Tim Berners-Lee predicts the future.

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

The London-born computer scientist proposed an information management system to help his colleagues share information among themselves.

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

In 1993, Berners-Lee persuaded CERN to release the web protocol and source code into the public domain without patent or fee. Berners-Lee attributes the decision to Webb’s runaway success.

Berners-Lee remembers how things were 35 years ago when the web began. “When it started, I couldn’t have predicted that it would be this way, this transformation,” he told CNBC.

He could tell that there were signs that the web was about to become massive. Traffic to the first website, info.cern.ch, was “growing by a factor of 10 every year, so doubling every four months.”

“We lost track of the logs because they got cut,” 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 creation of the web, Berners-Lee has seen some of the downsides that have emerged. For one, AI algorithm-generated social media feeds mean people “feel angry and upset, or disgusted,” he says.

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

But Berners-Lee still has some hope for the future. Here are some of his top 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 change the way we interact with the web.

With the advent of creative AI tools like Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tech firms are betting that users can use digital chatbots to find the information they need and generate written content and even code. I will be more engaged to help them.

There are already firms 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 wearable pin device.

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

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

“One thing that I predict — but it’s something that we might have to fight for — is that you’ll have an AI assistant, that you can trust, and it’s like a doctor for you. works,” Berners-Lee said.

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

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

“It will all be done by AI agents; you’ll never go directly to your bank account online, or your health provider online, or any of the e-commerce sites.”

Akamai was founded in early 1995 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in response to Berners-Lee’s challenge to create a new way to rapidly deliver web content to users.

Blumofe still thinks we’ll go online for entertainment TV shows, movies and video games. But he thinks many of the daily tasks of our online lives will be managed by AI in the future.

“Humans can go back to their lives in the physical world, greeting each other as a physical experience, not a virtual one,” 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 web in which we all have complete control over our data.

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

“You’d think of your DataPod as your digital space, you’d think of it as something you’re very comfortable with,” Berners-Lee explains.

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

Inrupt is behind something called the Solid Protocol, which aims to “radically change the way web applications work today, resulting in improved privacy as well as real ownership of data.”

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

In Berners-Lee’s vision for the future web, you’ll be able to use your digital pod to access all the applications you need, for example, email on your phone, but also on your laptop, desktop to large screens like computers, and TVs.

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

For example, buy flights. Berners-Lee predicts that the future experience for the web 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 entrust to it. So that you can plan what you will do. destination

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

Chintan Patel, chief technology officer at software firm Cisco in the UK, said he thinks the web is finally moving towards a place that is open and where information can be shared more easily.

“Although we’ve increasingly seen the web fragment a bit with more siled platforms — more information is 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 sourced from the open web.

“For all its drawbacks, the Web has brought more benefits to society and made many 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 both the physical and digital worlds interact through powerful headsets, according to Berners-Lee.

“You can work with a VR headset, and then when you take the VR headset off, you can do it with a bigger screen,” he said. “And whenever you move, you can grab your phone and the experience will be the same. It should move between different devices very smoothly.”

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

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

“It’s going to be called local computing and some form of local environment that we’re not looking for, but giving us an immersive experience.”

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 being forced to break up.

Last week, the EU’s landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA), which forces tech companies to transform their platforms to allow competing products to flourish, officially came into force, in a major step forward. Which proponents hope will lead to a more competitive landscape of healthy tech. .

If a tech firm violates its obligations under the DMA, the European Commission can impose some pretty sweet 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 faces.

Berners-Lee said he always prefers it when tech companies “do the right thing by themselves” before regulators step in. “That’s always been the spirit of the Internet.”

He uses the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative that started in 2018 and is now backed by the likes of Google, Apple and Meta, to facilitate the portability of photos, videos and other data between their platforms. Can be encouraged.

“Maybe the companies were a little bit tipped off by the possibility of regulation,” Berners-Lee said. “But it was a freeing thing.”

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

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