Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks on the importance of designing human systems at Brattle Theater
The inventor of the World Wide Web remarks on its conception and future
Jieruei Chang–The Tech
In 1989, a young engineer at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) presented an idea for a universal system of linking information. First described as “a vague and interesting proposal,” it proceeded to become one of the most influential inventions of the 20th century.
“I was drawing with a ski pole in the snow, the diagram of the World Wide Web,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee recalled.
On Oct. 1, 2025, Berners-Lee gave a talk to discuss his life and new book, This is For Everyone. Author Juan Enriques served as moderator, and Harvard Book Store hosted the event at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, just off to the side of Harvard Yard.
In the talk, Berners-Lee spoke with a stutter and made rapid gesticulating motions with his hands. He began by recounting his first dabblings in electronics; growing up in London as the son of two computer scientists in the 1960s, he witnessed the exponential growth of computing technology. In primary school, he connected wires to build simple electrical circuits like relays. In secondary school, he’d go to the store and buy bags full of the newly invented transistor, connecting them together to build logic gates on breadboards. As an Oxford student, he put together enough logic gates to build an entire computer. “The power of the electronics you could buy with your pocket money grew year by year,” Berners-Lee said. By the time CERN hired him, he was envisioning a way to connect computers — and information itself — together.
“The dictionary only defines words in terms of other words,” Berners-Lee said. “The world is nothing but connections.” This simple idea would give rise to the architecture of the World Wide Web: an inter-computer network connected by hyperlinks. Although Berners-Lee did not invent the internet nor the idea of a link, he was the first to put them together. When he tried to explain his concept to colleagues, he recalled, “They didn’t understand that when you clicked on one link, it could take you to any other place on the Internet.”
From the start, the Web was designed to be open. One major milestone was when he “got CERN to agree to not charge royalties to use the World Wide Web.” By making the Web’s underlying protocols free and non-proprietary, they ensured that no single entity could claim ownership of the network’s roots. And at first, it seemed to be working.
“The world that saw the birth of the Web was a much more optimistic one than today,” Berners-Lee said. Democracy seemed to be on the rise. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Apartheid had ended in South Africa. And the Web was the headlining technology that would herald in a new era of peace and prosperity. In some cases, it has. Protest movements nowadays spread largely through social media. Online resources like MIT OpenCourseWare give free access to knowledge on unprecedented scale.
But in his talk, Berners-Lee warned that the Internet is becoming an increasingly divisive place that reflects an increasingly polarized society. And as commonplace as it is to blame the content of an Instagram feed on “The Algorithm,” Berners-Lee noted that the design of these algorithms is neither nameless nor neutral. “When you make an addictive algorithm, you know what you are doing. There are university courses taught on how to make algorithms addictive,” Berners-Lee said.
These algorithms take the path of least resistance, wielding controversy and emotion in order to capture attention. When hate speech or misinformation crawls through social media, “the person who typed the horrible thing is responsible, but if the algorithm sends it to a million people, the people who wrote the algorithm are also responsible,” according to Berners-Lee. He posed a challenge for the audience: “Why not see if you can make your platform still work without being addictive? Why not make people interact constructively instead of being angry?”
Of course, the elephant in the room is the rise of large language models (LLMs), shifting the way we interact with information and the Internet. “AI has aced the imitation game,” Berners-Lee said. According to him, “The next version of the Web will not be rendered visually,” but rather force-fed to AI models as training data. And this has implications for the people who created the trove of data that made LLMs possible in the first place. “When you have AI, you’re not going to the original websites. You’re not seeing the ads, so the original makers of those websites are not getting anything for their work,” Berners-Lee explained.
This shift raises a new kind of question: not about what information is accessible, but rather who benefits from its use. When AI models consume the labor of countless creators without acknowledgment or compensation, the Web’s original social contract — free exchange of ideas in return for visibility — breaks down. Like a classical algorithm, the AI models themselves embody the reward functions and alignments of their creators. “When you use an AI, you should ask it: ‘Who do you work for?’” Berners-Lee said.
Despite these concerns, Berners-Lee is optimistic. He insisted that the Web’s founding principles are not obsolete but rather just neglected, and he thinks there is still a way to restore the Internet. “There is still time to build machines that serve humans, rather than the other way around,” he said.