Artificial intelligence has an exciting role to play in fields like drug discovery, scientific progress and disease treatment. But given the pace at which it is evolving, there is a real prospect of AI becoming more powerful than its creator, warns Tim Berners-Lee, British computer scientist and inventor of the World Wide Web. Humanity will have to figure out to how deal with super intelligence, says Berners-Lee, striking a note of caution at a time when companies and govts seem to be in a race to develop AI without really thinking through the consequences.
Speaking to Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, Berners-Lee described ChatGPT as a “phase change”, which surprised him with its conversational power. He emphasised that the critical question is who an AI works for. He argued for assistants that serve the user’s best interests – analogous to a doctor’s duty – rather than corporate incentives. He connected this to his Solid project and his company’s work on user-controlled data “pods”, aiming to restore agency by letting individuals control and selectively share their personal data, including in child-safe configurations with parental oversight.Berners-Lee also contrasted the early web’s democratic spirit with today’s platform-dominated experience. In the beginning, individuals could publish their own websites and participate on equal footing with major institutions.
