My Other Notes - The Future

Yesterday we visited with Intel and discussed security, privacy and future technology. Intel is an interesting company, being as they are an absolute pre-requisite for the information society. But for how long can this continue? Can we continue to see increasing price/performance in the future? Will Moore's law hold over time?Gene Meieran, the second Intel fellow ever and a (again!) the stuff of legend (considering the time he has spent at the company, 33 years, and the total time he has spent in the industry, 43 years, he is one of the institutional memories still around and he is still very active) thinks that it will certainly continue to hold for the coming 10-15 years, and he sees no reason to suspect that it will cease to hold after that either. In a sense we've never had som many different new computational technology bases to migrate to, and this in itself is promising. Consider the alternatives being developed right now: chemnical transistors, photonics, DNA-based computing, quantum dots...The number of alternatives is growing quickly and there seems to be no danger that we will be forced to give up on Moore's law.

Meieran also had the kindness to show us around the Museum at Intel, showing us how wafer production has developed and how new fabs are being constructed. The display there is fabulous, and also celebrates one of the founders of Intel, Robert Noyce. One qoute from Noyce is replicated at several different places in the building (and the building also bears his name). The quote is: ”Don't be encumbered by history. Go off and do something wonderful”. A great thought.

Posted by Nicklas at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The front page of this issue of Fortune: "How to make money of the new net boom". The bubble is forgotten. It took 4-5 years. Where are the doomsters now?

Posted by Nicklas at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Long Now Foundation held a seminar yesterday, down at Fort Mason. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia.com and WIkipedia's "father" lectured on the future of the project, on social innovations and the future of the encyclopedia. It was - of course - a truly fascinating session (with lots of good questions to).

Wikipedia is growing quickly, and the recent brouhaha about there being an error pointing out a certain individual as complicit in murdering president Kennedy has simply strengthened the project. When CNN called me up to yell at me Wikipedia really grew, noted Wales.

But the perhaps most interesting part of the lecture was on what Wikipedia actually is. There are two different views of the true nature of Wikipedia. The first is that it is a collective hive-mind that basically uses pseudo-darwinistic mechanisms and creates a kind of collaborative selective pressure to weed out bad articles and canonize good ones. This view is, Wales submits, clearly wrong.

Wikipedia is, he states, a community. The individuals matter. Yes, there are a lot of contributors and, yes there are more than a million pages in the English version, but the encyclopedia depends on a core group of wikipedians that number, perhaps, 200-300.

This is a radically different view of Wikipedia from the view that is sometimes pushed in libertarian circles of Wikipedia as a new and spontaneous order, he thinks. Well, perhaps. But even in a spontaneous order you would not necessarily expect to find contributions evenly distributed. Knowing what we know about scale-free networks we would probably expect the contributions to be heavily unevenly distributed - not unlike those between seeders/leechers in file-sharing networks.

It is in fact pretty simple to see the synthesis of the two views presented above if one thinks about the network of wikipedians as a scale-free network. The mistake I think Wales does is that he thinks that darwinian systemic order is something like brownian gas order. Darwinian order may instead be the result of a scale-free network of selection where certain elements in the network have stronger selective qualities than others.

But the really interesting issue is if this will scale. Wales thinks - as do I - that it will. And interestingly his view of why it will scale is that the community will have to subdivide into several smaller communities. This is consistenet with the views on social networks today - where there seems to be a limit to how large a certain social network with a certain cohesion factor can actually be, see for example the so-called Dunbar-number.

But there is another distinction, where Wales is right. He says that WIkipedia is not, in any way, a technical innovation. All the technology needed to do Wikipedia was around in 1995. Instead, he states, it is a social innovation, drawing on the fact that people will cooperate if they are given the chance. We must design for cooperation.

This is a point that seems to resonate with the findings of Robert Axelrod on "tit for that" and the evolution of cooperation. And it is a point that Wales makes well. He asked us to think about restaurant design, and went through the steps: we want to offer steak, so we must have steak knives. But wait! If we have steak knives people will be able to stab each other! So, we must put all the people eating steaks in cages...Right? Uh, no...

This is, as Wales notes, not the dominant design paradigm in restaurant design. It is, however, the dominant design in software design. Everyone tries to design out the opportunities to do evil. But when they do this, they also eliminate the possible growth of trust. Wikipedia is designed not with liability in mind, but with accountability. And the basic idea is that accountability always requires social innovation, and that it cannot be design into the architecture.

In a sense Wales is the Anti-lessig. He is working to keep the rules out of the code, out of the architecture.

Wales is also redefining copyright. Surprisingly he notes that WIkipedia would not be possible to print, because of liabilities in copyright issues. The notice-and-take down regime of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually protects Wikipedia, and makes it possible for it to exist in the current, repressive copyright regime.

This is a paradox: the DMCA as an enabler of Wikipedia? Well, it is true to a certain extent. The real truth - and Wales realizes this since he is a member of the Creative Commons board - is of course that our current copyright rules were not built to handled collaborative creative work like Wikipedia. And it will have to change to enable even more social networks generated content. Soon.

Wales is now exploring the technologies of Wikipedia in a semi-new company. Wikia. They are recruiting. What are you waiting for? His motto alone makes you want to work for the guy: make [[Wikilove]], not [[war]].

Posted by Nicklas at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

Stig Hagström worked at Xerox Parc for more than fifteen years. He is now the director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Wallenberg Hall, Stanford. The center was financed by Swedish financial giants Wallenberg, who have really found an interesting area to work with (and one that happily reflects very well on Sweden). The Center works with the question of how technology can be used to create better learning environments. Not - Hagström points out - with any type of overconfidence in technological solutions: teaching and learning will always first and foremost be human endeavours. But the Center is interested in trying to find solutions that will augment that endeavour and create new forms of learning.

One simple thing that Stanford has found is that small, seminar-like, learning is superior to all other forms. So they decided to have only that form. (Yes!). Large lectures became exceptions and the university decided to develop this as a model. The costs, of course, would be extreme. But the university started a fund-raising drive, and succeeded in raising enough money to shift to this model. An extremely impressive feat.

Hagström shows me the facilities at SCIL and the architecture - newly renovated - nicely complements the atmosphere of research and exeperiment that permeates the whole Center. There is even an artist in residence and her work is beautiful.

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John McCarthy is a living legend. Yes, this is a tired cliché and it makes you sigh and think ”oh no, not another one...” But in this case it happens to be true. Let's review the facts:

1) McCarthy coined the term ”Artifical Intelligence”. There. Ok? No?
2) McCarthy invented LISP. Now?
3) McCarthy has been a leading researcher in AI for more than 50 years. Get the picture?
4) McCarthy has, as a side project, started one of the most passionate and useful collections of arguments to prove that material progress is sustainable.

You know, we could go on. But lets drop the clasifications for a while. When I knew I was going to Stanford, one of my aims of course quickly became to meet with Professor McCarthy. He kindly assented and I had the privilege to spend two hours with him discussing the future of AI, sustainable material progress and science fiction. At almost 80 he is as mentally agile as ever, and is still working on research in AI, he has also recently started his first science fiction novel.

The future of AI

Professor McCarthy is confident that AI will continue to develop. Or, as he notes: ”There was a hundred years from Mendels discoveries until we charted the genome – we still have time.” This does not mean that he downplays the problems with AI, however. Brute force, speed, for example will not be enough. We definitely need something more than mere speed, he says. But exactly what that is, is not certain.

Now, mind: we have come far. Computers routinely beat great chess players. They create swarm-like intelligences in computer games. They create the vast majority of non-player characters in virtual worlds. AI helps with everything from word processing to traffic planning. The applications are out there and they continue to develop. But there are still things that we cannot do. One of the things that remains hard is to allow a computer program to fram context. Look at another, more complicated game, like the Japanese game of go (or Chinese game, depending on your historical views). Computer programs play very poor go, and the reason, professor McCarthy thinks, is that go forces the players to think about the board in regions and to subdivide and find reasonable regions to compete in. What regions are reasonable, however, seems to be a hard problem to solve.

Sure, in chess we have kingside and queenside regions – players subdivide the field into these regions – but it turns out that this division is unnecessary for a computer. A computer does not need to think about these regions at all because of the speed with which it can explore the tree of possible moves. Not so in go.

One of the current research projects that McCarthy works on is related to this problem. McCarthy is trying to develop a logic of contexts and approximate concepts. How do we work with these as human beings? How do we develop concenpts that are in a basic sense vague? We seem to be able to handled vague concepts with ease, and this increases our intelligence.

When I suggest that this seems like thinking from the later Wittgenstein, especially when Wittgenstein speaks about the use of concepts such as ”game”, McCarthy seems uneasy. He really does not like Wittgenstein (even accuses him, if half jokingly, of setting back the field of philosophy anout fifty years, singlehandedly). You know, he says, he even led Bertrand Russell astray. That is quite some achievement.

McCarthy has a strong belief in logics, and in a sense he is a purist. He does not believe that we need new forms of logic – like modal logic – or probabilities. McCarthy thinks that these areas have their uses, of course, but to him they are far less important than pure logic. This is also reflected in his recommendation to people wanting to study AI: he recommends them to study mathematical logic, and to read analytical philosophy (i.e. Russell before he was corrupted by Wittgenstein...)

This strong belief in logic also forms the basis of McCarthy's rejection of the different critiques of AI that have emerged over the years. He mentions Dreyfus, Penrose and others and when I ask him if he believes their critique has relevance for the field, and if there are things that human minds can do that are not translatable to algorithms he simple says ”no”. And there is an incredibly strong point here: the burden of evidence should, of course, be shifted to the person arguing that there are things the human mind can do that are not algorithmic. Becase what are they then? Penroses answer – that quantum-level qualities of the human mind makes it unique – simply sound to ridiculous, and it is not even clear how such an hypothesis could be empircally verified.

But the question of AI could still be obsolete. There are many other possibilities. One simple possibility would be this: before we have computer programs that achieve human level intelligence, the clear bordeline between human and other intelligence will have been blurred and it will no longer be relevant to speak about artificial intrelligenve. Rather, we will speak about symbiotic intelligence, connoting all kinds of intelligence networks that can develop. One simple such symbiotic intelligence – between humans – is Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedians depend in a high degree on Google so they use the advanced page-ranking mechanisms in Google to enhance their editorial capabilities. The end result is a mesh intelligence where the artifical and ”natural” components interact seamlessly.

Perhaps we will not discuss AI separately, and perhaps we will give up the idea of trying to acsertain the intelligence of computer programs. The question of AI may well be a category mistake: asking if a computer program is intelligent, may be lika asking if a human organ is intelligent. It is the networks resulting from interactions between different components – artifical or not – that is the relevant unit of intelligence.

McCarthy is reluctant to think so. He thinks that before the line between human and artifical intelligence blurs we will have developed some sort of artifical intelligence. He even thinks that there could very well be a graduate student out there today, who has solved the basic problems that still riddle the field. But we don't know yet. He defintely seems to think that AI will become a reality, and that we will have to deal with programs that are as intelligent as – or much more intelligen than – we are. This is a truly fascinating future...

The future of material progress

The second subject of our discussions are the pages that professor McCarthy has set up on sustainable material progress. McCarthy, who describes himself as an extreme optimist (one who thinks that things will work out well even if people do not heed his advice), has spent a tremendous amount if time with these pages, and the most populat of them have recieved a lot of traffic. The pages are the perhaps biggest collection of reasons to be upbeat about the future of the world that exist on the Internet. (Why does he do it? "The usual mixture of public spirit and ego").

I ask professor McCarthy why he is so optimistic. What made him do this? His answer is very interesting. He simple states: "I never stopped".

Then he explains that in the 50s everybody was this upbeat about the future, and as far as he is concerned there are no reaons not to be. McCarthy – in this sense – is a relic from another, much more positive, era when it comes to the view of the future. He thinks that human kind will continue to develop, populate the galaxy and expand it's powers indefintely to the borders set down by the first and second principles of thermodynamics. This is almost dizzying for someone like myself, whoi grew up in the shadow of the cold war, with imminent threats of global waming, comets and other prophesies of doom. But it is also liberating.

McCarthy supports his argument with facts, sources and a lot of data. But when I ask him if he has recieved a lot of criticism, he says ”No, sadly not.” He thinks that this is because his thinking is so deviant from the current thinking of the day that he safely can be ignored. This is probably true, but this speaks against not him, but more against our current zeitgeist.

Take one simple example. McCarthy is a strong proponent for nuclear power. He thinks that nuclear power and hydrogen will constitute a stable energy system that can sustain material progress for a long, long time. (Until the sun goes cold at least, and we will have to have come up with something else to live on by then). In his unbridled support for nuclear energy he is almost alone. Even those that argue in favor of nuclear energy today, do so from an argument of necessity. Peter Schwartz recently did this in a seminar held by the Long Now foundation – and his argument was that if we rely on oil we will have geopolitical tensions that will end in global war. So in a situation where the alternative is global war, nuclear energy could be ok.

McCarthy notes that this issue has become enormously ideologized. And the ideology is tainting the rational assessment of the technology, and this really makes him irritated. He cites numerous examples where nuclear energy is almost eliminated from discussions of future energy, just because it is controversial.

In this, and in the overall pessimism of the future, McCarthy finds no other explanation than the radical movement of 1968. The movement created a ”the-end-is-near”-mindset that has turned out to be incredibly hard to break – in part because the 68-generation now is in power in most media outlets, companies, public sector agencies and other places. The optimistic generation of the 1950s is, like McCarthy a generation emeritus.

But McCarthy has great faith in the future (though I sure that he would scoff at that description – it is not for him about ”faith”). He thinks that we will continue to develop and that the future will out. The risks – that a public ideology of doom creates a negative selective pressure on innovations, science and investments – are there, but they will be overcome.

Extreme optimism, anyone?

Posted by Nicklas at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

John LeGates has a tremendous experience in working with ICT-policy issues, as well as with policy analysis. When I meet him I want to discuss the future, but he starts off with issuing a caveat: he does not know how to predict the future, and it is clear that he does not think that anyone else does either. His grounds for this belief are simple: look back ten years and see who actually managed to predict the future.

He is his own counter-example, however. Back in 1980 LeGates wrote a paper that reduced the entire media industry to panic. He tried to sketch the plausible implications of information technology on the media world, and when I ask him now what he thought he got wrong, what he would change, he thinks for quite some time, and then answers, serioiusly, that he probably wouldn't change anything except for the timing. In a sense he thought that what is happening now (see the earlier post on a crisis in American media) would happen sooner, but it is happening now.

Well, what about the media then? LeGates predicts a two-tiered development (or rather: observes today that news industries are dividing into two distinct markets: the global/national and the local. Local news will always be needed, but global/national news may become commodities. This is not a novel idea, there are others who think the same. And on the commodity market of global and national news we could easily imagine that we will see a market for analysis and refined commentary emerge. The blogs are early entrants in this market, though LeGates thinks that they lack editorial quality (but that this might be changing). Personally, I think that editorial objectivity may have a niche market, but lessons from early American media seem to indicate that partisan, vile and propagandistic media can succeed quite well.

And the media is, of course, not the only sector of society that is being disrupted by the new technologies that develop. The natural question to ask is of course if the future will continue like this. John LeGates thinks it will not – he thinks we will see even more instability and an increased rate of change. While he is reluctant to predict the future, he notes that there are things happening now: forces, actors, trends – that can be used to understand the present, and often this is as useful as you could expect. One of the strongest and most persistent trends is that price/performance is increasing continually. And this in turn will lead to evermore instability and innovation. Often disruptive innovation, at that.

LeGates mentioned Moore's law as an example. I ask him whether he thinks that there are bounds to the development of price/performance and Moore's law. He smiles and says that there has always been such limits. And funnily, he notes, these bounds will always be reached in eight years or so. With regular intervals a paper is published that states that things cannot continue to evolve like they have sofar – but during the 40 years LeGates has been working with technology policy, well, they have continued to develop quickly breaking through all bounds.

The bounds, he explains, are there. But they are functions of the tools we have today. So when somebody say's that Moore's law will only hold true another 8 years, well they are correct: but only if we assume that nothing happens in eight years. And this never happens. During the eight years advances, changing technology bases and other trends eliminate the bounds. Progress knows bounds, but it keeps pushing them ahead.

This is really interesting. There should be a word for this phenomenon, and it is reminiscent of the worry horizons I tried to explore in a previous post. This boundary horizon is where our current tools will become worthless and fail to accelerate change. Over time it would be reasonable to guess that the boundary horizon has become shorter and shorter, and of course, on could formulate the singularity as the point where our tools become worthless the moment they are invented. The relationship between the tools of progress and progress is not well explored, and the tool horizon/boundary horizon may well be a useful concept to introduce in futures studies.

What slows this down then? Well, one thing, we agree – is regulation.John LeGates explains that all technologies go through phases and that during it's development at technology ”acquires the usually stakeholder accretions”. That is, the technology becomes politicized. This phenomenon might even be accelerating. As our society becomes more and more technology focused we seem to think that technology needs to be analysed and assessed from a societal standpoint earlier than before.

LeGates says that when he discusses this with large corporations, a worrying pattern is emerging. Many large companies note that they get more back from a dollar spent in the regulatory/legal department than in R&D. This is, of course, an extremely short-sighted view, but it seems to hold true. This encourages lawsuits over patents and copyrights, lobbying for retaining different regulatory perks (especially for large telcos) and other legal/regulatory strategies over basic research and development.

It seems as if R&D is perhaps best conducted, not within old firms, but in new entrants. Overall it may well be true that it is cheaper to buy these entrants than to finance research of your own. This would lead, in the long run, to an innovation system where large companies invest little or nothing in research. But the big question is if this is rational: if a dollar invested in research in a large company typically, over a time of ten years, returns two dollars, and if that same money could be used to by innovative firms the problem becomes two-fold: what are the costs for acquiring capital for these small innovative firms and what are the losses the large company suffers (or the gains) when it is continually forced to merge with smaller, more innovative companies? The equation looks quite complicated.

John LeGates finishes with an interesting observation: he notes that there is so much happening today that we tend to miss, and that there is no need to try to predict the future. The only thing we have to do is look around us and identify where we are today. That in itself is a very hard task. What is the state of the art in computer science, nano-technology and biotech? Who knows?

Maybe this is already the future.

Posted by Nicklas at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning I met with Victor Mayer-Schönberger at the JFK School of Government. We discussed governance issues and the Internet. Mayer-Schönberger is just finishing an article on the World Summit oin the Information Society (WSIS). During this summit the EU suggested that Internet governance issues be handled by a sui generis international institution. This institution would then be governmed by a basic charter of "rights" or qualities that Internet governance has to adhere to: openness, end-to-end...

The proposal was shot down by the US who felt that it was a bad idea, for reasons that are not clear. Mayer-Schönberger pointed out that if this had become international law, the result would have been that WSIS could have created a way to hold China and other dictatorships in check. They could then not design networks with heavy filtering, without violating the basic charter of Internet governance.

According to Mayer-Schönberger, then, the WSIS had within it's reach the possibility to restrain Chinese repression of the Internet, and they stopped it. Why? The formal reason might have been that the US was afraid that the Internet would come under the purvey of the ITU - connected to the UN. This would have been understandable. In the ITU we find a lot of countries that completely lack democratic legitimacy, and to allow them to govern the Internet is a horrible idea. But this was not the idea put forward by the EU - they did not want to choose between ICANN and ITU - they wanted to created a third alternative. But they were stopped - for what reason?

Mayer-Schönberger thinks that the interests of the Chinese government actually coincides with those of the large telecommunication companies in the US: they do not want to see end-to-end as a permanent quality of the Internet. They want to be able to control the networks, to prioritize traffic and de-commoditize connectivity.

We discussed at length the idea of end-to-end networks and the qualities the embody. Now, Mayer-Schönberger is not an unreserved fan of this design principle. He states that it seems clear that the end-to-end structure, the scale-free networks as well, seem adpated to incremental innovation - but not radical innovation. A strong believer in Stephen Jay Goulds model of punctuated equilibrium, Mayer-Schönberger believes that human innovation moves in large steps, and then remains in place. We should design our networks to accomodate this kind of innovation. But how? That is a hard question, but it seems as if we need new topologies to be able to strengthen this kind of innovation.

But how will these new networks look? One plausible idea that Mayer-Schöneberger works with is the idea of decentralised Napster-like networks where the computing resources are shared amongst a large number of different actors. Mayer-Schönberger has studied Second Life and other MMORPG to discern the architectural direction these gaming infrastructures are moving in. These games may well, in the future, allow for decentralised, radical innovation.

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This morning I visited the CSAIL at MIT and had the pleasure to discuss the future of the Internet with Dr David Clark and Dr William Lehr. Both are engaged in the interesting Communications Futures Policy project. The subject of the day was the future of the Internet and the conversation keyed in closely with the conversation I hade just a few days ago with Dr Parulkar.

What technological and social trends will drive the change for the Internet?

Both Dr Clarke and Dr Lehr agree that the Internet will change because of new technologies and networks that connect to it. Sensor networks and embedded computing are things that will become more and more important. But it is important, notes Clark, to think about this question in two steps: one is how the Internet will change and the other how it should change. The truly hard question is not how we will make the Internet better – we can envision ways to do this, as can industry – but rather how we can create the infrastructure we will need in the future. This is also the good thing with the GENI-project, according to Dr Clarke. The facility is a palpable result of the project but it is only one part, the actual research in the FIND-project (Future INternet Design) is much more important (a facility without projects to run would make no sense).

We have a peculiar problem when it comes to this. The Internet has been so hugely successful that it tends to blot out the need for not only incremental, but rather disruptive, innovation. It is hardly surprising that the majority of Internet researchers work with a better net, instead of a completely different net, since the net works so well right now. But what should the Internet look like in five to ten years time? That should be the question and we should bracket all issues of transition to this new platform, and concentrate on re-inventing a global communication platform as we would envision it not knowing of the Internet of today.

A hard task indeed.

Is the security situation degrading or improving or is it stable?

Both Dr Lehr and Dr Clarke think that the security situation is degrading and that the Internet is becoming less secure. Security, in fact, is the primary reason and motivation behind the FIND-project, Dr Clarke says. Phishing, new security holes and other systemic risks become more and more obvious, and where credit card companies could traditionally internalize risks by becoming their own insurance companies they have a hard time doing that today because of the systemic component of Internet risk: a disruptive technology could very well destroy the entire security systems of the existing commerce infrastructure.

Dr Clarke also thinks that in the next ten years information security will transform into risk management, the ambition to achieve total security or to use encryption will wane and be replaced by a reasoned attitude towards risk.

But what does it actually mean to say that the Internet is becoming less secure. Would it for example be reasonable to assume that information security breach related costs (ISB-costs) have increased as a percentage of the net economic worth of the Internet? Well, this is a much harder question to answer, says Dr Lehr. We do know that information security related costs are increasing, but the again, the total economic value of the Internet is almost immeasurable today and still growing (yes, that does sound strange, but it is huge anyway). It may well be that ISB-costs actually are becoming relatively smaller since the economic potential of the Internet is growing so quickly.

What about end-to-end architectures?

Much as Dr Parulkar Dr Clarke is not comfortable with the question of whether or not we will keep certain aspects of the existing network architecture, such as the end-to-end design. He does believe that a central component dealing that enables parties to freely consent on the use of different applications must be retained in order to ensure innovation at the edges of the network, but he also acknowledges that this is a blunt description.

"We need a new language to describe the richness of what is happening with networks today", he says.

And this new language is something he is trying to figure out in his ”non-existent spare time”. This does not mean, however, that he condones the idea of legislating for network neutrality. The idea or thinking behind network neutrality is that a infrastructure owner should not be able to prioritize his or her own traffic while sub-optimizing that of other, virtual operators of different kinds. Large companies dependent on the network, but unwilling to pay for it such as virtual VoIP-providers, search engines and others have been pushing for legislation that would make it impossible for network providers to discriminate against service providers.

The temptation for these companies to do so, however, must be great. To be able to sell prioritization would be to transform connectivity from a commodity to a differentiated product and would probably lead to enormous profits when media companies, service providers and others had to buy prioritized traffic (or simply traffic of with a certain QoS).

The problem that Dr Lehr and Dr Clarke have with this idea is not that they are against the legislation per se but rather that they think that this is a very dangerous area for the legislator to move in. The slightest mistake may lead to very adverse effects, and they both state that they have a hard time figuring out how this legislation would even look. All current examples the reject outright as not well thought.through.

"I am extremely nervous about our ability to write laws that cleanly excise the bad behaviours", Dr Clarke says.

And what would immediately happen if this was allowed is of course that basic Internet access would get a baseline quality that would be far below today's levels.

In summary

Both Dr David Clarke and Dr William Lehr have a wealth of experience in the Internet field, and their priority right now is to find the next Internet, beyond the current incremental improvements. What really strikes me about the discussion we had is how hard this will be, how extremely challenging it will be to bracket the Internet, it's current successes and the huge societal impact it has had.

And how necessary it is to do just this in order to come up with something truly deserving of the epithet ”the next” big thing.

Posted by Nicklas at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I met with Dr Guru Parulkar with the National Science Foundation on the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). The project has a staggeringly difficult task: to reinvent the Internet bottom up. The theory behind this is actually quite simple: the current Internet architecture has powered more than thirty years of innovation, commerce and communication, but it is now in need of a review and there are obvious difficulties with security, address space limitations and basic networking functions. New innovations, like sensor networks and mobile clients, require a different structure and a new form of networking architecture.

Why a new Internet?

There is a great risk that the current Internet infrastructure actually creates a negative selection pressure on innovations in that it limits what can be done, for example in the sensor network space. To avoid this Dr Parulkar and the National Science Foundation founded GENI. The idea being to connect existing research on what the next generation Internet would look like and to develop a research facility for experiments that require a different, more versatile network design.

Sensor networking - where sensors with limited computing and communication power may be widely deployed at a cheap cost - will revolutionize much of what we know about science, communication and the net today. These many little sensors will be embedded, Dr Parulkar believes, in everything that costs more than ten dollars - starting a cambrian explosion of connectivity where the species of connected devices will explode in to multiplicity and result in a much more diverse network than today. This also requires new thinking on the part of the network designers, he notes.

Sensor networks are also interesting because they bring senses to the web. Hitherto the net has been numb, deaf, blind, without sense of smell or touch. With sensor networks - and some are already being tried out in military applications - all this will change. We will have a sensing network, a special kind of entity that will be able to monitor everything from pollutants in the air to the kind of perfume you are using (now, let's not get started on the privacy issues in a sensor network with DNA-sampling ability...).

The GENI facility - Dr Parulkar is careful to point out that it is not a testbed since a testbed is dedicated to one single idea - will be started in the year 2008 and be ready in five years. In a way it resembles a particle accelerator, but for network research: it is general facility with certain limitations that can be used by researchers to try out designed experiments in a controlled environment. The operating time of the testbed is presumed to be ten years.

Societal impact studies

When Dr Parulkar describes the project I ask him if they have decided to take into account societal impact issues as well, and he says that they plan to do so. It is, he explains, an integral part of the project. I admit that this really does not surprise me, but I still want to know why, so I asked him directly: why would you care about the societal impact? The guys who invented the Internet never did - they invented a then-superior form of networking system, that was all. They had no intention, capability or reason to discuss societal impact (and had they done so they would probably not have expected what actually happened!).

Dr Parulkar admits that this is the case, and when I say that there seems to be a political correctness to all the talk about societal impact in innovation systems he does not directly disagree, but he poses a counter-question. If we have reasonable grounds to believe that a technology can have a severe impact, should we not then examine this? And again, he notes, if a technology has a clear value proposition it will be adopted anyway, no matter what the societal impact may be.

Well, perhaps. The thing is that the discussions on societal impact almost always center on negative consequences, and the press these discussions get creates a negative incentive for investors and scientists to engage in different areas. And in order to discern the positive effects or value propositions the technology may need time to develop in a space where it is not hampered and our creativity is not limited by discussions about possible downsides.

The talk about societal impact may again create a negative selection pressure on innovation systems, forcing out innovations that could have great impact, but seem associated with possible (not probable, nota bene) drawbacks. The most obvious example is perhaps stem-cell research.

End of end to end architectures?

The next thing we discussed was the current focus on end-to-end network architectures. The old telephone network was a highly centralised and "smart" system in that all the intelligence actually was embedded in the network. The phones were dumd devices at the edges and nothing could be done with them to innovate. Anybody who wanted to innovate communication in the telephone networks had to work with the bottleneck of the central telephone company. When the Internet came, it reversed this almost completely. The Internet was in many senses an extremely dumd network and pushed intelligence to the edges, thus enabling one of the perhaps strongest and most diversified waves of innovations humanity has seen.

Now, will this be preserved in the next generation networks? Dr Parulkar thinks that the question is based on a faulty premise. It is not the case, he notes, that there has to be an either-or situation. With virtual overlay networking, for example, he explains, each end user at the edges can create their own network which should spur even more innovation. True - these may be intelligent or dumb networks, but that does not matter. What matters is that the network actually allows for yet another layer of innovation in restructuring the network.

The assumption behind the dichotomy between end-to-end networks and centralised networks is that we have to choose. But what if the user can choose to build virtual networks on the top of the existing infrastructure? Then he or she can best adapt their business models, research projects or other networks to the task at hand. The distinction between smart/dumb becomes a matter of choice made at the edges.

In summary

The fascinating thing about GENI is perhaps that it is all the Internet was not. It is a planned attempt to change the infrastructure of communication in the world. Perhaps it will even result, Dr Parulkar says, in a parallel network that overtakes the Internet much as the Internet supplanted the telephone network and it in turn supplanted the telegraph network.

We will see.

Posted by Nicklas at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)