WASHINGTON – MARCH 14: Robert Metcalfe smiles after US President George W. Bush introduced him … [+]
After winning the prestigious Turing Award, Bob Metcalfe likes to look back and reflect on everything that has brought us to this point – – including the principle of connectivity and the rapid and dramatic rise of new technologies in our lifetimes…
There’s almost something mystical about his talk: the old Chinese proverb about building roads, early forays into ARPANET and, later, our modern world, where data flies at the press of a button. Suggesting that the principle of connectivity is central, Metcalfe invites us to think about the how and why of things like packet switching – and how digital transfer might interact with the physical transfer of materials, tissues, cells, of atoms… you get the picture. Connectivity is essential, integral, omnipresent and takes many forms.
In particular, Metcalfe explains the progression of technology in the Moore’s Law era by building on the early ideas that made up the modern Internet. He will point out that it all started with Telnet, where people wanted to access other people’s servers, then FTP, to transfer their own data to other servers, then email, which he dates to around 1973, and all the rest. .
Thinking back to building networks and his time at other things overlapped. of these early works.
Metcalfe also often mentions Ethernet as a foundational technology – not just Ethernet, either, but other advances like the mouse (attributed largely to Doug Engelbart) and early networking, with the involvement of people like Bob Taylor (check out his obituary from 2017 on Wired to learn more about how these people worked together to build what we now use every day).
It is also, as he points out, a durable system: rather than being supplanted by something new, Ethernet, semantically, has incorporated other new technologies. This is interesting, because many other names have been relegated to the sidelines of the march into the future.
Regardless, this mystical principle of connectivity can be seen in Metcalfe’s column on the modular approach to the evolution of the Internet. There’s the founding of Cisco in 1984, when, as he puts it, “the scale started to reveal itself” and the way Web 2.0 formed from the original World Wide Web. But the journey hasn’t been entirely smooth either.
Another interesting thing that Metcalfe brings to the table is a look at some of the challenges and obstacles that have accompanied the meteoric evolution of the Internet.
He sometimes calls these “pathologies”.
We can group them into two different sets – those that came early and others that came later, basically, now…
When we talk about early-onset pathologies, we often first talk about hacking – the war between external parties and the targeting of other people’s systems, which so many people compare in various ways to physical theft.
Then there’s pornography, which, as Metcalfe notes, has devoured vast swaths of the Internet, revealing some of the most regressive parts of human nature.
But it’s interesting to think about one of the other points Bob made: the early founders of the Internet didn’t want it to be used for advertising!
Of course, that ship has sailed…
So what are today’s pathologies?
Well, they include censorship and misinformation, not to mention disinformation, and let’s not forget about compromising data privacy. Today, our data is traded on the dark web and elsewhere, and we need to think about how the infinite free flow of information can, in some cases, mislead people.
So what you get from Metcalfe’s musings is a balanced view of something that seems to happen in the blink of an eye – the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to the Internet, and what will follow.
We are now in the age of AI. We’re thinking about all these new capabilities and how they will shape our future. In a sense, it’s all about connectivity. Understanding this better can help us chart a path forward.