Tim Berners-Lee gives predictions for the future

Personal AI assistants that know our health and legal history inside out. The ability to transfer your data from one place to another seamlessly, without any obstacles.

These are just some of the predictions for the future of the web by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of its invention.

Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the world-changing technology in 1989 while working at CERN, the Swiss research center for particle physics.

The London-born computer scientist presented a proposal for an information management system to help his colleagues share information with each other.

Berners-Lee was to continue working on his idea for this information sharing system, and by 1991 the World Wide Web was up and running.

In 1993, Berners-Lee convinced CERN to release the web protocol and source code into the public domain without any patents or fees. Berners-Lee attributes the network’s enormous success to that decision.

Berners-Lee remembers what things were like when the network started 35 years ago. “When I started, I couldn’t have predicted that it would be like this, this change,” he told CNBC.

Still, he could tell that there were signs that the network would grow significantly early on. Traffic to the first website, info.cern.ch, “increases by a factor of 10 every year, so it doubles every four months.”

“We lost track of the logs because they cut them down,” Berners-Lee recalls. “Now this is going to be a serious thing. We have to make sure it doesn’t collapse.”

In the decades since the web was created, Berners-Lee sees some of the flaws that have emerged. For one, social media feeds tailored by AI algorithms mean people “feel angry and upset or filled with hate,” he says.

Meanwhile, the ease of creating content on social media platforms and creating new websites and blogs has led to “disempowerment” for people and businesses – and a loss of ownership of our data, he adds.

But Berners-Lee still has some optimism about the future. Here are some of his best predictions for what the web will look like in the next 35 years.

Prediction 1: Everyone will have a personal AI assistant

One of Berners-Lee’s big predictions is that AI will transform the way we interact with the web.

With the arrival of generative AI tools like Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tech firms are betting that users will become much more engaged with digital chatbots to get the information they need and help them create written materials and even code.

There are already companies trying to reimagine how we interact with the web using AI-powered devices, including Samsung with its Galaxy S24 smartphone and US startup Humane AI with its Pin wearable device.

Berners-Lee believes that one day we’ll have AI assistants working for us — just like our doctors, lawyers and bankers.

“Some people worry about whether in 35 years AI will be more powerful than us,” Berners-Lee told CNBC via Zoom video call last week.

“One of the things that I predict — but it’s something that we may have to fight for — is that you’re going to have an AI assistant that you can trust and that works for you, as a doctor,” Berners said. – Lee.

Robert Blumoffe, Akamai’s global chief technology officer, said he thinks the web will stop being something people use — and that AI agents will take over on our behalf.

“You can imagine a world years from now where the web is the realm of AI agents and people are no longer using the web effectively,” Blumofe said in an interview with CNBC last week.

“Everything will be done through AI agents; you will never go directly to your bank account online, or your healthcare provider online, or any e-commerce sites.”

Akamai was actually founded in response to a challenge posed by Berners-Lee at MIT in early 1995 to create a new way to deliver web content to end users more quickly.

Blumofe still thinks we’ll go online for entertainment TV shows, movies and video games. But he believes many of the day-to-day functions of our online lives will be driven by AI in the future.

“Human beings can return to their lives in the physical world, greeting each other face-to-face as a physical experience rather than a virtual experience,” he said.

Prediction 2: We will take true ownership of our data across all platforms — including VR

Another thing that Berners-Lee predicts is a network where we will all have complete control over our data.

So instead of handing over ownership of our data to Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants, we will instead be able to own our data through a data warehouse or “pod”.

“You’re going to think of your block of data as your digital space, you’re going to think of it as something you’re very comfortable with,” Berners-Lee explains.

Pods is a technology Berners-Lee is working on with her startup Inrupt.

Inrupt is behind something called the Solid protocol, which “aims to radically change the way web applications work today, leading to true data ownership as well as improved privacy.”

In 2022, the firm raised $30 million from venture capital firms including Forte Ventures, Akamai and Glasswing Ventures.

In Berners-Lee’s vision of a future network, you’ll be able to use your digital device to access all your essential applications, for example, email on your phone, but also your laptop, desktop computer and larger screens like TVs.

Berners-Lee added that his idea is to have a set of “trust applications” that we can allow to communicate with each other to share information and perform important tasks much faster.

Take for example the purchase of flights. Berners-Lee predicts that the future web experience will be one where you can use your wallet to buy flights from a flight aggregator and then give it access to the data you’ve entrusted to it to come up with plans what to do in your destination.

“All your to-do lists, calendar events and so on, and all the different pieces of your data will come together, so the ability to live your life becomes much more powerful.”

Chintan Patel, chief technology officer of software firm Cisco in the UK, said he believes the web is ultimately moving to a place that is open and where information can be shared more easily.

“Although we see the web becoming less fragmented with more siled platforms – more information being collected, sold, even misused in many cases,” Patel said.

However, he noted that OpenAI’s ChatGPT — and several other popular generative AI tools — are powered by data originating from the open web.

“For all its shortcomings, the web has brought many more benefits to society and made many more things possible,” Patel said.

Berners-Lee predicts that his vision for the web will also go a step further with virtual and mixed reality, where the physical and digital worlds interact through powerful headsets, according to Berners-Lee.

“You can do things with a VR headset, and then when you take the VR headset off, you can do it with a huge screen,” he said. “And every time you move, you can take your phone and the experience will be like one. It should be very smooth between different devices.”

Mixed reality is a new dimension of access that web experts expect us to become more accustomed to over time.

“Some big changes are going to happen in terms of serious digital connectivity,” Chintan Patel, chief technology officer of UK enterprise technology firm Cisco, said in an interview with CNBC.

“Until then, it will be called some form of spatial computing and a spatial environment that will not be something we seek out, but an immersive experience that is provided to us.”

Prediction 3: A big tech company could go bust

Another thing that Berners-Lee says could happen in the future is that a big tech company is forced to break up.

Last week, the European Union’s landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA), which forces tech giants to change their platforms to allow competing products to flourish, officially came into force, in a major step they hope will lead to healthier technological competition.

If a technology firm violates its obligations under the DMA, the European Commission can impose some soft legal measures. This includes fines of up to 10% of the company’s global annual revenue, or 20% for repeat offenders.

In some extreme cases, the Commission could demand that companies be broken up – although most antitrust lawyers believe such an outcome is unlikely given the legal hurdles Brussels could face.

Berners-Lee said she always prefers tech companies to “do the right thing on their own” before regulators get involved. “That’s always been the spirit of the Internet.”

He used the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative that launched in 2018 and is now backed by Google, Apple, and Meta to promote the portability of photos, videos, and other data between their platforms.

“Maybe companies were pushed a little bit by the possibility of regulation,” Berners-Lee said. “But it was an independent thing.”

However, he added: “Things are changing so quickly. AI is changing very, very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. Monopolies have changed quite quickly on the web.”

“Maybe at some point in the future agencies will have to work to break up big companies, but we don’t know who that company will be,” Berners-Lee said.