I am here in Berkeley with Dr. Barath Raghavan.
He is a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute.
I wanted to talk to him about a technical idea he has called the Quine, and we'll just
chat about this in the context of disruption.
Okay Barath, could you tell us about the Quine please?
Sure.
The Quine idea really is specifically an Internet Quine.
It is sort of building off a general idea of a Quine in computer science.
It sounds esoteric, but it is actually a pretty simple idea.
All software is a computer program and it is written in some sort of code and there
is some language that it is written in.
There was an idea that somebody came up with a long time ago, I would say several decades
ago, that you could have a program that its entire job is to produce itself.
It's a self-reproducing program in some sense.
It's really a novelty.
There is no actual usefulness of this, of a software Quine, but the thought was that
you could extend this by analogy to a lot of different things.
The question I had was what would an Internet Quine look like?
I can try and explain a little bit of why I even was asking this question.
As you know the Internet is probably the largest single human artifact ever built in that it
spans every continent, it connects now probably a good 70% or 80% of humanity, and as a result
it has an enormous material and energetic basis.
It takes a lot of energy to build and maintain all the infrastructure, everything from the
devices that we use as users, to the servers that are in massive datacenters, to the fiber
that has to be dug into the ground to connect different datacenters and different large-scale
infracture, the mobile towers that have to be put up by all the telecommunication companies.
There is a lot of physical infrastructure, and a lot of energy goes into that as well.
A lot of materials, everything from rare minerals that go into our cell phones to all of the
electronics manufacturing and the materials that go into that, the plastics and the oil
that goes into that and the transportation.
There is a lot of stuff that goes into building Internet and so I've done an analysis to figure
out how much resources and energy does the Internet use.
It turned out that it was a lot, but at the same time humanity as a whole uses so much
that in the scheme of things the Internet doesn't use that much.
It ends up being about 2% of humanity's total energy usage to run the Internet.
That's the energy piece.
I was also interested in looking at what happens if some of these rare minerals go away or
they are no longer accessible?
The classic example is this mineral called coltan which is mined in West Africa.
This falls into sort of this category of what is called conflict minerals in general which
is places where there are unstable governments, there are oppressive governments, and these
are not countries generally that we would like to be doing business with but that's
where the minerals are and so that's where the companies go and they buy the minerals
and then they use them to build the electronics.
These minerals are limited.
Another example is lithium.
Lithium is used for lithium ion batteries which are in every hybrid car today, but there
aren't that many countries that have lithium.
If I remember correctly one of the biggest sources is Bolivia, but they have understandable
concerns about digging up the entire Bolivian countryside to provide these minerals to the
world.
There are geopolitical reasons that minerals might be unavailable.
There are ethical reasons why they might be unavailable.
There are simply natural limits on how much there is and that might be a reason why they
become unavailable.
If there is some sort of global disruption of any of these kinds I was interested in
seeing how could we build an Internet, all of the pieces that make up what we think of
as the Internet, with as small of a footprint as possible?
Eventually the goal is to say could we build an Internet and all of the tools to build
an Internet in a way that is self-reproducing so this brings us back to the Quine idea.
How small of a footprint, how small of a region could we have and still achieve this sort
of self-reproduction?
I started doing an analysis.
I said okay, what is the main task of the Internet?
It is really long range communication between two people.
What makes the Internet different is intercontinental communication that is realtime and fairly
high bandwidth between pretty much any two people.
The only other thing that can really achieve this is certain types of long distance hand
radio, but it's not very high bandwidth.
You're not going to get a whole lot of information across.
Given that as the basis we did an analysis.
We found what are the things that we need to make that possible?
We need routers on the Internet, we need the end-user devices like laptops and phones,
we need the physical wires that connect between these devices, and so you need all these pieces.
Then we said okay, well, what do we need for all of those pieces?
How do we build them?
We need sort of the ability to build circuit boards, we need the ability to mine aluminum,
we need the ability to create certain types of plastics.
Then we said okay, what do we need for those?
We just kept doing this process and the conclusion, the goal was that eventually you can trace
it back to some natural resource, something in the ground that was pulled out of the ground
and then turned into something that was manufactured which then was turned into something and eventually
became the Internet.
Once we came up with this analysis we really found there are about 30 or 40 elements that
are being dug out of the ground, minerals that are being dug out of the ground that
are required.
Then we did an analysis and said okay, well, where in the world do these exist?
Where are the ones that are particularly rare, and we mapped it out.
From our current analysis it's not easy to build an Internet Quine in a small region.
Most of the components that make up the Internet come from every continent in the world I guess
except Antarctica.
The challenge then is okay, well, if the Internet as it exists today is hard to make sort of
locally sustainable then what would an alternative look like?
We've been thinking about this, but we don't have any great answers yet.
It might be possible, or it might be the case it's just not possible to build a very small
scale Internet.
It's still an open research question for us.
Is it the materials that are limiting factor because they come from so many places?
The materials, and I think the manufacturing processes.
I think the manufacturing processes is sort of an artificial thing in that right now a
lot of manufacturing say is done in China, but it could be done here and it was at some
point in the past.
There are some options like doing 3D printing of circuit boards which isn't mature yet but
could become better and then it would be possible to do it anywhere, but you would still need
the mineral inputs.
The main issue I think comes in radios that are in phones that require some rare minerals.
Batteries require rare minerals.
There are certain components that are difficult to produce, but maybe let's say we were okay
with having not as dense batteries.
We have larger batteries and maybe we didn't have as good of radios we could probably achieve
most of what the Internet and the devices that we use for the Internet in a small area.
Now, when you say a small area are you using the word local?
What kind of a scope?
Geographically I'm thinking as small as possible.
I think on the regional level, what we might think of as a county or a metropolitan area.
That kind of regional level is what I think.
That's actually pretty small.
I thought you were going to say California or the west or something, but you think it
could be even smaller?
I think it could be smaller.
It's definitely the case that if you make it bigger it will be easier, but I prefer
to sort of try and challenge myself on thinking what if Southern California could build its
own Internet using only the resources, the tools, the machining that exists in Southern
California and say with Northern California, and then you can interconnect them and you
could design it so that the locally built Internets could interconnect using the same
protocols, but the physical infrastructure would be all locally built.
What is the status of this project now?
The status of the project is we have some ideas for how to do the interconnection piece,
but the manufacturing piece requires manufacturing expertise beyond what I have.
I'm talking to some people who do sustainable manufacturing, mechanical engineering people,
because it is going to really require an interdisciplinary effort, everything from mechanical engineering
to material science, computer science, and probably many more disciplines.
So there is a lot of expertise that is really at stake here as well as the materials right?
Yes.
Then one of the other challenges is that this would not be something that is sort of a viable
competitor for the modern Internet.
It's unlikely anyone is going to say I want to use the Internet Quine instead of the Internet
because there is no reason to use it instead of what we have today.
The reason that it is interesting is because of the question of global disruption, that
we want to have the ideas out there for how to do it differently in the case of a global
disruption of some sort.
It doesn't have to be a quick disruption either.
It could be a slow process by which say telecommunication companies find it difficult to continue operating
the Internet and so the infrastructure stops advancing as quickly or it becomes more unreliable.
As this sort of thing happens communities might say hey, why do I want to depend on
these big companies that aren't really providing me good service?
Why don't we build something locally and then they might be able to take our plans if we
are able to produce a good set of plans, take our plans off the shelf and say we could build
this ourselves locally.
Have you published any of this work?
I published one or two pieces of it.
It's not very conventional research in that conventionally the researchers at least in
computer networking are interested in what happens if we start with what we have today
and then build upon it rather than what if we built something completely parallel or
independent from what we have today?
I think to some it might seem like a step backwards because it is a step backwards in
terms of functionality, but I think it's a step forward in terms of the processes that
got us to where we are.
Okay, good.
Well, we will make those papers available to the students.
That was very interesting.
Thank you so much.