Tim Berners-Lee makes predictions for the future

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

The London-born computer scientist has come up with a proposal for an information management system to help his colleagues share information among themselves.

Berners-Lee continued to work on his idea for an information exchange 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 royalties. Berners-Lee attributed the enormous success of the Web to this decision.

Berners-Lee remembers what things were like when the Internet started 35 years ago. “When it started, I didn't expect it to be this way, this change,” he told CNBC.

He could tell that there were signs that the Internet was going to grow significantly early on. Traffic to the first site, info.cern.ch, was “rising 10 times every year, doubling every four months.”

“We lost track of the logs because they were cut,” Berners-Lee recalls. “Now this is going to be dangerous. We need to make sure it doesn't collapse.”

In the decades since the Web was created, Berners-Lee sees some downsides. For example, social media feeds designed by AI algorithms mean people “feel angry, upset or hateful,” he says.

At the same time, the ease of producing content on social media platforms and creating new websites and blogs has led to people and businesses being “disempowered” – and losing ownership of our data, he adds.

But Berners-Lee still has some optimism about the future. Here are some of his most important predictions for what the Internet will look like over the next 35 years.

Prediction 1: Everyone will have an AI-powered personal assistant

One of Berners-Lee's big predictions is that artificial intelligence will change the way we interact with the web.

With the arrival of generative AI tools like ChatGPT powered by OpenAI, technology companies are betting that consumers will become more engaged with digital chatbots to get the information they need and help them produce written materials and even code.

There are already companies trying to reimagine what our interaction with the web will look like 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 will have AI assistants working for us, similar to our doctors, lawyers and bankers.

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

“One of the things I expect — but it's something we may have to fight for — is that you'll have an AI assistant, that you can trust, that works for you, like a doctor,” Berners-Lee said.

Robert Plomovi, Akamai's global chief technology officer, said he believes the web will stop being something humans use — and that AI agents will take over for us.

“You can imagine a world years from now where the web becomes the world of AI agents and humans no longer use the web effectively,” Plomovi told CNBC in an interview last week.

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

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.

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

“Humans 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 have true ownership of our data across all platforms – including VR

The other thing that Berners-Lee predicts is an Internet in which we will all have complete control over our data.

So, instead of ceding 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 store, or “pod.”

“You'll think of your data pod as your digital space, and you'll think of it as one thing that you're comfortable with,” Berners-Lee explains.

Pods are a technology that Berners-Lee is working on with his startup Inrupt.

Inrupt is the one behind the so-called Solid protocol, which “aims to radically change the way web applications work today, leading to true ownership of data as well as improved 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'll be able to use your digital cubicle to access all your essential apps, for example, email via your phone, but also your laptop, desktop, and larger screens like TVs.

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

Take, for example, purchasing flights. Berners-Lee predicts that the future experience of the web will be one in which you can use your wallet to buy flights from a flight aggregator, then give it access to the data you entrust it to come up with plans for what to do where you're staying. Destination.

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

Chintan Patel, chief technology officer at software company Cisco in the UK, said he believes the web is eventually moving to an open place where information can be shared more easily.

“Although we have increasingly seen the internet become a bit fragmented with more siled platforms, more information is being collected, sold, and in many cases even misused,” Patel said.

However, he noted that OpenAI's ChatGPT — and many other popular generative AI tools — is powered by data sourced from the open web.

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

Berners-Lee expects his vision for the web will also go further through virtual and mixed reality, where the physical and digital world interact through powerful headsets, according to Berners-Lee.

“You can do things with a VR headset, and then when you take the headset off, you can do it with a huge screen,” he said. “As you move, you can hold your phone and the experience will be the same. It should transition seamlessly between different devices.”

Mixed reality is a new dimension to web accessibility, and experts predict we'll get more accustomed to it over time.

“There are going to be some big shifts happening in terms of some serious digital connectivity,” Patel told CNBC in an interview.

“It will be called at that time a form of spatial computing and a spatial environment that will not be something we look for, but an immersive experience that is presented to us.”

Prediction 3: A major technology company could be broken up

Another thing Berners-Lee says could happen in the future is a large technology company having to break up.

Last week, the European Union's landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA) officially came into force, forcing tech giants to change their platforms to allow competing products to flourish, in a major move that will hopefully lead to a healthier tech competition landscape. .

If a technology company violates its obligations under the DMA, the European Commission can impose some strict legal measures. This includes fines of up to 10% of a 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 might face.

Berners-Lee said he always prefers that tech companies “do the right thing themselves” before regulators get involved. “That has always been the spirit of the Internet.”

He uses the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative launched in 2018 and now supported by companies such as Google, Apple and Meta, to encourage the possibility of transferring photos, videos and other data between their platforms.

“Companies may have been a little motivated by the possibility of regulation,” Berners-Lee said. “But this was an independent thing.”

However, he added: “Things are changing very quickly. AI is changing very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. And the monopolies have changed very quickly again on the Internet.”

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