"We have to keep the web open" - Interview with Tim Berners-Lee

When you first proposed the Web, did you imagine it evolving into such a powerful social and political force? Political maybe is a strong word, but anyway, at what point did its human impact surprise you, the human impact that the Web has?

I suppose it grew very speedily. It was an exponential growth and served a load on the first group by a factor of 10 in the first year, and by a factor of 10 in the next year, and by a factor of 10 in the next year. So in a way, there was no one point when you could say “That is when the Web took off”. It grew exponentially for several years and then as almost as big as the world. I guess in 2016 was maybe one point when I realized that it was, when the Brexit election and the Trump election, people said that they were possibly influenced indirectly by the Web, people being manipulated on the Web, so it suggested the Web had sinister parts to play in that election. That was a bit of a moment.

Looking at the moral evolution of the internet, what do you consider the most significant ethical challenges we face right now and what, in your view, is clearly “wrong” versus “right” in today's digital world?

So there's a lot of things which are good, things like Wikipedia and GitHub, things which basically let people use the Web to collaborate and so on. But what's wrong is the digital sovereignty that we don't have. We don't have control of our data. And so individuals don't have sovereignty, they don't have the power, they're not enabled to be able to do all the things, to be able to collaborate, to be able to be creative and work with other people. So digital sovereignty is what we're missing.

You have often spoken about the Web as a public good and it is. How can governments, companies and individuals balance innovation with responsibility to protect that public good?

Governments and companies and people and individuals all have a duty to make sure the Web is the web we want. The Web Foundation produced a thing called the Contact for the Web, which kind of recognized that. Governments should keep the internet turned on, companies should try to charge reasonable amounts for it. There were nine things that we ended up with. There are three for governments, three for companies and three for individuals. Individuals must respect other people, must make sure that they post stuff which is accurate, for example.

On a more personal note, are there any particular places you enjoy visiting? You mentioned some of them in the book. It was very interesting for me to know this. Are there any particular places you enjoy visiting to disconnect and reflect perhaps landscapes like Wales or cities shaped by rivers? What draws you to those environments?

Yes. So, I suppose the common feature is the water. I'm looking at a little pond. So, having a pond in a vicinity, having a river to run along, having a stream running by the door, that sort of thing. I think there are common themes of being on water or in water, being able to swim in water and get a Canadian lake. So, the common theme is water.

What advice would you give to young innovators who are trying to create something truly authentic and original in a world that feels saturated with ideas and creations?

Well, it may feel saturated with ideas to you, but it's not saturated. There's a lot more ideas out there. So, a young person should, you know, you should notice the idea. You should nurture the idea. You should sort of curate the idea and implement it. And then when you're implementing it, I think persistence is really important. So, if you write your idea out, but also when you implement it, remember that it might take longer time than you thought, it might take more effort than you thought. So, persistence is important.

Philosophically speaking, what does “authentic” or “original” mean to you in the digital age, where everything builds upon what already exists?

Well, everything is building on everything. The Web builds on top of the internet. The internet is a platform. But the internet empowers things that are built on top of it, but it doesn't constrain what they are. Same with the Web. It empowers things that are built on top of it. You can build any old website you like. You can imagine. And so, when you build something on top of the Web, then the platforms, one on top of the other, are empowering. Things built on top of the other, in a way, the Web being built on top of the internet doesn't necessarily have to be authentic.

With the increasing discussion about artificial intelligence and technological singularity, a term which was popularized by Ray Kurzweil, do you think we should be concerned about AI's trajectory or optimistic about its potential?

Well, both. If you make something with strong intelligence, if it's stronger than you, then you have to be careful. So, I agree with Ray that, bit by bit, the intelligence will become a bit greater, and therefore, it must, at some point, become smarter than us. I think we do have to be careful of that. We have to find ways of containing it. I think we should develop it in the open. We should have something like CERN, built for AI, where people can come together and develop it in a very deliberate, careful way.

 As someone who helped shape one of the most transformative technologies in history, what responsibility do technologists have when creating tools that may redefine humanity's future?

I think that responsibility is huge. I felt that responsibility when creating things like the Web Consortium and the Web Foundation, so that people can get together and convening people to make the Web a better place, making sure it serves humanity. Now, social media companies have responsibility to build systems where people feel better rather than worse. They have responsibility for the mental health issues of people on social media.

From an anthropological perspective, how do you see the World Wide Web shaping and being shaped by human nature and social behavior?

First of all, the Web is a platform. World Wide Web itself doesn't really shape human behavior, but social media does. So when you build social media, when you build something like Pinterest, which is a collaborative site where people, where you can share things with people, you build it in a way that makes people have fun and so on. If you build, whereas when you build Instagram, well, when they built Instagram, they built it as something which was a fairly pro-human space, but then later they changed it. So Instagram is now something where you can end up, there are mental health issues of teenagers on Instagram, but partly that may be due to the way they changed the algorithms to always feed you more and more beautiful people.

Where do you believe we should draw ethical boundaries online today? Maybe it was in the previous questions, but where we should instead push limits to preserve openness, creativity, and freedom?

Certainly we have to keep the Web open! Don't shut it down. Don't censor the Internet. So different countries have different records with that. So when it comes to keeping it open, a lot of that falls down to the countries who have control over the Internet. Initially, of course, the countries didn't have the power to turn that because the Internet was just connected in a way with no firewalls, but now there are firewalls between different countries. So the responsibility to reduce those firewalls.

Interview conducted by: Stefan Karaivanov