153. The Man Who Invented The World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee)

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1:33This 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. But he's a very, very revealing portrait of the spirit of a man who not just invented something, which is 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 multi-billionaire off the basis of this product and remains deeply interested in ideas, deeply idealistic, and maybe not really a sort of classic media performer.

2:31Welcome to The Rest of Spongebob Leading with me, Anastor 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.

3:20and 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 a more straightforward life, almost as academics. Yes, I suppose. Computer scientists wasn't a term. They were mathematicians, and they'd been roped in to build this computer. And people would really, you know, that was the time when Alan Turing was defining what a computer was. Yeah, so the whole idea of a computer was being forged, if you like, for the first time. So I was really lucky to be in that house with all the time my mum did certainly found to bring up four kids.

4:10So 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 it 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.

4:55we went to church but they were a strong sort of atheist sort of thread to a very rationalist literally what about the tooth 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 I was shy yes and And I was compounded with the fact my natural shyness is that I ended up going to a school, a 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.

5:39The catchment area was based in Clapton 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. We had Richmond Park just around 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?

6:24Maybe. Maybe. I guess there must be some data on it somewhere. So, as Rory said in the introduction, you're kind of best known for, quote, inventing the World Wide Web. And I read your book. I apologize, I read it 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 was 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?

7:21For me, there's a very strong link I suppose because the early days of the web were this new people hoped for utopia you know before, 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 such 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 blogged about everything else. And so everything would be covered. And so I felt that I was a peer among all the other people, big companies, small companies.

8:07They 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, mine was the first in history, but the people who then came along, they were all peers. People could do all kinds of things and they were, yeah, this sense of peerness, or we call it now, we call it digital sovereignty. It's the idea that you as an individual

8:39are empowered. And have we lost digital sovereignty? Yes, we have. And what's the consequence of that? Maybe explain how we've lost it and then the consequence. In our original Facebook. So people don't make their own. When they want to be expressive, then they go to one of the platforms.

8:57So 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, when we sit here, the three of us talking on a podcast, in a way, we are a peer of any other podcast. And people, and that part of the web is still very much empowering of individuals. I can use a pick, my i use a particular podcast viewer to look for listening to podcasts and i select which ones i listen to uh and and so that and even to me or i i find out about podcasts through the grapevine or whoever however and they're all they're all is that how you kind of envisaged the worldwide web developing you say in the book that wikipedia is a really good example of how you've thought it was going to be.

10:03So if Wikipedia and podcasts are sort of good internet, what is the bad in the internet? Bad internet are the bits which are addictive. In fact, in the book, there is a big diagram where I put the good things because 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.

10:48And so once they learn 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 there'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 uh it's not fair because it's a generalization and scientists don't like generalizations uh people though uh it's uh when you generalize about people in general so some of them i met some of them i haven't and so jeff bezos i've met i've you know i've gone to conferences he's run about Mars, about space and robotics and so on.

11:59And so he seems to be a reasonable person. Mark Zuckerberg, I have talked to, I've met and talked to, but not recently. And so, they're very different people. I wouldn't cast them all in the same books. What about the bigger point? 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. 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.

12:40It's only the addictive side. It's only TikTok. 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. 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 as feed manipulation for engagement.

13:34And you talk about lying, addiction, polarization, 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 in Silicon Valley.

14:25You were presumably a hardworking scientist. And can you just give us a sort of pre-shot before this moment to the World Wide Web of the sort of person you were and the different worlds 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. I suppose 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. We're all working as a computer programmer. Just stop there. How do you make a computer in the 1980s?

15:07You sort of say that that's a normal thing to do. In the 1980s, most of us 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 to a 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 in those days. You make circuit boards. You design a circuit board by plugging it into a thing called a breadboard. And then when you got it working on the breadboard, then there was a thing called variable where you'd make your own.

15:42you make your own circuits you plug in integrated circuits at that point integrated circuits came in one inch long black things with rows of feet and you solder the feet into the circuit board and wire and then put in wires between the circuit boards and so you end up building And what did that computer do? So that computer would do, it would run a very simple programming language, I designed myself called Timple PL and there was a it would it wouldn't do a lot but it could but it could uh you could record data on cassette tapes back in the day uh 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 what did you love about those days and that 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.

16:42They had all these different types of computer. Some of the core thing is an accelerator, 27 kilometers long in a tunnel which goes under the Alps. 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 skied for the first time so i hiked in the mountains for the first time uh so all that side of it also was swimming in like in lake geneva and other local things so that that's that was the lovely part one more thing and then back to alice and And then at some moment, you had the confidence to propose to your boss this idea of a worldwide web.

17:57And 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 Basil de Ferranti.

18:34Ferranti was a computer company. And he wrote speeches for the boss explaining about computers. One of the things that 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, 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.

19:23And you could connect any two things together. So whenever you were introduced, you could go to one 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. What's that sort of logic of the large language models? I think we're in danger, though. We can get on to that in a second because we're very excited by large action. But just to finish the World Wide Web. So you were describing, I think, the beginnings of developing hyperlinks or the beginning of the thought that goes towards the developing of links.

19:56And 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 Sendall. The now famous thing about that was that eventually, unfortunately, Mike died of cancer several years later. And when Peggy got hold of the copy I'd given him, he'd written vague but exciting in pencil on the top corner. And so he thought it was vague but exciting. and so he let me play so does that mean he didn't he didn't fully understand it the vagueness was that your vagueness or his was he in my vagueness right yeah and was you the sort of person did you constantly did you focus upon the vague or on the exciting 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.

21:12So 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 university if you're building your own computer. So you weren't seen as a sort of boy wonder? No. No. I was in my 30s. Your parents worked for Ferranti. 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 call and silicon glen all these kind of things that that younger listeners may not have heard of um 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 and how we lost that so yes well 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 room with them and talk for an interview and then maybe get offered a job.

22:18And 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 a hard sell so then Plessy was in Poole in Dorset so we went to we had to go to Poole 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 in France and ICL in Britain tried. They produced perfectly good big mainframe computers and they worked perfectly well, but at the end they couldn't compete with the IBM process.

23:09So you're British. You're 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 center 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 a much bigger way? Well, yes and no. The Internet had already spread all over across America. So when I invented the web, it was relatively new.

23:49And 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 Organization. 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 is 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 the internet were American in American universities so yeah if Europe had funded the ARPANET then that would have 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?

24:54Are there 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 AI, I found that the CERN experience was pretty good. And just to sort of note that 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 liked 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.

25:40Now, 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, then we're doing it in a place where it's very controlled. And this is, I mean, 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 defense and security, and these models are only in the US and China, Europe will be in a very vulnerable position strategically, economically.

26:23And 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. 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?

27:06There's a risk if the Europeans aren't sufficiently on the AI band. But I mean, there are European LLMs and so that, yes, I think that Europe should make sure they keep up to date. Okay, Tim Allister, quick break and then back for more. This episode is brought to you by Revolut 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, paperclips, little notes. But I accept it could be more efficient, Rory. So I'm going to sell Revolut Business to you. Brings clarity and efficiency, works in over 30 different currencies, no hidden fees, smart spending tools.

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28:33Whatever stage your business is at. With Revolut Business, you're ready for what's next. 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 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 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 broody said some of the things that you think are good and thought about thought about but you know on balance has this thing been very good for the world or the downsides outweigh it i think on balance it's good uh because there's so much good stuff people with teenage children are very aware of the good the bad stuff because it's when it's addictive it 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 sort of dominate the conversation it dominates people's lives but 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 has changed You say at one point that, you know, we've got to make sure that social media works for democracy.

30:18Yeah. I'm assuming the reason you say that is you worry that at the moment it's perhaps not working for democracy. Well, certainly, by the 2016 elections, then I was 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?

31:01Well some places in Taiwan for example there was a system Audrey Tang we talked to her yeah yes That system, the POLIS system, I think it's called. That, I think, is the example side of that. There's also a group at MIT in the Media Lab. I'm an advisor to them. That's the center for 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 electioneering and the rigging of elections. But you talk in the book, don't you, about the Brexit vote? You talk about the Trump 2016 election. You talk a little bit about the risks of polarization.

31:41You talk about A-B testing. You talk about the ways in which the difference between broadcast and narrowcast and the risks that come with this narrowcasting. Can you explain a little bit of that to the audience? So narrowcasting 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, narrow casting is when you do it in a very specific way. 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.

32:25So it means that instead of spreading your political message, broadcasting it on radio to everybody, 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, 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.