Making Connections: Travels with AI Made Possible by Bob Kahn's Historic Contributions

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

dozens of wind turbines, prompting me to ask, "How much of France's total energy generation comes from wind power?" (Perplexity didn't exactly answer this one, but referenced an International Energy Agency site that stated wind met 7.8 percent of national electricity demand in 2021.)Next: "Where can I buy distilled water near me right now?" (In the nearest Carrefour hypermarket, in the housekeeping section, it turns out.)Then we flipped on the audio response mode so the vaguely English-accented male voice could "tell us about the construction of the cathedral in Amiens, France," which we were going to the next day.Despite the occasional miss, we agreed that the app significantly enhanced our real-world experience and connected us to Flemish culture and people.Those connections would not have been as convenient, or maybe even possible, without the Internet-which provides the data on which generative search and many popular large language models rely-and without the seminal contributions of this year's Medal of Honor recipient, Bob Kahn, whom Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry profiles on page 36 in this issue.Kahn is being honored for his work on packet communication technologies, which were part of the project that became the ARPANET and the foundations of the Internet.Could he have foreseen people driving around asking an AI-powered search app any question that popped into their heads?Probably not.As Perry writes: "Other than generally thinking that it would be nice if computers could talk to one another, Kahn didn't give much thought to applications.""If you were engineering the Bell system," Kahn told Perry, "you weren't trying to figure out who in San Francisco is going to say what to whom in New York.You were just trying to figure out how to enable conversations."Kahn's creations are enabling conversations today, with chatbots in cars and coffee roasters in cafés around the world.