The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 153. The Man Who Invented The World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee)

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

Tim Berners-Lee could be one of the richest men on the planet, why did he forfeit such large profits to make the World Wide Web a free and open space? How do we reclaim the internet from social media companies taking away our sovereignty? Have tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk thanked Tim for his invention?  Rory and Alastair are joined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to discuss all this and more.  Visit HP.com/politics to find out more. To save your company time and money, open a Revolut Business account today via www.revolut.com/rb/leading, and add money to your account by 31st of December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. Feature availability varies by plan. This offer’s available for New Business customers in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland. Fees and Terms & Conditions apply. For US customers, Revolut is not a bank. Banking services and card issuance are provided by Lead Bank, Member FDIC. Visa® and Mastercard® cards issued under license. Funds are FDIC insured up to $250,000 through Lead Bank, in the event Lead Bank fails. Fees may apply. See full terms in description. For Irish customers, Revolut Bank UAB is authorised and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania in the Republic of Lithuania and by the European Central Bank and is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland for conduct of business rules. For AU customers, consider PDS & TMD at revolut.com/en-AU. Revolut Payments Australia Pty Ltd (AFSL 517589). TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics  Twitter: @RestIsPolitics  Email: [e-mail] Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolics.com. This episode is sponsored by HP. Now, Rory, I hear that Windows 10 is finally being put out to pasture this year. It is, and something pretty relevant for you, Alistair, given what I've seen as some of your technology. It's going on October the 14th, to be exact. And after that, Microsoft is going to be able to. stop supporting some of those old laptops of yours. No updates, no security patches. So if you were still using it or a business was still using Windows 10, it would be really exposed to cyber threats, for example. It would be like locking the door, but leaving the key in the lock. So it's time to move on, and HP are making that refreshingly straightforward. Yes, they are. HP's latest business PCs comes with Windows 11 Pro as standard. They're faster, more secure built for the AI tools, which are

already reshaping the way we work. And you don't have to figure out all in your own. HP's business advisors help you pick the right kit, so no baffing jargon, just practical advice. And here's the bonus. Restis Politics listeners get 10% off business PCs at HP.com using the code Trip10 TermSupply. So unlock efficiency and innovation upgrade to Windows 11 Pro PCs with HP and get 10% discount. Visit HP.com slash politics to find out more. This is an interview that Alistair and I did with Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. And we don't often interview scientists, engineers.

This is a man who effectively won the Nobel Prize for Computing. And often the image I think we have of engineers and scientists is a bit misleading, because they're often the ones that we see are people who are super slick, extrovert communicators. Tim, as you'll find, isn't quite like that. He's a very, very revealing portrait of the spirit of a man who not just invented something, which is at the heart of all our lives, but also went on to focus on non-profit work, on university work, and did not turn himself into a multibillionaire off the basis of this product, and remains deeply interested in ideas, deeply idealistic,

and maybe not really a sort of classic media performer. Welcome to the rest of policy leading, me, Honest Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And very, very proud and pleased to have with us today, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is one of, I think, a Brit that people can genuinely be proud of. I wanted to start if it was okay with your childhood. Your description of your childhood sounds almost like a sort of idyllic Enid Blyton novel. You describe your parents, both of whom were computer scientists demonstrating experiments to you as children, brothers and sisters with your mother, who was a pioneering early computer scientist, registering your different achievements on the fridge,

performing the importance of being earnest, and a relatively simple life, despite the fact that your parents were computer engineers, which nowadays we would associate with being worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Silicon Valley, they will seem to be living. in more straightforward life for Mr's academics. Yes, I suppose computer scientists wasn't a turn.

They were mathematicians and they'd been roped in to build this computer and people would really you know, that's the time when Alan Turing was defining

what a computer was. Yeah, so the whole idea of a computer was being forged, if you'd like, for the first time. So that,

so I suppose I was really lucky to to be in that house with all the time my mum did certainly found to bring up her four kids and so I was a very lucky childhood I think the thing I was most intrigued about your childhood was the fact that you got

to adulthood and your first big romance without ever having known who Bruce Springsteen was that suggests to me sheltered beyond belief well so we didn't Mum and Dad were introverts, I suppose. We went to the Festival Hall, so we knew that they would go to Messiah sings and so on. So there was more on the classical side. And also you didn't believe in Father Christmas,

which again I found a bit unusual. Well, I think they were just, yeah, I think they were practical, logical. We went to church, but there was a strong sort of atheism. these sort of thread to a very rationalist. Literally. What about the truth?

Did you have the tooth fairy at all? Did we get money? No, I don't think we got money from the tooth fairy. And Tim, you've described your parents as introverts. What were you like as a child? Were you relatively introvert and shy, or were you outgoing? What sort of child was shy, yes. And I was but compounded with the fact my natural shyness is that I ended up going to a school,

manual school is actually a train ride away. So the friends I made at school were all based around that sort of Clapton Junction area. The catchman area was based in Clampon Junction, whereas I was coming from East Sheen. And so I didn't naturally have my high school friends around the corner. So I had two very close friends when I was in primary school, which I go through. Go to Richmond Park. We had Richmond Park, I found the corner as well, which was delightful. And as you went on in life and studied physics at Oxford and fell in love with maths and chemistry at school,

did you find that the friends that you developed in later life, the scientists you got to know, often also tended to be quite introverted and shy? Yes, I think there is. Are scientists introverted? Maybe. maybe I guess there must be some data on it somewhere. See, as Rory said in the introduction, you're kind of best known for quotes,

inventing the World Wide Web. And I read your book, I apologize really very quickly because I only got it yesterday. And there were bits of it that I kind of, as a non-scientist, I struggle with. But the big thing that I get is a sense of you

almost groping your way with others towards something that you know is going to be significant, but you don't quite know as you're going what it is going to be and how it's going to play out. And you're very frank about the optimism. There's a bit where you say that when the World Wide Web is invented, the world felt much more optimistic. Today it feels much more pessimistic.

I just wonder whether there is a link between the way the World Wide Web and the Internet have developed and the pessimism that we now feel. For me, there's a very strong link. I suppose, because the early days of the web were this, people hoped for utopia. You know, even before search engines, when you could just blog, you could link to other people's blogs,

and then you'd look around and see the incredible richness of the blogosphere. And even before people, before search engines worked, there was a feeling that I would blog about whatever sort of frog I'm interested in. And then I'd be able to, but then somebody else in the world would have talked about everything else. And so everything will be covered. And so I felt that I was a peer among all the other people. Big companies, small companies, they could put up websites, but my website would be a peer with theirs. And I could link to them or not link to them depending on what I felt.

But yours wasn't a peer, because yours was the first in history. Well, my was the first of history, but the people who then came along, they were all peers. People could do all kinds of things and they were, yep, there's this sense of pureness, or we call it now, we call it digital sovereignty. It's the idea that you as an individual are empowered. And have we lost digital sovereignty? Yes, we have. And what's the consequence of that? Well, maybe explain how we've lost it and then the consequences.

In how it's on Facebook. So people don't make their own. when they want to be expressive, then they go to one of the platforms. So they put stuff on Instagram if they want to share information. Instead of making a website, instead of being creative,

well, there are some people, of course. Podcasts are some of the most hopeful things in that they are like being back in the, they're like blogs. They're just audio versions of blogs. You make your podcast, And so here is we sit here The three of us talking on a podcast

In a way we are a peer of any other Podcasts and people And that part of the web is still Very much empowering of Individuals as I can use a Pick my I use a particular podcast viewer To look for listening to podcasts and I select

Which ones I get to listen to And so that And to me Or I find out about podcasts through The Grapevine or whoever however, and they're all... So is that how you kind of envisaged the World Wide Web developing? You say in the book that Wikipedia is a really good example of how you've thought it was

going to be. So if Wikipedia and podcasts are sort of good internet, what is the bad in the internet? Bad internet is the bits which are addictive. In fact, in the book there is a big diagram where I put the good things. it's important for people to know, to realize the good, you know, if you're thinking I shouldn't give my kids the phone because of all the bad things on the internet, remember, well, maybe you should give your kids the phone because of all the good things. Maybe you should help them keep away from the bad things. The bad things are the things which are addictive.

The tech community a while ago learned how to get somebody to stay on the platform. And so once they learned that, you can take courses on it at Stanford. And so you provide the user with a stream of things, which if it keeps you on the platform, then it's going to be typically, it will give you things which you react to. You have this steady flow of names, which when I suspect when you first come across them are not that well known, but become incredibly well known around the world.

Mark Anderson, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter. Your first interactions seem to me to be very positive. But then I sense that you feel that the kind of absolute arch-capitalists in them or capitalism in them is what has created the bad. Is that fair? It's not fair because it's a generalisation. Scientists don't like generalisations. People don't.

it's, when you generalize about people in general, so some of them I've met, some of them I haven't. And so Jeff Bezos I've met. I've gone to conferences. He's run about Mars, about space and robotics and so on. And so he seems to be a reasonable person. Mark Zuckerberg, I have talked to, I've met and talked to, but not recently.

But they're very different people. I wouldn't put them all in the same. Okay, well, what about the bigger point, though? You do make the point in the book that there was a point at which capitalism caught up with the Internet. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I think the way people could make money from advertising on the Internet was good. That's useful. So it's reasonable you can have a podcast, you can make money from advertising, and you can make a living like that.

So that side of it is not bad. It's only the addictive side. It's only it's ticked. talk. It's Instagram. It's things where your teenage girls end up with worse mental health. This diagram for people who read the book, and it's a wonderful book. It's an engaging book. It's congratulations. I enjoyed it very much. But the diagram is an extraordinary sort of insight into your brain. Some people say that when you start talking fast, it's extraordinary the directions to which you go. This diagram, which we will show.

on the podcast thing, consists looking at it of about 120 different little boxes. As you say, on the left, we have the bad. So just to summarize what Alistair was saying, on the left, we have Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, which you describe it, feed manipulation for engagement. And you talk about lying, addiction, polarisation, peer pressure, mental illness. and then you have a sort of grayer category, spying, ID tracking, in which you're putting sort of Zoom, Amazon, WhatsApp. And then we get into the good stuff, where we talk about creativity, good elections, democracy, solving climate change, online collaboration, compassion, community knowledge, science.

But I want to take you right back to the beginning because, presumably there in CERN, you were a very different person in a very different world. You weren't yet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, you weren't yet going to conferences with billionaires and Silicon Valley. You were presumably a hardworking scientist. And can you just give us the sort of pre-shot before this moment to the World Wide Web of the sort of person you were and the different world you were in? The world of the 80s was quite different, presumably, to the world of today. It was. It was a lovely world, in fact, for me. I was a scientist's choice of formerly I'd done physics,

but the moment I got through university, I realized that computers were where it was at. So I made my own computer. I got my first jobs who were all working as a computer programmer. Just stop there. How do you make a computer in the 1980s? you sort of say that that's a normal thing to do in the 1980s most of those haven't heard of computers and you say I made a computer

what did you do well you start off by making the screen you get an old TV you go an old TV shop and you say hey do you have a TV which has got most of the electronics working but not the radio part and the guy says yes sure so you get a TV then you build circuit boards and that's those days you make circuit boards you'd design a circuit board by

plugging it into a thing called a breadboard and then when you got it working on the breadboard, then you'd, there was a thing called variable where you'd make your own, you'd make your own circuits. You'd plug in interagated circuits at that point. Interrogate circuits came in one inch long black things with rows of feet, and you'd solder the feet into the circuit board and then put in wires between the circuit boards. And so you build, end up building. And what did that computer do? So that computer would do, it will run a very simple programming language. I designed myself

called Tim Paul, PL. And there was a, it would do a lot, but it could you could record data on cassette tapes back in the day and you could, and it could

read programs off cassette date. And you described it as a wonderful world. Develop that a little bit more. What did you love about those days and that life? Well, CERN was a really wonderful place to work. So I was a physicist, But maybe that got me in the door, but really, but they wanted computer scientists. They had all these different types of computer.

Some of us, the core thing is an accelerator, 27 kilometers long in a tunnel under the, which goes under the out. The problem that Cern had was that they had people coming from all over the world. and they saw that in the coffee there'd be all kinds of people speaking English and French but also all kinds of other languages so all sorts of very bright people

a lot of introverts a few extroverts among them a few crazy people who had a band based around the whole CERN concept so the environment was just

really exciting and there was And I was a little British kid come out to Geneva for the first time, so I seeed for the first time. So I hiked in the mountains for the first time. So all that side of it also was swimming in Lake Geneva and other

local things. So that was the lovely part. One more thing, and then back to Alistair. And then at some moment you had the confidence to propose to your boss this idea of a worldwide web. And I think it took some months to make it through the system, and you presumably were still relatively young. How did that work within

the system? How did it feel to have an idea like that, take a proposal like that, work with people? Can you sort of remember that process? Because very unusual to have come up, obviously, an invention that's changed the entire world. But talk us a little bit about the process of that, how it felt to take that through. So I'd always been concerned in the back of my head about a few problems. I remember my dad explaining, he wrote speeches for Battle de Franti. Franti was a computer company. And he wrote speeches for the boss explaining about computers. One of the things they would explain is that computers were really good at doing logical, organized things.

They're good at tables, but not good at random associations. I always thought, now, capturing random associations. So in fact, the first time I was at CERN in 1980 before, a few years before, the web thing, I actually designed a program called Inquire Within Upon Everything. And Inquire was a program which would allow you to type. It was terminal-based, so you type into it a note about something, and you type into it how that note was connected to other notes in the system,

other things in the system. and you could connect any two things together. So whenever you introduced, you could go to one a note about a thing and then you could say, now, here's a new note, but you'd have to explain how it was connected to the other thing. You have to select the type of connection. Is that the sort of logic of the large language models? I think we're in danger to it.

You can get on to that in second, because we're very excited by large language on AI. But just to finish the World Wide Web. So you were describing, I think, the beginnings are developing hyperlinks, beginning the thought that goes towards the developing of links. And I had this idea that you could take all of the existing documentation systems around there at CERN. You could wrap them up together under one roof.

You could make a meta system which would include them all. And I wrote it up and gave it to my boss, Peggy, and I gave it to her boss, Mike Sandel. The now famous thing about that was that eventually, unfortunately Mike died of cancer. several years later and when Peggy got hold of his the copy I'd given him

he'd written vague but exciting in pencil on the top corner and so vague he thought it was vague but exciting and so he let me play

so does that mean he didn't fully understand it the vagueness was like your vagueness or was he in my vagueness right my yeah was you the sort of person Did you focus upon the vague or on the excited?

I didn't see this for a long time, in fact. But when you were looking back now and you were getting that sort of feedback, what's your psychology in terms of taking something like that forward? Focus on the exciting. Right, right. Because you actually, your book starts where you say I was 34 years old when I first presented. So that is young, isn't it? In the science world, is that young? In the computing world, it wasn't because people were coming out of, you know,

this inside if you're building your own computer. So you weren't seen as a sort of boy wonder? No. No. No, I was in my 30s. Your parents worked for Farranti. You worked briefly for Plessy. And it's a reminder of the fact that Britain in the 50s, 60s, 70s, even into the 80s, had these tech companies. It did.

Ray Kohl, had Silicon Glen, all these kind of things that younger listeners may not have heard of. Do you describe a little bit about that world? And what happened to this world in which Britain was at the cutting edge of so much of electronics, technology, chips and how we lost that? So, yes. So when I left university, then you'd go to the milk round interviews where each big company would send somebody to each university. And you'd go to a hotel with them and talk for an interview and then maybe get offered a job. And so there was Plessy, there was GEC, and there was ITT. ITT was in Hollow, which we weren't very attracted to. GEC was in Coventry, where the interviewer said,

the great thing about Coventry is how easy it is to get out of. It's the hard sell. So then Plessy was in Poole in Dorset. So we had to go to Plessy, so we had to go to Plessy. And we had jobs in various different parts of the company. And so then, yes, in those days, these big companies were companies like Honeywell, Bull, in France, and ICL in Britain. They produced perfectly good big mainframe computers, and they worked perfectly well,

but at the end, they couldn't compete with the IBM process. So you're British, you were working in a European institution, and yet if we sort of list the really, really, really big money-making beneficiaries of your invention, a lot of them are in the United States. And there's a point in the book where you say the centre of mass of the web was shifting to the other side of the Atlantic. Is there any way that actually this could have been used and adapted in a way that was much more beneficial to Europe, that Europe could have owned this in much bigger way? Well, yes and no.

The internet had already spread all over crosswalk of America. So when I invented the web, it was relatively new. And there was a battle between the internet and the ISO protocols. So in a way, Europeans felt, no, you shouldn't use the internet. It's this kind of ad hoc protocol produced by these Americans. They haven't put it to the international standards of globalization. And so therefore, you should wait to the international standards organization. So that in a state was a mistake, in fact.

So Europe ended up behind. Is that a kind of bureaucratic mindset that the Americans complain about? Yeah, if you like. The ISO, the field, you have to do everything through ISO as bureaucratic. We could, so by the time the web spread, the web spread through the people who were using the Internet. The people who were using Internet were in American universities. So, yeah, if Europe had funded the ARPANET,

then they would have all started maybe in Geneva, but America funded the ARPANET. What's the lesson of that, do you think, for Europe and the UK, when we think about tech and innovation? Are the lessons that the government could take on how to make the UK a more dominant player in technology compete with the US that you draw from your experience? Well, right now, I think one of the experiences, I think, now, if we jump all the way to, to AI. I found that the CERN experience was pretty good. And just to sort of note that the CERN was put together after the Second World War to worry about how people who would end up making nuclear power and who would control

that huge forces inside the atom. So CERN, I really like working there. I thought it was a great place, not just for doing what they did, but also for doing what I did on the side. Now, maybe for AI what we should do, we should have a place like CERN, where we bring all of the experts, and under international banner, collaborating in a positive way, we should develop something where if it ends up being more powerful, if it ends up becoming a superintelligence,

that we're doing it in a place where it's very controlled. And this is very exciting, but very important, because of course, if large, language models and AI defines the future of public service, the future of business, the future of defence and security, and these models are only in the US and China. Europe will be in a very vulnerable position strategically, economically, and therefore it almost seems necessary for Europe and the UK to develop its own sovereign LLM, no? Yes, well, I didn't say European sovereign LLM and CERN wasn't a European, CERN was really international. So what I prefer is something, yes, based in Geneva will be fine, but international, so involve the Chinese and the

Americans as well. Do you not feel there is a risk for Europe and the UK if all the AI innovation takes place in the US and China that pretty quickly companies will be created in those places that we can't create, weapons will be created in those places that we can't create, public service innovation will happen which we don't own? There's a risk if we, if the Europeans aren't sufficiently on the AI band, I can. But under that, I mean, there are European LLMs, and so that, yes, I think that Europe should make sure they keep up to date. Okay, Tim Alistair, quick break, and then back for more. This episode is brought you by Revoluted Business, the All in One account, designed for efficiency and built for business.

Is it true, basically, that you don't even have a spreadsheet to do your expenses? I've got a pen, paper, paper clips, little notes. But I accept it could be more efficient, Rory. So I'm going to sell Revoluted business to you. It brings clarity and efficiency, works in over 30 different currencies, no hidden fees, smart spending tools. It is actually pretty amazing. And you can set card limits, you can automate your expenses. Basically, it does take the stress out of your financial woes. There's also a £200 welcome bonus if you're new to Revement. business. Open a Revolut business account today via Revolut.com slash RBE slash leading or by using the link in this episode's description and add money to your account to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. The offers only available until the 31st of December

2025 for new business customers in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland fees and terms and conditions apply. Whatever stage your business is at. With Revolut business, you're ready for what's next. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Zavarik here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated, by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy when Britain feels like it's

sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions. And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues.

We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you.

We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is history wherever. you get your podcasts. You probably had the biggest audience of your life in 2012 when London was hosting the Olympic Games, which I always think is the last time that the UK really felt kind of positive about itself. And you had that role in the Danny Boyle's opening ceremony, which is actually the title of your book.

It's the tweet that you did, this is for everyone. And you've got this huge cheer around the stadium. how is your vision of thinking about both when the thing started but also at that moment in 2012 has it proved to be for everyone and on balance has it been a force for good or a force for bad? We've touched on, I've already said some of the things that you think are good and thought of bad, but on balance has this thing been very good for the world or the downsides outweigh it? I think on balance it's good because there's so much good stuff.

People with teenage children are very aware of the bad stuff because when it's addictive, it takes people's time. And so it takes a lot of people's time. And so the bad stuff, the bad addictive stuff, because it's addictive, it tends to dominate the conversation. It dominates people's lives. But in general, the most, you know, the stuff out, most of the stuff, out there is good. And what about the way that politics has embraced it and the way that elections have changed

and you could argue democracy's changed? You say at one point that you know we've got to make sure that social media works for democracy. Yeah. I'm assuming the reason you say that is you worried at the moment is perhaps not working for democracy. Well certainly with the 2016 elections

then I was a sort of a bit of a shock when people said that it's possible that the election had actually been swayed by people being manipulated on the web. And so that sort of was another, I think, people did a lot of people I knew did a double take at that point and realized, whoa, actually, we have to make sure that the web supports democracy. It should support people being able to communicate across cultural boundaries.

You should be able to understand the person who's arguing against you by understanding where they're coming from. Do you think it's got worse or better since then? Well, there's some places in Taiwan, for example, there was a system. Audrey Town, yeah. We talked to her, yeah. Yeah, yes. That system, the policy system, I think, is called that. I think is the examples like that. There's also a group at MIT in the Media Lab. I'm an advisor to them. That's the sense of a constructive communication. What's your assessment of how it's gone in the US and the UK?

I haven't seen any recent data about how about electioneering and the rigging of elections. But you talk in the book, don't you, about the books? Brexit vote, you talk about the Trump 2016 election, you talk a little bit about the risks of polarization, you talk about A-B testing, you talk about the ways in which the difference

in broadcast and narrow-cast and the risks that come with this narrow-casting. Can you explain a little bit of that to the audience? So narrow-casting is when somebody is on a social media and they've been liking a whole lot of things. So you, the social

media company know them very, very well. And so then you can then deliver a message to them, which may get them all angry at the other side, for example. And you can do it. And narrow costing is when you do it in a very specific way. As you deliver it specifically because you know that that person is very, very keen about children or very, very keen about the army or something. So it means that instead of spreading your political message, you know, broadcasting it on radio

to everybody, where it's... So it is much more like there being many, many small radio stations, which are very, very finely tuned with only one or two people in each cohort. And you've also talked about the way in which something like Facebook, because as you said earlier in this interview, instead of setting up your own website, you create your page on Facebook, but you don't totally control that Facebook page. In fact, the company's algorithms determine what people see on that page,

what political messages they get when you visit the page. So a very strange combination of algorithms, profit motives, attention-seeking, begin to frame that interaction in a way that's radically different from what you initially envisaged for World by Web. Could you explain that a little? Well, by comparison. So, yes, I'd imagine it would be more like blogging and podcasting, I suppose. Well, it's different with Facebook.

Well, I guess Instagram was like this for a while. So it's the old Instagram and new Instagram. I had an Instagram account, and I followed people I knew. I only allowed people I knew to follow me. And I used it for keeping track of friends and relatives. So now if I go to Instagram and I scroll through, I see there's a feed. So it's become a feed. That feed can have all kinds of things, like feed bite.

and if maybe it could get me addicted I don't know when I stopped using Instagram because of that change so really the difference between Instagram before or after or if you like the difference between Pinterest you know for example people

don't get addicted to Pinterest but they can work in groups they can share things and so on on Pinterest in a way that is more is better for the teenage mental health than things like Instagram. If you look at a list of the wealthiest people in the world with Mr. Musk at the top and Mr. Bezos is pretty close and Mr. Zuckerberg and all these kind of incredibly wealthy people

and including in China some of the wealthiest people there as well, they've all kind of benefited in a big, big, big way from your invention. Is there any part of you that doesn't think that you deserve, to be up there with them in terms of monetary gain, or is that not something that motivates you? Well, I have, now I have a company inrupt doing great things to fix some of the problems that we've got, and so I'm not averse to having to be on the commercial side of the coin at all. But you're not up there with the musks and the Zuckerbergs. They have made phenomenal amounts of wealth. Have they ever said thank you to you?

Yes. have they? Well, yes, I've got some of them. And Tim, you're being quite sort of self-deprecating, but Alice's got a point. I mean, you didn't immediately from the late 80s throw yourself entirely into business and entrepreneurship. You actually took a number of academic jobs and non-profits. And non-profit jobs, yeah. Why was that? Why were you not primarily driven by initially in the early stage, your career by business and entrepreneurship, but instead by the ideas themselves. Well, really, the important thing was to keep the web on track.

So the consortium I started at the moment the web was going. All the companies like in that day, Netscape and Microsoft, IBM, HP, these companies were all vying to be the best thing on the web, to be the best browser, to be the best website, and so on. But they also knew that the web had to be one web. It had to be one protocol. So, HTTP would get more powerful, and URLs would become more powerful and so on. But all those standards had to be the same. So they had to agree on them.

So then I led this industry consortium for many years until just recently, until 2020. I was the official leader of the whole consortium. And what I did, my job was to bring people together around the time. table and they really enjoyed being around the table. They really enjoyed talking to people from other companies solving the same problems. And so that, in fact, the whole WCC, the web consortium experience has been really positive and a lot of the people involved in it have been, you know, wonderful people. So this is a podcast primarily about politics. And I just wondered, first of all, whether you're a very political animal.

And secondly, there's not much politics in the book. You have a brief mention of David Cameron not being terribly interested in this stuff, but David Willits was there to sort of, to get him in the right place. But there's not much politicians in and out of the book. I just wondered if you're just not that bothered about politics or whether you think that politics is best staying out of this world.

Well, the book is about the web. The book isn't about politics. But I do talk about Gordon Brown. and so Cotonier brought him around fairly well because he agreed to put all the UK government data online and that demonstrated a little leadership for basically leading the way showing the whether the Americans then had to catch up

by putting their data online and there was a great graph which I don't think is in the book about showing now when Gordon said yes some UK put some data online and then other countries followed, and other countries followed leapfogging. So that was, the top cover then was valuable because lots of people within the government

knew that it was good to put government data online for free. They wanted to do it. Some of them were really excited about it, but they needed their cover. They needed the fact that the Prime Minister had said, yes, we'll do this. And this then has become something with enormous potential, but also quite controversial.

So if we take for listeners the example of the NHS, huge benefits from potentially from everybody being able to access this incredible data set and C patterns, but equally people profoundly worried about privacy concerns. How would you explain to the public how you manage those questions around data? In an ideal world, you have a data wallet, which you control. and in that data you can put your bank data, you can use it like an annual wallet, you can put your credit cards in it,

but also you can put all of your bank data, you can put your credit card data. Your health data. You can put your health data in there. And once you've got your health data, imagine you've got your health data. Imagine you're interested in being part of a clinical trial of some drug, which is going out there.

But you've got a whole bunch of your data, your own health data and you've got it in your data wallet. You got hold of your genome. You scan your genome and instead of giving it to a company, you've kept it yourself. So you've got a copy of your genome. So anybody in the scientific world or in the medical world who's interested in doing research about you

then finds you really, really much more valuable target. So then you go to the clinical trial place and you say, look, I'm prepared to share with you for the purpose of finding of curers for cancer only. But for that, as I'm prepared to share with you, all of my medical data, and also, if

it's interesting to you as well, my credit card data, so you can see what sorts of things I buy, what sorts of things I do. And so that's, you know, the model is hopefully the future involves very, very much more powerful research in which individuals contribute

their medical data to the common cause. I presume somebody arguing against you would say, but that's not as convenient for the company as being able to access everybody's data with no restrictions at all, because some people might choose not to share their data. Yes, it's true, but privacy is really important.

You wrote a piece in the FT a while back, and you talked about the walled gardens, that the social media platforms have all built these unscalable garden walls and they keep our data in there. How do we break those walls down given that they have now become very powerful economic

and political forces? So the wall garden is like when you're on Facebook and you're on LinkedIn and you want to share Facebook photos with LinkedIn for example, Facebook and LinkedIn are two wall gardens they don't so that they don't allow you

you can't share with a LinkedIn group your Facebook photos and so on and so on and there's a whole bunch of different And that's because they own your data Because they own your data They keep your data inside their website So all the data from Facebook is stored on Facebook dot com or the Facebook data data from LinkedIn

is stored on LinkedIn.com And you can't get access to it So one of the things that I think people have talked about doing is legislating that you must be able to move your data between different ones. Moving forward into AI, which Alistair was drawing into a bit earlier, you write in the book about your interest in the debate

about what it would mean to say that these machine learning models are or are not intelligent. In fact, I think it's a paragraph in the book where you talk about that debate and you say, you know, some people see it simply as a question of following tokens, but actually there's an open question about whether if the set didn't get large enough and if the neural connections didn't get large enough, it begins to seem quite different. Tell us a little bit about your sense

of what it means to talk about a computer being intelligent. So I think since Alan Turing defined the Turing test as being something where what it meant for intelligence is you have to put this computer behind a screen. You can't look at what it's made of

and that was a really important message and I think some people have forgot that message recently when they say, well, a computer, it might seem to be smart but it's only made a transistors and nothing made of transistors can possibly be intelligent. So, oh, in fact, something that's made a transistor can certainly be intelligent. Can it be super intelligent?

Well, why not? If you're building something which is as smart as yourself, then why can't you build something as a smart? than yourself. And if you build something which is smarter than yourself, then shouldn't you be careful? Shouldn't you have it do it in a very, very carefully contained way? Well, that then leads me to the next one and then back to Honestead, because there is an argument being made in the States that there shouldn't be any restrictions or regulation, partly because they say they're in a race with China and any form of restrictions will stop them from out

competing China. And other people say, anyway, we can't be regulated. because the government doesn't understand what we're doing, so any regulation they bring will be the wrong kind of regulation. So there's a big push, particularly from the people building these models and funding these models to say, government stay away, don't get too involved. What's your response to that? I think I'd go along with the people who are working in AI,

they're split, I suppose, as well. But I think the ones I trust are the ones who say we have to be careful about containment. And why? Containment. You have to be careful about containment because if you have something which is smarter than you, then it will argue it will take control

of the planet. I mean, it's very sci-fi sort of thing to think about. And how would you explain that to the public and what sort of things might it do? What sort of things in the worst case scenario would we have to plan for? One place to go is sci-fi movies.

Remember how the completion in 2001, which basically refused to end up feeling it was more important to the mission than the people on board and ended up trying to take over from the people. That sort of you can imagine making movies in which that happens with the AIs that people are building now in a few years, because the AI is so powerful. But in those circumstances, and with you saying that's a sort of possible, feasible scenario, should governments not be trying to get more of a grip on this rather than less than a grip?

Yes, I agree. They should. And especially in light of the fact that some of the people who've come to dominate the social media space are now sort of moving into the AI space as well. and yet they seem to be winning this argument I don't know if you agree with this but they seem to me to be winning this argument about let the creatives thrive let the companies thrive

otherwise we're going to be left behind and China's going to take over I'm definitely on the side of the argument that we should constrain the big AIs Okay my final question actually is about China you have a very interesting section in the book about China and the way it sort of was maybe a bit slow to catch on

but once it's caught on, it's caught on very, very pretty impressively, but at the same time does have this rather repressive approach to what people can have access to. I just wonder what your take is in the Battle of the Two Superpowers, these two different approaches and whether you can see merits and demerits in both? Well, I see merits and demerits in the two approaches, certainly. You can see that when it comes to doing something like organizing a national project, for AI.

Obviously, the Chinese are very national project-oriented. Everything in China, more or less, is a national project. Everything works for the government. So that, in a way, having the communist system clearly will give them an ability to be, maybe take a lead and invest seriously in AI capabilities as far as the, whereas the American system leaving it to the companies involved, they are going like crazy, but there's no coordination about what happens.

There's no control over what the AI is used for by all these companies. Last two questions for me. First one, what do you think your parents would have made of the world we're in today, looking at it from the perspective of them as idealistic mathematicians, the 1950s, and now looking at the way in which world's going, what would they have liked, what would they have disliked about the modern world? I think they would have been absolutely fascinated to see CHAT GPT. They would never imagine that you would have something.

You know, they've, all of the problems, a lot of the problems like, you know, they were very aware of, problems of speech recognition, of spirit, of, you know, of one by one, they saw, or things like, now you can, now Saturn AF works, you can ask an AI to navigate you across the world. You can now, now speech recognition works, now speech generation works. So they'd seen certain parts of those, but I think they would be absolutely staggered, as I was, I suppose, to see what chat GPT could do. And what would have satin them about the modern world, do you think? Oh, I think they're quite liberal and I think the, what would have sounded them about the world. I think the political situation, I think probably.

They probably imagined that the world would have been more liberal each time around. And final one. What do you, in these interviews, sometimes wish that people asked you? What sort of questions do you wish that you had more chance to talk about? my book. What will be an example of something that you sometimes come out of into saying, I wish I'd had more of a chance to talk about that? Well, well, I wish that you would have asked about. Maybe I will, maybe the solid system,

the solid protocol, sort of the fact that maybe the fact that all these open source people who are working on the new protocol are so enthusiastic about it and are fired up about building a new world in which the world is completely much improved on the one we have today. And community-minded? Community-minded, both individuals but also organizations being able to function much more than getting back that feeling of digital sovereignty that we started off with in the early days of the way. Cheeky, final, final.

What do people misunderstand about what it means to invent something like this? When people describe you, talk about the moment of inventing the World Wide Word, project their ideas of their idea of a scientific genius onto you, what do you think they misunderstand about what really is involved in the process of scientific invention? In fact, it's a very long process. It involves having multiple jobs. and so they asked they asked

so what was the UVEECO moment okay and so I'm so glad we did less that Roy I didn't even like that I even wonder about the original UVEECOM moment whether in fact sitting in his bath whether that maybe that as or

maybe in fact that it was a long process I think other inventions take a long time they don't happen overnight and anybody who tells you they had a new you can own would I'd be very suspicious. Well, all the things that we haven't asked about, you can read about in your excellent book.

This is for everyone, published by McMillan out now. Thank you for your time. Have a great opportunity. Thank you so much for having you. Thank you. It's been great. Alice, what do you think of that? Was that what you were expecting or a little different?

No, because I mean, I don't know that much about me. I'm not seen much of him. I obviously know the impact he's had on the world. And he doesn't, doesn't do many interviews. He doesn't. He's obviously doing this because he's published his book and he's talked about his life story and what his views are and so forth. And I actually was thinking as he was sitting there, I was thinking of all the many, many, many people that we've interviewed,

some of whom have been really significant global figures, he's probably the one who has changed, touched the lives of more people. Because it's very hard to think of a single person on the planet who hasn't at some stage engaged in or being part of a process that has inevitably involved the World Wide Web. So I found him quite inspiring in his own way. As you said in your introduction, you know, he's not a natural media performer. He's quite quirky. He sometimes, I think, is listening to the words that you say literally without necessarily getting your tone all the time.

so some of my attempts to get the Huber going probably fell a little bit flat but listen the guy's clearly a genius and also I think I was pressing him and you pressed him

and you're the thing about the thing about wealth I mean if he had taken a Bill Gates Steve Jobs Zuckerberg Musk approach to this he would have been one of the wealthiest people on the planet

but that's not what rocks his boat and you get a sense that that's slightly the values maybe I'm projecting too much of his parents, but his grandparents were teachers, his parents were mathematicians who worked for these computer companies in a world where they didn't make much money. He lived in a pretty modest house.

And I also think huge tribute to his parents because, as you say, he's obviously quite an unusual person, describes himself as an introvert. And yet it's clear in the book that he grew up in such a loving and supportive environment where his parents really made him feel accepted, confident, special, or at least that's how it comes across. Yeah. But I think to get through your entire up to Adelter without a no Hebrew,

Springsteen is, I'm sorry, Roy, this is not on. And the Father Christmas thing, I mean, part of me, you know, is absolutely, why do we teach our children on the one hand? It's really, really, really bad to lie. But one of the big things they grow up with in the early years is this massive lie. And, of course, he's sitting there saying, well, by parents didn't do any of that because they were mathematicians and there were scientists and they were yeah his mother was exactly a liberal basically atheist yeah they knew alan turing and his father had been um essentially

sent by the british military and the government at the end of the war to do his computer science stuff and then worked for the british military so they weren't quite um gCHQ intercept bletchley stuff but they knew that world that they were coming out of that world connected to that world and then there's an extraordinary world also, where Britain at the end of the second world was one of the big tech superpowers the world, innovating, creating these incredible companies, which eventually, as he says, IBM ate all their lunch. I slightly misunderstood him when he was answering you about this containment issue and whether you let the AI companies rip or he's actually, I thought he was first of all he was saying, I'm with the tech guys, but in fact, he's not with the tech guys at all.

He clearly doesn't fully trust them. No, no, no, absolutely. He's, He's very, very cautious and believes these models should be contained, should be regulated. He's also in the book very clear about the fact that he went to a party with a champagne bottle, expecting Hillary Clinton to be elected. And then left him behind a tree. Yeah. But again, he doesn't really want to get drawn into. The word Trump was on his lips when he was talking about what his parents would be disappointed by. I don't know whether, because silence never quite works on a podcast, I think, but as this silence went on, he clearly didn't want to say what was in his head, which was basically his parents would be appalled at what was happening under Donald Trump's leadership.

So he sort of, you had to sense it rather than hear it. And I suppose part of the point to be fair to him, and we slightly had this grumble after we interviewed Bill Gates, for at least I did, which is that he has decided that his role in life is to try to create an internet. a World Wide Web, which is community-based, compassionate, collaborative. And to do that, he cannot afford to alienate the US president, Mark Zuckerberg, or any of these people. Because his job is to try to hold them all together. Yeah, well, he's pretty frank about some of them, but maybe not as frank as he actually thinks. I don't know. But listen, he's a very, it's a bit fascinated to see what our regulars think of it.

But he's an amazing Brit and an amazing kind of testimony. So he went to a British state-funded school. school. As he points out, again, funded by the state, funded by the local council, yeah. And I think it would be, it's like the thing we say about, you know, deep mind going from the UK to the US or people will look back and say that was a sort of moment of decline for the UK and Europe. I mean, wouldn't it have been great if the whole thing could have stayed in?

The whole thing could have been run for Britain and Europe. And you got to something fascinating there where he points out that one of the problems was a very understandable European obsession. was standards while the Americans were rolling out this military-funded internet. Yeah. Yeah. You're getting into it. Anyway, they were, is he our first...

Is our first proper computer site? We've had some AI guys. Yeah, but he's, I think, at the far, far end of the real innovation. And we had Robert Spolski, of course, the baboon expert on the side stuff. We loved. Our listeners and viewers loved. But anyway, thank you, Alastair, very much. Good.

Thank you. Thank you.