[ih] History of AI and Internet

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 25-Jun-26 10:22, Sivan via Internet-history wrote:
> Dear Jack Haverty,
> 
> Your question "For example, when there are problems in today's Internet,
> are AI techniques and tools used to diagnose and repair them?   What's the
> History of such things?" is immensely interesting. Concerns about A.I.
> momentarily set aside, are there initiatives underway to positively use
> A.I. tools to "diagnose and repair" problems in the Internet? For example,
> using A.I. to scan for malware, bots, phishing and other forms of technical
> and non-technical Abuse? Or using A.I. to scan and detect barriers to
> network protocols such as vpns? Or even using A.I. to scan and detect
> non-human content and other forms of Abuse?

I can't imagine that the answer to any of those questions is "No".
I wouldn't have said that a year ago, but progress is very fast.

Of course, operators will see this as a competitive advantage and may
choose not to publicise such AI deployments. But there is a lot of
work in progress on agent-to-agent communication.

If this is history, it's history in progress.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter
  
> 
>   Sivasubramanian Muthusamy
> sender
> 
> On Tue, 23 Jun, 2026, 01:20 Jack Haverty via Internet-history, <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> With AI now in the news all the time, I've been wondering about the
>> history of AI in The Internet, i.e., how AI technology has been used
>> within the Internet over the years, rather than just a service which
>> people can access over The Internet.   Personally I only know of a few
>> such uses of AI in a communications role, quite a while ago.  But maybe
>> others remember more...?
>>
>> In the mid-1970s, I was involved in an AI project at MIT in Licklider's
>> group, sponsored by ARPA.   It wasn't really part of the ARPANET but it
>> did relate to communications.   The project involved using AI techniques
>> of that era, then called "expert systems", to have computers decode
>> hand-sent Morse radio transmissions.   The Intelligence Community was
>> apparently quite interested in this problem at that time, and the
>> project ran for several years and was deemed a success.
>>
>> FYI, see chapter 22 of https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA239925 for
>> info on that AI project.  Personally, I think of that 1990 report as an
>> enumeration of "ARPA's Greatest Hits".   There are six projects listed
>> from the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA (IPTO, where
>> all the networking and computer projects happened).  Another project of
>> those six IPTO successes is The ARPANET, described in Chapter 20.   The
>> Internet was probably still too immature to be included at the time .
>>
>> Similarly, while I was at BBN in the 1980s there were tools developed to
>> visualize activity in the ARPANET, and do tasks involved in network
>> design - figuring out where new lines were needed, reconfiguring the
>> topology of the ARPANET to address changes in traffic patterns, and
>> other such analyses.  I'm not sure those projects would be recognized as
>> "AI" today, but they were widely used to manage a variety of networks
>> such as the ARPANET and DDN. The idea was to use computers to augment
>> people skills, as it is in today's AI as well.
>>
>> Bob Kahn and I had a discussion at some point in late 1982 about AI and
>> networks in ARPA's world.   Bob was aware of the ARPA-sponsored project
>> done at MIT in the mid 1970s which used AI "expert system" techniques to
>> decode Morse code.   We mused that a similar expert system approach
>> could be used to manage networks, especially the emerging Internet which
>> was much more complex than the ARPANET and had few tools available for
>> operations and management.
>>
>> The concept was to use the plentiful supply of BBN engineers who had
>> been debugging Internet crises for several years as the "experts",
>> observing how they worked, and translating what they did into software
>> to do tasks "automatically".   That started the "Automated Network
>> Management" (ANM) project as a new research task at BBN.   I wrote the
>> proposal to ARPA and waited for the contract to be signed.  But when BBN
>> reorganized in July 1983 the ANM contract and I went separate ways so I
>> never got to work on ANM and I don't think there was enough detail in
>> the proposal to convey the concept onwards to the new project team.
>>
>> It strikes me that the real driver of AI today has evolved only partly
>> from advances in algorithms such as LLMs.  I think another major factor
>> has been the massive drop in computing costs over the last
>> half-century.  AI systems, such as that Morse Code project, were
>> affordable only by well-funded parts of government in the 1970s,
>> requiring millions of dollars/pounds/rubles/yen/lira to field a system
>> that provided minimal capability.  Today, the system that cost millions
>> in the 1970s now costs pennies by comparison.
>>
>> Anybody else know more about the history of the use of AI *within* (not
>> just on top of) The Internet?   For example, when there are problems in
>> today's Internet, are AI techniques and tools used to diagnose and
>> repair them?   What's the History of such things?
>>
>> /Jack Haverty
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