The World Wide Web has done what its clunky name describes: it has meshed together the digital globe. It has connected 5.5bn people, made vast amounts of information available and spawned an extraordinarily dynamic digital economy. It is now hard to imagine a world in which users could not email each other, share research on quantum mechanics or cat videos and buy a mattress topper on Temu.
But, as its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has lamented, the technology’s original promise of generating a creative, collaborative and universal community of users has been despoiled. Exclusionary walled gardens of content, the spread of disinformation and the rise of addictive, and often toxic, social media have all degraded the experience. Does the transformation by artificial intelligence offer the chance to reinvent the web?
Berners-Lee certainly hopes so, as he describes in his latest book This Is For Everyone. In his view, AI will bring about the greatest technological shift of our lifetimes — and it’s important not to mess it up. Too much talk about AI, he writes, is between the boomers and the doomers. But as he explains, the real, hard questions about AI’s impact may be determined by technical issues, design choices and protocols.