Inventor of web has hope for AI
PROGRESS: PROMISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS EXCITING, SAYS TIM BERNERS-LEE
‘More and more, computers are starting to tick off all those things we were told computers just couldn’t do. So these are very exciting times.’
The man who invented the world wide web could be mistaken for a schoolteacher, or perhaps a university professor.
A slight build, spectacles and thinning, brown hair combine with an almost humble demeanour that is difficult to associate with a legacy as great as any of the giants of the technology world.
Tim Berners-Lee was looking for an easier way to connect information when he first came up with the concept of the world wide web in the 1980s, while working as a physicist at the Cern laboratory in Switzerland.
Today, he is a director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which, in effect, sets the technical rules for how the web operates. But he remains an academic and is a senior researcher and founder chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
It is little wonder, then, that he is as preoccupied with artificial intelligence (AI) as he is with the web. The latter remains his baby, however, and he has far more to say about it than any other topic.
In March 2017, he issued an open letter warning that we have lost control of our personal data, that it’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web, and that political advertising online needs transparency.
Clearly, he is not one to gloss over the perils of progress. So, when it was announced that he
was to offer his insights into the dangers of AI at the Dell EMC 2017 conference in Las Vegas, it became the must-attend talk of an already intensive convention.
The conference represented the first joint convention by two giants of the computer world, following computer manufacturer Dell's purchase of storage leaders EMC for $67 billion (R884 trillion) – the biggest IT acquisition yet. EMC and its subsidiary, VMware, are responsible for the storage and the management platforms of a large proportion of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure. The cloud is going to be integral to AI, hosting and processing the massive amounts of data that will allow AI to help human beings make and act on decisions.
It was no surprise that a record 13 500 delegates attended Dell EMC World. And it was no surprise that the lines to get into Berners-Lee’s “AI in Perspective” talk were almost as long as those for the conference’s opening keynote by Dell founder Michael Dell.
The web founder speaks with a rapid-fire energy that sometimes appears to run ahead of his thoughts. He delivers his perspective of the future with authority and empathy.
“The promise of AI is really exciting but you still have to look at it as the thing which makes a lot of people concerned,” he says by way of introduction. “We have to look at not just the hopes, but also the fears.”
The promise, he says, is that of almost all computer projects: “We’re trying to get machines to do things we don’t want to do, like filling out a form. A lot of the progress in computing starts off with simple things, like doing accounts and taxes. Translating languages has always been just about to happen, but is now starting to become functional.
“You can train a machine to beat a game. Instead of training it by looking at lots of people playing a game, you just teach it to play against itself and it becomes better than a human. You can grab yourself some cloud storage and some cloud computation and find some open data produced by government or scientific or enterprise, find lots of data, find the latest algorithm and create something that has added value, and put out signal where there wasn’t signal before. Like enabling you to decide where to invest.
“More and more, computers are starting to tick off all those things we were told computers just couldn’t do. So these are very exciting times.”
There are two key problems in this Utopian vision. The first seems easily solved: “There is a huge dearth of people who know how to do this stuff, but there will be more and more. The stuff is out there and you can teach yourself. The promise is huge.”
The second issue is that most difficult of challenges: public perception. Berners-Lee talks about an “AI spring”, when the world was full of hope, turning into an AI winter: “The world turned on them and said ‘you were supposed to give us robots by now, what happened? This sucks.’”
And fear is building that AI will take away jobs. “Suddenly it’s no longer AI. Now it’s Natural Language Processing, now it’s self-driving cars. But they wont call it AI.”