When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.
Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.
Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.
“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.
Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.
It doesn’t matter how noble your intent when inventing or researching, once business has control of something, it is used to gain power and control over people. All you scientists and engineers and researchers need to starts accepting your own contribution to this monster, held accountable for the technologies you help businesses unleash on all of us.
We do not blame Prometheus for what the arsonist did.
Zeus did…
If Prometheus saw a dude twitching his fingers, eager to burn shit down and then handed him fire, he damn well should be blamed.
I think your coming on a little heavy, if you are trying to say that inventors should build systems that are resilient to misuse, I whole heartadly agree. But how your post seems it would imply that no one should be inventing anything that could possibly be corrupted or face the consequences, which is quite a huge pendulum swing that wouldn’t cause the outcome I think you are looking for.
They should consider to not build at all if it’s clear the result is business returning us to slavery.
Maybe the problem isn’t the technology in this case but a system that promotes consolidation of power and money as its top and only priority.
It’s likely impossible to pick a link in this web of causation and blame it. Not a single part is impactful enough to change things, which is why most of us do nothing, feeling impotent in our tiny place in things. But some people have a much greater impact than most of us, and scientists and engineers are some of those people. Some of those people can prevent futures simply by not inventing it.
It would be nice to be able to unlock the truths of existence without worry someone would use it to cause harm, or chase power, but that doesn’t seem like the world we have. We know people will try with whatever new thing we learn or create. Where does the responsibility lie then for those who bring that new thing into existence, knowing it may be used to cause harm? We know Shell and BP and Nestle and Elon and Phillip Morris and United Health all cause harm in pursuit of power and use science and technology to enable their ambitions. Every new insight, every new technology further empowers the worst of us to do the worst to us and it seems to me like that isn’t going to be stopping in my lifetime. That was made possible by the consolidation of private wealth and control over collective resources capitalism enables, the technology of the corporation enabled.
I agree with the first part, but scientists and engineers are not that much more complicit than literally everyone with a job. Those businesses couldn’t have done that without marketing, hr, janitors, tradespeople, lawyers etc etc etc either. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and there is no ethical job.
Their complicity is more impactful. They Empower those businesses with new technological capabilities that the public, the state and the population in general is in no position to effectively keep up with and defense against. Employees also have their own responsibility, but the empowerment engineers and scientists are giving businesses by building fucking AI is very different than what an office bureaucrat contributes by managing the logistics. Logistics can only manage what exists, science and engineers are bringing new shit into existence and handing it to psychopaths. I rarely ever hear anything about the responsibility scientists and engineers have by empowering these corporations and other ambitious people even though their contributions make it possible at all.
All these LLM engineers building the spy tools and data collection and analysis systems that will be used on us need to be brought into the conversation when we discuss whose responsible for MAGA and Trump and the technofascism that were watching be built right now. They can’t do it without those inventions and discoveries, so maybe stop fucking helping them? We’re responsible for what we do, not what others are doing. That goes for scientists and engineers as much as anyone else, yet are rarely mentioned.
That’s a good point, and I feel that way about things like weapons manufacture or intelligence, and yeah, probably working for Google or Palantir. There is a limit to the abrogation of our responsibility because we need to make a living. But I still somewhat disagree with some of your point, on practical grounds, which is basically that “AI” doesn’t really work.
AI is just an example of technology that empowers, pick any technology or any scientific discovery from TNT to CRISPR. The point is that new powers are being created and handed to psychopaths who are hurting all of us. At what point are these people held to account for handing billionaires the tools they use to herd us off a cliff?