MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium - Fifty Years After 'As We May Think' (Part 2/5)

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MODERATOR: Well, it's a great pleasure and privilege to introduce another genuine pioneer, another person who's really helped shape our field in a multiplicity of ways. Bob Kahn was primarily responsible for the design of the ARPANET, which was the first practical realization of packet switching, which was rather a controversial thing at the time people first started advocating it. He was also responsible for initiating the internet project at APRA, which was the follow-on to ARPANET. And that was the first open architecture network, another very important idea. He's a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, which provides the framework for the internet.

Now, that's one role in which he functioned as key designer/scientist/engineer. Another was that he was a enlightented funder of the ARPA academic community. And he was responsible for initiating and funding many star projects and stars. And we're all in his debt.

He's been a tireless champion of computers and communications and that interplay that is so important to us today. He left APRA for a very specific purpose, to found-- and he is now president of-- the corporation for National Research Initiatives, which he founded in '86 to provide leadership for the research and development that he felt would absolutely be vital for the national information infrastructure, the NII, or as it became later known, the information superhighway, or the infobahn, or whatever your favorite buzzword is, that that would take in order to be more than just hype to be reality and to be useful to all of us. And he is still engaged in working those research issues.

Now, bringing it back to our theme today, Bush had very little to say about how people work together, the idea of sharing, or as Ted now says, transclusion, was certainly in there, but it is almost hidden away. And you really had the sense that he was working on personal information management devices. But sharing information is obviously the name of the game today. And spools of annotated microfilm in the mail is not how we fortunately have to do things today. He simply did not anticipate computers and communications as it has grown up. And Bob's role here today will be to talk about ways in which to extend Bush's vision. Bob.

KAHN: Let's see. Would you have any serious objections if I took your laptop off of the podium here? The urge to press on these keys is too--

PRESENTER: Just can't resist a keyboard.

KAHN: Thank you. OK. Well, first of all, I am delighted to be here at this session honoring the 50 years of Bush's paper. And particularly happy to be on the program after both Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart.

I have to tell you, though, that I think it would have been much nicer if you put them on in the reverse order because every time I listen to Doug, I feel nice, and smooth, and relaxed. And when I hear Ted, I feel like I need to lie down.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

Well, just-- Doug reminds me of a cyber psychologist. I always feel like probing. And every time I listen to Ted, it's sort of a hybrid. And I keep going back and forth between Back to the Future and Saturday Night Live.

When I was asked to give this talk, Andy said, look, anything you'd like to talk about would be fine as long as it's in the context of Bush's paper because that's what this symposium is about. And I got to thinking about the real guidance I got because in listening to both Doug's talk and Ted's talk, I got the impression that the guidance from Andy to Doug may have been to only talk about ideas that had been well thought about for the last 40 years, in which, of course, Doug has been doing over and over again. And in listening to Ted, I had the impression that he said, don't talk about any idea that you've had in the last 35 years, so focus only on stuff that hasn't evolved since then.

To me, when I first suggested, well, what about the internet, and I can talk a little bit about packet switching, he says, no, no, that's retrograde. So talk about the future, look into what the future is likely to produce. And I said, well, then, how about something about the framework for digital object services, which is where things are currently at in my way of thinking. He says, no, that sounds too much like a computer science seminar. I really want you to speculate about the future, which I translated to mean, don't talk about any idea that you ever thought about before you show up on this podium.

[LIGHT LAUGHTER]

And that's been a little bit hard to do. So I probably won't keep to the letter or that particular guidance. But I'll do my best.

Let's see. When you look at the paper that Bush wrote, and I've read it now many, many times, and on the one hand, it really is very prescient about some of the needs, and requirements, and desires, and ideals that we might have in the future. I'm particularly impressed about his notion of what reality is.

I mean, his reality is totally embedded in the inventions of the day or the near term. He talks a lot about photo cells and advanced photography. He talks about thermionic tubes. He talks about typewriters.

He's locked into the stuff of the day, as it were. He certainly doesn't talk about digital technology. And I want to get into that in the future.

He has a very strong focus in his particular writing on scientists and what's left for the scientific community to focus on. He certainly has pointed to the information overload problem, which certainly must be greater now than it was then. But it's nice to know that it's not a new problem. At least it gives us some hope if we haven't solved it in the last 50 years. We have some work to do in the next 50.

He talked a lot about the linking of ideas. But when you looked at the machinery that he was talking about dealing with it, it tended to be more grounded in logic than it was in higher level notions, more semantic contexts. And perhaps he really believed that somehow higher level ideas could be put into the context of logic as many people have proposed on certain axiomatic bases. And he, I think, emphasized very strongly the human dimension as he got into the notion of mnemonics and where it could lead through some of his ideas like trails and so forth.

But as I look at what he wrote about in the paper, I am also struck by what it was lacking as well as what it was prognosticating upon. It was really very strongly lacking in digital technology. And we heard even from some of the members of the audience that perhaps he was not all that comfortable with digital technology because it really arose from around him but not from within him personally.

It's interesting also that the paper was dated in the year in which-- or certainly in the decade in which computing first really emerged as a workable invention. Not to say that people had thought about it before and hadn't poked around with it, but I think the '40s was really the year of the early workable machines, in the '50s, the first really practical ones. And then after that, it really got commercialized seriously.

He was also therefore embedded in a world of analog devices. He was focused on where the science community went. And, of course, he was also well grounded in the physics community of the day, which, at the end of World War II, saw its mission coming to an end potentially.

I think we have some of the same similarities today, but a very different possible rollout. Just as the end of World War II offered serious questions and challenges for the scientific community, so to today does the end of the Cold War offer some serious challenges for the entire scientific research community in this country because we have come to the end of what's been a very long 50-year compact between the federal government and the research community in the sense that a lot of the research that was supported over that period was predicated on the need to do it because of the Cold War.

And while that's by no means a suggestion that the federal government won't continue a compact with the research community, it's pretty clear to me that it's being reformulated as we speak. And nobody yet knows what the shape and form of it is. I'm particularly hopeful that it will come out with as strong support as we've had in the past. But it's by no means guaranteed. So, there are some parallels between what we've seen in the past and what we're seeing now.

The fortunate thing in Vannevar Bush's time was the fact that he had this future that was unveiling itself as he was writing his work. Today you could say that some of the same is happening. I could argue that we have not yet really seen the innovation that's going to really change the world of the future. Maybe we have it in our heads, and it hasn't come out. Or maybe it's happening around us, and some of us don't know about it.

The absence of digital technology in his vision it seems to me led to a very limited view of what was doable and what was not doable. In 1972, when I played at the very first ICCC conference a tape about the ARPANET and the origins of packet switching, a lot of the people who were very active and have stayed active in the field were on that tape. And had we done a retrospective, I would have played it for you here today in part.

If you listen to that tape, what you will hear is that the communication folks speak in very timeless phrases. They talk about the need for connectivity, high bandwidth, highly reliable systems. And you could play it today and say it's today's challenge just as well.

When you listen to the folks who are more grounded on the computer side of the world, and I think the distinction was larger then than it is today, almost everyone was talking about the technology of the day. And so almost nothing that they said really translates easily into today's context because it's dated. So you would see people talking about the need to connect a high power graphics display to a powerful remote time sharing system as their aspiration for the future.

Today, nobody would argue that. Nobody talked about much of the technology that showed up because it just didn't exist. They talked about better use of the technology that they then had. But they were very clear about the role of software in this whole thing.

Well, where are we today? I say still in very embryonic state. We are rapidly converting to digital. But lest you think that we've made a lot of progress to date, we are barely there.

Today, if you can imagine a not too distant future when we might have, let's say, upwards of 60 million people on the internet, keep in mind that that's likely to be less than 1/10 of 1% of the world's population. So that the actual size of the population that we're-- or maybe it's 1%, but the size of the population that we have to deal with is much, much larger than people who are now experiencing this particular technology.

And as the technology gets out, the biggest problem I think we're going to have to deal with is the cultural distinctions between the network itself, and what it implies, and the physical reality that we all deal with on a daily basis. So let me separate these two things and talk about the physical reality and the network and give you some notion of the kind of cultural disparity that exists between these two worlds. I mean, I've experienced myself in a number of different contexts. It's come up in some of the dealings with the financial community when they have largely in the past-- and most people think about using networks as a vehicle for moving information about money.

What they don't realize is that you can also have a notion of money that exists wholly within the network itself, has no necessary physical counterpart in the outside. So, you open up your wallet, you take out a string of bits, you hand it to somebody else, and you've done the same thing as take out a dollar bill and hand it to them. That is, there need be no physical account anywhere else in the world that knows about that dollar bill or knows about these bits. And yet, you can pass them around, maybe even make change for them.

Well, when you describe that to people who are somewhat sophisticated about digital technology, very first thing they think about is you must mean passing information about it no matter what words you use. It's very hard to think about anything else.

Second example I would give you is in the working that we've done with the library community, where the library community traditionally has been very paper-based. They deal with books. They deal with stacks of material. And their notion of the network is it's a way of taking that paper world and dealing with that information in a more flexible-- flexible way. And so what they tend to do is take their thoughts and their approaches that were well developed in the paper world and try and bring them into the world of the network, oftentimes at the loss of all the new flexibility that you could get if you rethought it completely.

Anyone who has ever tried to take a book and put a book on the network in anything more than just showing the pages one after another or letting you move through them more flexibly realizes that the design of something for the network world can be a very different challenge than a design of something for the paper world. And I'm not talking about just the ability to do hypertext linking and things like that. The very nature of that experience can be very different. So the heart of the problem as I see it in this particular cultural context is getting people to understand that when you're in the network, you may be having a different experience than when you're outside.

And so there's the whole idea of where you're grounded. And when you're grounded in reality, the network is a tool. When you're grounded in the network, then reality becomes your tool, as it were. You have things flip around completely. So this shows up in a number of different domains. But let me just start out by talking about creativity in the digital world for starters.

People that we deal with in the various industries that are content-oriented today know that when they produce a work in paper form or if they record something, it has a reality in the physical world. And when it gets translated into the digital world, they want to think of it as being the same thing. A lot of laws that apply in the physical world that they'd like to apply in the electronic world, and maybe that's the right way for it to come out politically. It doesn't have to come out that way technologically.

There are people who can create things in the digital world. That is to say if you are a creator of a musical work, there's no need necessarily for that work to first show up in audio recorded form before it ever gets transduced into any way that's captured and stored in memory. That is, you can create a totally in digital form without anybody ever having heard it before. And in that sense, it's got different properties than it might if it were in the normal analog physical world.

The act of converting something from the physical world to the digital world is to some a trivial, mechanical contrivance. It's just a matter of scanning some bits, digitizing some bits. But what you end up with is something that is uniquely different in many ways.

It's manipulable in different ways. It's processable. It's transportable. There are things that you can potentially do with it. And in fact, it may be a very new contrivance all on its own.

I'm reminded of the discussions that I've had with my wife, who happens to be a copyright lawyer, about the history of some of the key developments in this field. And I was particularly struck with how difficult it was to get people to realize that a motion picture was really a different kind of thing than just a series of images.

And yet while in this country we recognize the existence of the motion pictures, audio visual work of a different kind than just a collection of images, because it does have a storyline, and it does convey a different experience, there are countries around the world for which motion pictures are protected as just a very long series of images. And there is no other attribution given to them beyond that.

So, one of the hypotheses I want to put out is that, in general-- and this may not be true in every single case, and this is certainly not a statement about how laws should be written-- but the fact of the matter is that digital representations of things are in fact literary works. They are putting together things in terms of sequences of symbols, which is what a literary work is. We tend to put them together as sequences of the alphabet, which are non-processable all except by a human brain and system looking at it.

Potentially English could be processable by a machine in the future according to some rules. But when you write computer programs, and you're executing on digital representations, you in fact are dealing with literary works in a program field according to my reading of the law today. Whether that is something that would be universally accepted or not is a different issue. But it seems to be the case.

Now, when you talk about a digital representation, the interesting word there is not so much digital but representation because it implies that what you have inside the system is a representation of what was outside the system. And what do you do when you start out with something that's inside the system to begin with?

Well, it's not clear it's a digital representation of anything else. It may be the first and only fixation. It may have an analog representation of the digital original, if you will, but it may not be a digital representation of something that was outside like a digital representation of an image, or a movie, or whatever.

Furthermore, as we move to an all-digital world, my assertion is that our grounding in reality is going to be lost in a very fundamental way in the sense that as we get into more and more activities that involve multiple participants enabled through this digital medium, everyone will be able to be involved and participate, witness, view, experience a given event or set of events in their own unique way.

And you might say we do that today all by ourselves. And an arbitrary camera, though, could record the facts as they were. And so the facts of the particular setting could be recorded on film. And we would say that was the reality.

But in a digital space, maybe you can't get to a single place that was the thing that produced the experience that everybody had. And since they all saw it differently, the Rashomon phenomena are likely to abound in multiple ways. So there may in fact be no real reality anymore, just multiple perceptions of the same thing coming together.

Well, when you look at Bush's notion, and you realize that digital technology didn't fit in his world, you realize that he was pushing pretty hard, and in a rather remarkable way, to figure out how all these analog pieces of technology could play into this future. But when we look at it today, that range of technology almost is not on the visibility scene. We have semiconductors and electronics more generally.

My guess is that in time even that technology may be superseded by something else. I mean, we're all looking at optics and photonics. But that may not be the last word in terms of materials and material phenomena. In fact, as we move to faster and faster and smaller and smaller, we may get from our current views where we're talking about moving things to actually manipulating things in smaller and smaller worlds as we get into the ability to manipulate the nanoscopic and smaller.

On the networking front, the issue is somewhat similar to computing in the sense that I think computing as we know it as a machine that's able to manipulate symbols on our behalf will be around probably forever. Networking in terms of its ability to provide reliable connectivity between different parties will probably be around with us forever. I don't think those are likely to be taken for granted anytime soon. Maybe in the future it will.

And so when you look at what is possible within this framework, begin to realize that while many people are pushing the technologies, and we get amazing developments almost every year, in fact, the real action is likely to be in the systems and the application side of the world where we will try and put these things together in interesting ways that take real advantage of the power of the networking and the power of the computing capabilities, both the equipment themselves and all of the peripheral devices that go along with it.

Everybody here probably would view progress in networking in terms of a few simple measures like bandwidth, moving from 56 kilobits or 300 bod for those old timers to one and a 1/2 megabits, or a gigabit, or a terabit or a petabit. And I run out of Greek prefixes at some point here. Somebody could probably help.

On the computing side, software is still too hard. But the real challenge is putting it together. It's the integration function.

And as you think about the integration function, you realize that the idea of integration ultimately has going to be more than just plug and play. That is, plug and play presumes that somebody has figured out what the architecture is for coherence beforehand and put out this technology in a form that you can just plug it and things will work.

But this is unlikely to be the way things actually work. It's unlikely to be the way things work at the technology level. It's unlikely to be the way things work at certain dimensions of the human interaction level. And it's unlikely to work that way at the content level.

Now, if I could have the first of the slides. I just want to give you the NII example of how this integration can and cannot play out. There are a lot of people who think that the NII, so-called National Information Infrastructure is a kind of thing that we need. And we might consider putting out an RFP to somebody to go build it, like a building. So it's got an architecture that's below it. But in fact, it's probably more organic than that.

To really be effective, it needs to have the kind of dynamism that the economy might have where you can capitalize on ideas from different sources, put them together so that the whole is greater than just the sum of the parts. But this slide illustrates one model of an NII that might come out of our combined activities. But what is this? It's a very uninteresting notion of an NII. It is more like what we would define the economy to be, namely the set of all activities that are in [INAUDIBLE] production and consumption, social and otherwise, in our system.

Here's the same thing for the NII. You simply take the collection of technologies, and applications, and all the things that people produce, and all the things that people consume, put a circle around that, and call that the NII. If that's what we end up with, we will have failed to leverage the real possibilities of this revolution in computers and communications that we're experiencing.

The infrastructure is absolutely crucial. And the reason it's crucial is that if it's done right, it can lower the barriers to productivity in lots of different ways. You've heard some examples already from some of our speakers.

But we haven't really had a national-level infrastructure despite the fact that we've had a telephone system in this country for a long time. I heard one of my colleagues say this was a hundred-year mistake in going from all digital technology in the telegraph to all analog technology and now back again. But that's another matter.

We may, in fact, go through this cycle again and again as we consider whether to move to an all-optical plan, which is not yet clearly digitized. So we may move back to an all optical one at some point in the future only to realize the power of digital technology in the network, and then figure out how to gain the power of that through some physical invention of which I can barely begin to comprehend at this point. So, you have this conundrum.

If I could have the next slide. This is the dream that many people have, that you take all of these different capabilities that are going to be part of the NII, and they go through a magic convergence process. Don't ask me what it is. I saw a wonderful film on the notion, which made fun at this whole notion as to whether it's possible.

But I would describe the first slide as being akin to putting out an RFP for a symphony asking for violin, oboe, first cello pieces and saying that there can be no more than 30 minutes in length and have a dynamic range of 60 dB. And then you take the-- you take the ones that look nicest on the screen, you add them together, and you call that your symphony.

The problem is it's missing something. And I know what to call it exactly. It's not the architecture of the symphony.

But it is the musical work that was presumably in the symphony in the first place. So you're not going to get that musical work by linear addition. It isn't going to happen, except that unless the monkeys-- enough monkeys submit musical compositions.

So how is it going to happen? Well, one way it could happen is if magically Mozart could figure out what the NII symphonies are for each of these different areas and come out with the right prescriptions for what the oboes, and the flutes, and so on should be playing. But the NII is so big and broad that Mozart needs a pretty dynamic range to be able to cover all these bases. And I don't know anybody who's broad enough to cover absolutely every one of the bases. And maybe there are some who can cover some of them. But we don't even know what all the bases are.

So how are we going to get to this convergence? And more importantly, how are we going to get anybody to agree to this notion of convergence? I think it's going to be very hot.

I want to come back to this because the key to this working is open architecture in my view. And it seems to me that the notion of open architecture is not necessarily something that is going to be unanimously agreed to a priori. We may agree to an open architecture a posteriori once all the standards, and interfaces, and the like are in the marketplace.

And if I can have the next slide. The more likely scenario is that we will have some degree of convergence in some limited domains initially. And that we'll have a lot of separate efforts by different groups, some with vertical integration and some not. And sum of those two things, in fact, will be what we decide to call the NII.

Now, as you think about the open architecture issue, let me try and describe this in internet terms. When I was first working on the internet architecture, I described it to a large number of people as an open architecture approach to networking. It basically says, anybody can bring their own notion of a network.

You can plug it together. And somehow, the whole thing will seamlessly work to do best efforts delivery of packets from source to destination. And it doesn't matter what the network technology is. Furthermore, you can have value-added service providers come and provide their own networks. In fact, the whole thing could be commercialized at some point and still allow for evolution of the technology.

Well, in the early '70s, we had one large communications company in this country. And the idea of them building an open architecture network for lots of other people to participate wasn't exactly in their game plan at the time. And in fact, I suspect broadly speaking, even for people who would have been open to that idea, it didn't mean anything to them. They didn't know how to relate to it.

I could see similar parallels to people trying to relate to hypertext when their only model of the world was a book. But when you're trying to relate to a network, you think about how you put it together, how's it going to work? Well, what's the issue here? Nobody's really in charge. The framework is responsible for keeping it working. There might be a process through which evolution can take place, but nobody really is running it.

It just didn't have the ring of truth. Nothing this important to our society should be run that way, except the economy maybe or a few other things like that. So it just didn't have the ring of truth back in those days to anybody who didn't understand it.

So where are we today? You take the area of electronic transactions, which libraries will fall into, and electronic commerce would fall into it, all of those things, and you say, what we really need is an open architecture for digital libraries, let's say. And everybody says, yeah, that's fine.

But then they glaze over because it doesn't mean anything to them. They don't know what does it mean? And I say, well, it's really simple. You bring your own library to the thing, and it seamlessly becomes integrated in the whole.

You say, yeah, great idea. And you go on to your next thing because it doesn't translate into a technological plan of action. And even if it did, it doesn't translate into a political, systematic, commercial plan of action either. At least that's the way most people would look at it.

So, you go to someone who is in the database world and say, this is what we want to say, and we have the answer. It's called distributed database technology. That's what it does. Except it's my distributed database technology.

And you say, well, I want to take your distributed data based technology and make that an open architecture. And you say, wait a minute, that's where our value-added stuff comes in. And we can't possibly do that and make it available to anybody else. And I'm going to come back to this in the context of content in the middle because there is an analogous notion of an open architecture for dealing with content. But let me do that in due course.

So, here you have this issue of open architecture, which I think is important. But you have to realize that there are many people in industry who would look at open architecture and say, that's what we get after the whole process of sorting out the marketplace is over. And if you try and do it upfront, it precludes any single industrial giant who thinks they can do the whole vertical slice from weighing in and taking over the market.

So some people think it's a good idea. And some people think it's a bad idea. But I think it's the only way you can get this organic growth into a very large system where everybody has a chance to participate.

Well, then you think about organic growth, and that leads you immediately into issues of adaptability. If I could have the next slide. I've got some of these points I'm going to touch on outlined here.

So I've already talked about digital technology. I'm going to come back to a couple of the points there. But I'm jumping down right now into adaptive behavior.

The most important thing you want in any system-- and again, I'm thinking of network in the broad sense of including not only the communications and all the different pathways, but also the machines that may be connected to them. And when I talk about communications, I don't only mean terrestrial lines. I do mean wireless, over the air. I do mean all of the different media that one might use in order to get information from one place to another, electronic, optic, or whatever.

And I would even include in this open architecture the possibility of non-permanent connections so that people can in fact exit from the system and plug back in and still keep things going. So you'd like this kind of system to be able to adapt itself. And ideally, you'd like it to be able to adapt itself in some intelligent ways.

How many of you know of any systems that really have a detailed awareness of what it is that they're doing? And the answer is almost none. I mean, they might know, for example, in the phone company how much loading is on their lines, or they may keep some traffic statistics. But in terms of what's really going on, they really don't have a notion nor any idea of how they can then configured the net to do a better job of dealing with this.

To give you an example of how you could get a better idea of awareness or even learning, let me hypothesize that in the world of the future, which might lead to very, very complex functionality or might not, that individual components in the net may have the ability to know what it is that's going on. A given wafer, for example, might no longer be just a set of electronics carrying out a function, but could, in fact, be multiple levels where level one, in one example, might be carrying out the function, and level two might be overseeing the function carried out by the other level. Now, if something goes wrong at one level, the other one might know about it, may be able to fix it, and so forth.

Likewise, you can have synergistic implementations where both levels are providing functionality and also at the same time keeping track of the others. And that's only a two-level model. You can have trivial models that have more than two levels dealing with just replication and just checking to make sure how many are doing the same thing. But that's not really very smart. I think we can do better than that. So I think the idea of incorporating adaptive behavior in the net is an important one.

Another thing that becomes important-- I'm going to come back to this later-- is the possibility of injecting intelligence into the net. That is to say, today we're living in a world where everything that happens inside the system is principally controlled by the person who built it, brought it to you, runs it, operates it. There are very few cases where the intrinsic operation of that system is allowed to be controlled by arbitrary people from outside sending in the equivalent of, as it were, intelligent agents in the system that could effect its performance.

This smacks to many people of allowing viruses to come in. And it raises all the issues of trust and control. It raises all the issues of scoping and so forth. But it seems to me it's an our-- it's in our future.

Before I get off of this slide, let me jump up a couple of levels and just touch on a few other points I didn't make on this slide. One is that Bush in his article talked a lot about capturing information from everywhere. I mean, he talked about, I don't know, walnuts on your forehead-- I forget exactly how he put it-- microfilm just snapping pictures everywhere, hidden shutters in your pocket. The fact of the matter is we are rapidly getting to the point where every one of us can make digital fixations of everything that happens in our daily lives cost effectively in the predictable future.

And the real question is, what are we going to do with all of this information? We talk about information overload, this also becomes our intellectual property, a very fundamental nature, and raises some very profound social and cultural problems for the country. Every one of us has the potential for other people wanting to see as much of this information as we're willing to make available.

At some time in the not too distant future, there will be the first woman president of the United States. And that person may or may not be a little girl right now. And everything that goes on in that person's life may be of interest to the country as a whole. But you won't know about it until that event happens.

And so seems to me that if we were in that state, we ought to be making it possible to retain as much of this information as individuals are willing to allow to be retained, subject to their administrative controls, so that we do not lose our culture in the future. That's what I meant by digital fixations. Also, the ability to use this technology to allow collaboration and teamwork.

I'm going to come back to this in a few minutes. But there is a very distinct difference in view of what networking can do depending on what business you're in. Here's one view of the network as the medium for production and consumption of, let me say, information, maybe it's content. That is the idea if somebody produces something of value, the network is the delivery vehicle. Somebody buys it, you pay for it, transaction is done. This is trying to simulate the buying and selling of the economy in the network environment.

There's another model of the network where it's a medium for collaboration. It enables things to happen that couldn't otherwise happen for which there is no equivalent counterpart in speed and power in the physical world. And it seems to me that as we develop these ideas more fully, we're going to see these basic assumptions about what the network is having to come to the surface so that we can deal with them, both in law and in terms of the whole evolution of these systems.

In the notion of in cyberspace that I mentioned earlier, I think it's going to be possible for all of us to actually have a digital presence in cyberspace. Today almost all of us relate to it in one way or another. And that relationship is varying at different rates for many of us.

When I first started using the network in a serious way as a tool, I found myself initially going back to pencil and paper because I was comfortable in that mode. Because using the machine, I had to remember too many things. Too many things could go wrong. I didn't either quite trust it or understand it.

Well, I didn't feel relaxed enough to just relate to it in that mode. And then somewhere along the line, it just became the natural way to do things. And then the paper world became the arcane way. And for many people, I think they're going to discover a presence in cyberspace that's different from our current notion of just relating to it as a place where you go to pull things off a web or where you go to send a piece of email, but you actually have an existence there that's every bit as important in some ways as your existence outside of that space.

On the area of open architecture, again, the issue here is a very profound one for the scientific community. Because historically, the development of science has been predicated on the notion of individuals doing the work and therefore publishing their work in a form that others can review it. But when you're trying to actually create infrastructure, oftentimes the full resolution of a problem and all its details is an inhibitor to getting other people to adopt it.

That is, the very fact that you stipulate an approach when there might be 1,000 different approaches is an inhibitor rather than a solution for actually creating the infrastructure. It may be an interesting intellectual idea, it may be a contribution to knowledge, but it may be an inhibitor to the actual creation of infrastructure. So the hard part about infrastructure is excising all of the details for which there may be lots and lots of different and alternative approaches that are better than any single one that you might come up with, or where you don't even know that the one that you have maybe the best, allowing for people to participate in that process. If I can have the next slide.

I think that the real issue in network enhancement is, one, what is the network itself? And number two, what kind of functionality are we willing to allow others to stipulate for the network? In the case of almost every situation that I've dealt with, people have shied away from allowing other people to have a key part in describing functionality. They're willing to take inputs, but they're not willing to let them take actions that produce that functionality.

And so I think this is going to be particularly interesting as we get into issues of learning in the network. And by learning, I don't necessarily mean that to have a scholarly notion as one might normally attribute to that term, but rather ones that can incrementally update themselves, they can figure out what's going on, that can detect patterns of behavior, do things to improve things that can be codified in the form of computer programs that can cause specific actions to take place. That's what I mean by my that term.

Let me go into this issue of this ubiquitous content capture, which I mentioned briefly before. If we have all of this information that's around, and we have it all in digital form, then we all become intellectual property purveyors in the most profound way. I suspect that a few of us in this audience have become aware of the value of intellectual property either by virtue of their selling videotapes, or by virtue of turning things into books for sale, or what have you.

But when you actually have all of this information about yourself, you don't know how much of it is going to have value. Therefore, you probably want to protect as much of it as you can from misuse by others. And this gets into a topic that I want to spend most of the rest of the time on. And that is the issue of malleability.

Once you've got a system that's capturing all of this information, it's going to be very easy to keep track of a variety of things. People have noted that in the past.

Bush's paper was particularly cogent on this particular idea that you could settle things up, you could keep track of schedules, building links. And the digital technology makes that possible. This is one of the areas where I think the predictions are more likely to come true. And they can be in various forms. They can deal with money resolutions. They can deal with logistics, your schedules, what have you.

And furthermore, the technology is all going to probably become more integrated with us. I mean, I can see the day when the threads in my jacket will be mini antennas. And if you want to write on your display, you'll just make a little note in your inside of your jacket pocket. And I mean, those notions of the risks, whatever, probably will come true in some way, shape, or form because that's just progress in technology.

But if I can have the next slide, I want to talk about this issue of malleable content. This is actually a very fundamental kind of issue. For anybody who has looked at the way copyright is handled today, you realize there are essentially these two distinct notions of the network, the network as the production/consumption medium for content where the idea is that you can buy it, you can have it, you can use it for your own personal use, but you can't really change it.

Now, there are people who are willing to put material out for use on the net, and they're willing to allow people to change it. And this is not to say that much of today's technology can't be adapted to it, but the people for whom this is a business generally don't want that. And so this is what I would call hard copyright protection.

The extreme other side of the coin is what I call "no fixation interchanges." I mean, this is the dilemma of the telephone versus the telegraph in the early days when people thought that the telephone wouldn't fly because it didn't give you any hard copy. And therefore, it was viewed by some as not being that relevant, certainly for business transactions.

But the fact of the matter is that in between those two extremes where, in the case of a telephone call, there is no work, it's just an interaction between two parties that never gets fixed, and the other side where somebody actually creates something that they say you can have, pay me, don't change it, there is a whole world in between which I want to call the world of "malleable content." And I think this is where the real ultimate value of the network is going to be played out because it's a world that we haven't experienced before in any real sense.