Artificial intelligence is currently occupied primarily with sowing chaos. This chaos urgently needs a protocol, and this protocol needs the old wizard of the internet - Vint Cerf.
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Vint Cerf is an esteemed computer scientist considered one of the fathers of the internet.
He earned this title thanks to his contribution to the development of TCP/IP - the protocol underlying the entire internet.
A protocol is a convention that allows information to be transferred according to a predetermined set of rules.
Your phone and computer are able to connect to the internet only because they obey a set of various protocols - the protocols determine which network card can connect to your router model, what the data transmission rate will be, what happens if some of the information is lost along the way, and so on.
The TCP/IP protocol sends information across the network in small, tightly packed packets in several layers. These layers define the source and destination addresses and how to reconstruct the information on the receiving end.
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Vint Cerf now wants to build the protocol that will bring order to the way agents communicate with each other on the internet.
The reason agents need a protocol is that the internet protocols we use are good at building web pages for humans, but highly inefficient for agents that do not require a visual interface. APIs are already the core of the internet today, but they are still custom-built for each website and service and do not constitute a universal language.
Suppose my agent wants to book a flight for me. Instead of executing complex search queries and going step-by-step through a convoluted path until finding the right flight, it could simply send all the required flight parameters at once. The agent on the airline's side would immediately understand the request and return the correct information in a pre-agreed format.
The agent would receive a budget ceiling in advance and could identify itself on behalf of the customer using cryptographic authentication. The airline's agent could immediately verify the information and the deal would be closed between them.
At this stage, a digital dollar could allow the payment to be executed instantly over a blockchain network, and the entire process would be infinitely more efficient than the clumsy internet we need as humans.
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If you didn't fully understand the process, you're in good company.
Protocols are a dull and bureaucratic matter, but without them, the internet would look like artificial intelligence looks today - a massive mess.
The implications of this protocol will be far-reaching by any measure, because to a large extent, the internet as we know it will come to an end.
We will no longer communicate with websites and systems, but with agents. These agents will check and converse on our behalf with other agents, and most of the internet will move into the faceless shadow world of the machines themselves.
I connect with this vision from my personal experience - although I regularly manage dozens of information systems, my communication with them is conducted almost entirely through agents, making the visual interface completely redundant.
It seems everything has already changed, but the truth is we might not have even started yet.
Image: Wikipedia
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss and my posts are not written by artificial intelligence.
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