Robert Kahn has been present on the Internet since its inception – obviously since he was its co-creator. But like many technology pioneers, his resume is longer than that, and in fact his work pioneered supposedly modern ideas like AI agents and blockchain. TechCrunch chatted with Kahn about how nothing has actually changed since the ’70s.
The interview was conducted on the occasion of Kahn (who is referred to as “Bob”) receiving the IEEE Medal of Honor this week – you can watch the ceremony and speeches here.
Sound familiar? Last year, the IEEE announced that Vint Cerf, Kahn’s partner in developing the protocols that underlie 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.
Many of the technical and other problems we currently face in computing and the Internet are problems we have seen before and perhaps even solved. I’m curious to see if you notice anything particularly familiar about the challenges we face today.
Kahn: Well, I don’t think anything really surprises me. From the beginning, I was concerned that the Internet could be misused. But in the early days it was a very willing group of people from the research community who basically all knew each other or at least knew about each other. So not much went wrong. If you only have 100 people who don’t know each other, that might be doable, but if you have a billion people, you know you’re getting a little bit of everything in society.
[CERN leadership] actually approached me with the opportunity to start a consortium that they later founded at MIT… and I had too many questions, most likely off-putting, like, what about misinformation or disinformation? How do you plan to control what’s going on here? I thought there were approaches; In fact, we’ve been working on a few. And so in some ways I’m not particularly surprised – I’m disappointed that approaches that could have made a difference weren’t adopted.
I read about your “Knowbots” – which is very similar to an AI agent, capable of interacting in a less structured way than an API call or a simple crawl.
The entire idea was introduced 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 started it – you know, make flight reservations, check your email, watch the news, update you on things that might concern you, you just unburdened yourself; It would suit your wishes on the internet.
We basically made it available back then, it couldn’t have been more unfortunate, right around the time the very first cybersecurity threat emerged: the Morris Worm, back in the late ’80s. It was done accidentally by someone, but you know, people watched and said, “Hey, when these bad things happen, we don’t want other people’s programs showing up on our computers.” As a matter of form, we have it simply put on the back burner.
But something came out of it that I thought was very useful. We called it the digital object architecture. You are probably pursuing some work on cryptocurrency. Well, cryptocurrency is like taking a dollar bill and getting rid of the paper and then being able to work with the value of the money on the internet. Digital object architecture was like taking over the mobile programs and eliminating mobility. The same information is there, just you can access it in different ways.
Robert Kahn accepts the IEEE Medal of Honor.
It’s interesting that you address the architecture of digital objects and crypto in the same sentence. We have the DOI system, I see it primarily in the scientific literature, where it is of course enormously useful. But as a general system, I saw a lot of similarities with the idea of cryptographically signed ledgers and some kind of canonical storage locations for digital objects.
You know, it’s a shame that people think that these digital objects just have to be copyrighted material. I wrote an article called “Representing Values in Digital Objects.” I think we just called them digital units for technical reasons. I believe it was the first article that actually talked about the equivalent of a cryptocurrency.
But we last talked about linking blocks… back to the space age when you wanted to communicate with the distant parts of space, not wanting to come back and wait for minutes hours through delays in transmission back to Earth to correct something. You want to connect blocks that are in transport together. This way you know when the next block will arrive a millisecond later and you can find out what went wrong with the block before it was released. And that’s what blockchains are all about.
In digital object architecture we talk about digital objects being able to communicate with other digital objects. These are not people sitting at keyboards. You can send a digital object or a mobile program to a machine and ask it to interact with another digital object, perhaps representing a book, to enter that book, to work and to interact with that system. Or you know, like an airplane – people think that airplanes need to interact with other airplanes to avoid collisions and stuff like that, and that cars need to communicate with cars because they don’t want to collide. But what if cars have to communicate with airplanes? Since these objects can be anything that can be represented in digital form, everything potentially interacts with everything else. This is a different idea of the Internet than a high-speed telecommunications connection.
Right, it’s about whether objects need to communicate with objects and enabling this as a protocol, whether it’s an airplane in a car. In the so-called Internet of Things, there is a connected doorbell, a connected oven, and a connected refrigerator, but they are all connected to private servers via private APIs. It’s not about a protocol, it’s just that there’s a really bad software service in your fridge.
I truly believe that most companies that would have had a natural interest in the Internet were hoping that their own approach would prevail [rather than TCP/IP]. Whether Bell Systems, IBM, Xerox or Hewlett Packard, each had their own approach. But what happened was that they had somehow bottomed out. You had to be able to demonstrate interoperability; You couldn’t go in and ask everyone to get rid of their old stuff and take your stuff with them. So they couldn’t decide on a corporate approach and were stuck with the things we were doing at DARPA. That’s an interesting story in itself, but I don’t think it’s worth writing about (laughs).
If every house you entered had a different power plug, you would have a big problem. But the real problem is that you don’t see it until you implement it.
I don’t think the government can be relied upon to take the lead. I don’t think he can rely on the industry to take the lead. Because you might have five or ten different industries all competing with each other. They can only agree on whether there should be a standard once all other options have been exhausted. And who will take the lead? It needs to be rethought at the national level. And I think universities have a role to play here. But they may not necessarily know it yet.
We are seeing major reinvestment in the US chip industry. I know that in the late ’70s and early ’80s you were closely involved with some important things and worked with people who helped define the computer architecture of that time, which of course also influenced future architectures. I’m curious to hear what you think about the evolution of the hardware industry.
I think the big problem at the moment, as the government has clearly acknowledged, is that we are not retaining a leading role in semiconductor manufacturing here. It comes from Taiwan, South Korea and China. We’re trying to fix that and I welcome that. But the bigger problem will probably be staffing. Who will maintain these pages? I mean, you’re building production capacity, but do you have to import people from Korea and Taiwan? Okay, 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’ve been there before, we can get there again.