Berners-Lee’s Internet Fix vs. AI’s Wild Ride—Can We Survive Both?

Tim Berners-Lee wants to fix the internet but isn’t so sure about AI—here’s the catch. He claims “We can fix the internet” but warns it’s “optimized for nastiness.”

Berners-Lee traces part of the problem to commercialization: “The Americans were very keen about commercialising the internet, crossing the boundary from being an academic thing to being a commercial thing.” To counter this, he proposes Solid, a web decentralization project designed to “democratise data.”

On AI, he advocates for a CERN-like research hub to contain “super intelligence.” Without such oversight, he says: “I can’t see a way that we can get to a point where the scientific community gets to look at the AI and decide whether it is safe or not.”

He supports Australia’s under-16 social media ban but acknowledges “messaging services are useful.” The article ends with GPU rankings, though no explicit link connects gaming hardware to these proposals.