Robert Kahn has been a constant presence on the Internet since its inception — apparently, since he co-created it. But like many tech pioneers, his resume is longer than that, and in fact his work anticipated such seemingly modern ideas as AI agents and blockchain. TechCrunch spoke with Kahn about how, really, nothing has changed since the 70s.
The interview took place on the occasion of Kahn (who says Bob in the chat) being awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor this week — you can watch the ceremony and speeches here.
Sound familiar? Last year IEEE awarded the medal to Vint Cerf, Kahn’s partner in creating the protocols that underpin the Internet and the Web. They’ve taken different paths, but they share a restrained optimism about the tech world 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 now face in computers and on the Internet are problems that we have seen and perhaps solved in the past. I’m curious if you find anything particularly familiar about the challenges we face today.
Even: Well, I don’t think anything really surprises me. I mean, I was concerned from the beginning that the Internet had the potential to be abused. But in the early days it was a very willing set of collaborators from the research community who all mostly knew each other, or at least knew each other. And so not much went wrong. If you only have 100 people who don’t know each other, maybe that’s doable, but if you have a billion people, you know, you have a little bit of everything in society.
[CERN leadership] actually approached me with the possibility of starting a consortium, which they later founded at MIT… and I had a lot of questions, probably misplaced ones, like what about disinformation or disinformation? How will you control what happens in it? I thought there were approaches. in fact, we were working on a few. 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” — that’s something very similar to an AI agent, that has the ability to go and interact in a less structured way than an API call or a simple crawl.
The whole idea started 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 started — you know, make plane reservations, check your email, check the news, we’ve told you about things that might affect you, once you’re released. would do your bidding online.
We essentially made it available at the time, which couldn’t have been more unfortunate, just as the first cyber security threat was emerging: the Morris worm, in the late 80s. It was accidentally done by some guy, but you know, people looked and said, Hey, when these bad things happen to you, we don’t want other people’s programs showing up on our machines. As a formality, we put it on the back.
But something came out of it that I think was very useful. We called it digital object architecture. You are probably following some of the cryptocurrency work. Well, cryptocurrency is like getting a $1 Bill and getting rid of paper, right, and then being able to work with the value of money online. The architecture of digital objects was like taking the mobile programs and getting rid of the mobility. The same information is there, except you approach it in different ways.
Robert Kahn accepts the IEEE Medal of Honor.
It’s interesting that you mention digital object architecture and encryption in the same sentence. We have the DOI system, I see it mostly in the scientific literature, of course, it’s extremely useful there. But as a general system, I saw a lot of similarities with the idea of cryptographically signed ledgers and some kind of canonical sites for digital objects.
You know, it’s a shame that people think that these digital objects should only be copyrighted material. I wrote a paper called representing values in digital objects… I think we called them digital entities, just for technical reasons. I believe it was the first newspaper to really talk about the cryptocurrency equivalent.
But we’ve been talking about the block connection lately… going back to the space age, when you wanted to communicate with the far reaches of outer space, you didn’t want to have to go back and wait for minutes or hours after transmission delays back to Earth for to fix something. You want the blocks in transit to connect to each other. So you know, when the next block that might arrive a millisecond later, you can tell 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 that can communicate with other digital objects. They are not people sitting at keyboards. You know, you can send a digital object or a mobile program to a machine and have it interact with another digital object that might be representative of a book, go inside that book, do work and interact with it the system. Or you know, like an airplane – people think that airplanes should interact with other airplanes for collision avoidance and the like, and cars should talk to cars because they don’t want to hit each other. But what if cars need to talk to planes? Since these objects can be anything you can represent digitally, you potentially have everything interacting with everything. This is a different concept of the Internet than, you know, a high-speed telecommunications circuit.
Right, it’s about whether things need to talk to things and enable it as a protocol, whether it’s a plane to a car. In the so-called Internet of Things you have a connected doorbell, connected oven, connected refrigerator, but everything is connected via private APIs on private servers. It’s not a protocol, it’s just a really bad software service that lives inside your fridge.
I really think that most entities that would have a natural interest in the Internet had hopes that their own approach would be what took over [rather than TCP/IP]. Whether it was Bell Systems or IBM or Xerox, Hewlett Packard, everyone had their own approach. But what happened was that they hit rock bottom. You 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 your stuff. So they couldn’t choose a company’s approach—so they were kind of stuck with the things that we were doing at DARPA. That’s an interesting story in itself, but I don’t think you should write about it (laughs).
If every house you entered had a different power plug, you have a big problem. But the real problem is that you can’t see it until you apply it.
I don’t think you can count on the government to take 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 all competing with each other. They cannot agree on whether there should be a standard until they have exhausted all other options. And who will lead the way? It needs to be reviewed at the national level. And I think universities have a role to play here. But they may not necessarily know it yet.
We’re seeing a lot of reinvestment in the US chip industry. I know you were closely involved in the late 70s, early 80s with some of the bolts and working with people who helped define the computer architecture of the period, which of course informed future architectures. I’m curious what you think about the evolution of the hardware industry.
I think the big problem right now, which management has clearly pointed out, is that we don’t have, we haven’t maintained a leadership role in semiconductor manufacturing here. It comes from Taiwan, South Korea, China. We are trying to fix it and I applaud that. But the biggest issue is probably the staff. Who will man 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, 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.
