Tim Berners-Lee predicts the future | Wilnesh News

Personal AI assistants could have a thorough understanding of our health and legal histories. Ability to transfer data seamlessly from one place to another without any hitches.

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

Berners-Lee invented this world-changing technology in 1989 while working at CERN, the Swiss particle physics research center.

The London-born computer scientist submitted a proposal for an information management system to help his colleagues share information.

Berners-Lee continued to work on his ideas for an information-sharing system, and by 1991, the World Wide Web was up and running.

In 1993, Berners-Lee convinced CERN to release the network protocol and source code into the public domain without any patents or fees. Berners-Lee attributed the great success of the Internet to this decision.

Berners-Lee remembers the birth of the Internet 35 years ago. “When it started, I couldn’t have predicted that it would turn out this way, this way,” he told CNBC.

Still, he could see early signs that the web would grow significantly. The traffic of the first website, info.cern.ch, “increases 10 times every year and doubles every four months.”

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

In the decades since the birth of the Internet, Berners-Lee has seen some of its attendant shortcomings. First, social media messages customized by artificial intelligence algorithms mean people “feel angry, upset or hateful,” he said.

At the same time, he added that the ease of producing content and creating new websites and blogs on social media platforms has led to a “disempowerment” of people and businesses, as well as a loss of ownership of our data.

But Berners-Lee remains somewhat optimistic about the future. Here are some of his key predictions for the next 35 years of the Internet.

Prediction 1: Everyone will have a personal AI assistant

One of Berners-Lee’s big predictions was that artificial intelligence would change the way we interact with the Internet.

With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence tools like Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tech companies are betting that consumers will increasingly use digital chatbots to get the information they need and help them generate written materials and even code.

Several companies are already trying to use artificial intelligence devices to reimagine our interactions with the Internet, including Samsung’s Galaxy S24 smartphone and US startup Humane AI’s wearable Pin device.

Berners-Lee believes that one day we will have artificial intelligence assistants working for us – similar to our doctors, lawyers and bankers.

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

Berners-Lee said: “One of the things I predict – but this is something we may have to fight for – is that you will have an artificial intelligence assistant that you can trust and that will work for you like a doctor. ”

Akamai global chief technology officer Robert Blumofe said he believes the Internet will no longer be something humans use, but artificial intelligence agents will control everything on our behalf.

“You can imagine a world in a few years where the web is the domain of artificial intelligence agents and humans are no longer using the web effectively,” Brumov told CNBC last week.

“This will all be done through an artificial intelligence agent; you will never have direct access to your online bank account, online medical service provider or any e-commerce website.”

In fact, Akamai was 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 faster.

Blumov still thinks we’ll go online to watch entertainment TV shows, movies and video games. But he believes that many of the daily functions of our online lives will be managed by artificial intelligence in the future.

“Humans can go back to living in the real world and greeting each other face to face as a physical experience rather than a virtual experience,” he said.

Prediction 2: We will have true ownership of material across all platforms, including VR

Another thing Berners-Lee predicted was that we would all have complete control over our data online.

So instead of handing over ownership of our data to Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and other tech giants, we can own our data through data stores or “pods.”

“You will think of your data bay as your digital space, and you will think of it as something that you are very happy with,” Berners-Lee explained.

Pod is a technology Berners-Lee is developing in partnership with his startup Inrupt.

Inrupt is behind the Solid protocol, which “aims to fundamentally change the way today’s web applications work, enabling true data ownership and increased privacy.”

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

In Berners-Lee’s vision of the future web, you would be able to use a digital pod to access all essential applications, such as sending email from your phone, as well as using your laptop, desktop, and TV. Bigger screen.

Berners-Lee added that the idea is for us to have a set of “trusted applications” through which we can communicate with each other to share information and complete important tasks faster.

Take buying a flight as an example. Berners-Lee predicts that the future of the web experience will be one in which you use a wallet to buy flights from a flight aggregator and then give it access to the data you entrust it to tailor what you do on your own website. What a plan. destination.

“All your to-do lists, calendar events, etc., all the different pieces of your data will be brought together so that your ability to live your life becomes more powerful.”

Chintan Patel, chief technology officer of Cisco Systems UK, said he believes the Internet will eventually become open and information can be shared more easily.

“Even though we’re increasingly seeing the web becoming a little bit fragmented, with more and more platforms, more information is being collected, sold, and in many cases even misused,” said Patel.

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

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

Berners-Lee predicted that his vision for the web would also go a step further in terms of virtual and mixed reality, in which the physical and digital worlds interact through powerful headsets.

“You can do things with a VR headset on, and then when you take the VR headset off, you can use the big screen to do things,” he said. “Whenever you’re moving, you can pick up your phone and the experience will be one. It should move very smoothly between devices.”

Mixed reality is a new dimension in accessing the web, and experts expect we will become more accustomed to it over time.

Chintan Patel, chief technology officer of Cisco, a British enterprise technology company, said in an interview with CNBC: “There will be some major changes in some important digital connections.”

“At that point, it will be called some form of spatial computing and spatial environments, and that’s not what we’re looking for, but the immersive experience it provides us.”

Prediction 3: Big tech companies may be broken up

Berners-Lee said another thing that could happen in the future is a major tech company being forced to break up.

Last week, the EU’s landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA), which forces tech giants to change their platforms to allow rival products to flourish, came into effect, a major step that advocates hope will bring A healthier technological competition landscape.

If a technology company breaches its obligations under the DMA, the European Commission can take some serious legal measures. These include fines of up to 10% of a company’s global annual revenue, and 20% for repeat offenders.

In some extreme cases, the European Commission could require companies to be broken up – although most antitrust lawyers believe that outcome is unlikely given the legal hurdles that could be faced in Brussels.

Berners-Lee said he always likes technology companies to “do the right thing themselves” before regulators get involved. “That’s always been the spirit of the Internet.”

He gave the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative launched in 2018 and currently supported by companies such as Google, Apple and Meta, which aims to encourage the portability of photos, videos and other materials between their respective platforms. sex.

“Perhaps these companies are motivated by the possibility of regulation,” Berners-Lee said. “But that’s a separate thing.”

However, he added: “Things are changing so fast. Artificial intelligence is changing very, very fast. There are monopolies in artificial intelligence. In the Internet field, monopolies change very quickly.”

“Perhaps at some point in the future agencies will have to work to break up large companies, but we don’t know which companies it will be,” Berners-Lee said.