building manufacturing capacity, 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, are you going to 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 go back.
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