Thirty years ago, on April 30th 1993, Tim Berners-Lee made history when he announced the development of the World Wide Web and pronounced it to the public domain, making it royalty-free. His innovation has since revolutionized the way we live and our access to information forever.
The World Wide Web allowed us to launch our first browser, search for content, and access information easily and quickly.Information sharing across sites and locations was now a reality and the internet was no longer a slow and cumbersome tool to use. The number of websites in the first year of the new technology increased from 600 to 60,000, and today, the World Wide Web encompasses a whopping 1 billion sites.
At the same time as the internet exploded, so did mobile phone use. In the past, phones were seen as a symbol of the well-off and were naturally not popular. However, at the same time that the internet began to turn cellphones into indispensable communication devices, AI technology also began to take a huge leap forward. AI-powered chat bots like ChatGPT gained massive success, with a million users in the first five days and over a billion in the first month.
Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist who formerly worked for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. His academic background and expertise in computer science drove him to search for a way for the organisation to share information across its sites and countries, which he managed to do through the World Wide Web. His decision to put the web in the public domain for free helped it dramatically gain popularity and experience massive success within just a few years.
Today, AI technology and the World Wide Web has changed the way we work, communicate and access information. People are now relying heavily on AI-driven tools and services, with many businesses outsourcing mundane tasks to artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, the importance of humans and their collaboration with AI technology cannot be understated. As Bob Dylan once put it, the times they are a-changin’ again and we need to adjust our strategies and expectations accordingly.
