Latest news with #TimBernersLee
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Google could steal the entire internet
Google has shown us what the end of the internet looks like. It calls it AI Mode. From Tuesday, instead of seeing ten blue links to third party websites when searching Google, users will see digests of information created by AI. Google says this 'lets you ask nuanced questions that would have previously required multiple searches.' Sometimes there is value in these digests – as demonstrated by AI startup Perplexity. However, the change has catastrophic economic consequences because of Google's dominant position over what we see on the web; AI mode removes the need to visit the site that created the original material. Google, it should be remembered, was found guilty of maintaining a monopoly by an American federal court last summer. An analytics study last week suggested that the top ranking site in blue link Google loses 79 per cent of its traffic after AI summaries are introduced. Other surveys suggest even more: as much as 96 per cent. This is not how the web was supposed to end. Sir Tim Berners Lee's original vision was of a rapid publishing technology, a two way conversation much like the telephone. When Google was young, it promised to get out of our way. 'We wanted people to spend a minimum amount of time on Google. The faster they got their results, the more they'd use it,' said founder Larry Page in 2004. But now Google has become like The Eagles' Hotel California – you can check in, but never leave. That's in keeping with an extractive industry which takes much from publishing but gives little back. AI makes this an order of magnitude worse. Generative AI breaks an informal social contract that has existed since the dawn of business: that a buyer should take a keen interest in the health of its suppliers. AI, though, is replacing suppliers entirely: an analogy is eating the seed corn. For having ingested everything from entire research libraries to newspapers, from YouTube to the works of every gallery, AI can create fine tuned pastiches and continue to produce them forever. Google can also punish sites that refuse to be scraped with a kind of corporate death sentence: making them disappear from Google. A former Facebook engineer, Georg Zoeller, who also advises Asian governments on AI, says generative AI is little more than piracy disguised by hype. 'Large language models are just storage, and all they are doing is compressing knowledge,' he says. 'The industry would have been murdered in its crypt if it had told the truth, and people realised that on the other side of the bot is a Napster'. The magic trick is how AI disguises the theft. Google says the old search results will still be available if you want – or can find them. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority has investigated the company's use of generative AI, but its remedies are so far very tentative, and it is soliciting views. The CMA also finds British business paying a very high toll to maintain Google's advertising dominance: UK publicly listed companies spend £10 billion with Google advertising, which the CMA suggests is far higher than it would be in a competitive digital ad market. The CMA can and should do much more to tame this predatory giant, so British internet businesses can survive.
Daily Mail
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis: In search of genius? Don't look in East Anglia
The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis (Jonathan Cape £22, 352pp) What does it mean to be a genius? It takes more than extraordinary accomplishments or a high IQ. Being a genius, Helen Lewis argues in her lively book, is as much about the society that has given the label as it is about the person themselves. Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, is too self-effacing to play the role – but his invention of the World Wide Web underpins all the accomplishments of today's tech bro 'geniuses'. The concept of genius has evolved. In Roman times, you could be possessed by a poetic muse, or 'furor poeticus'. In the Renaissance, the idea of 'great men' took hold; the Romantics developed the notion of the genius as a garret-dwelling oddball who coughed up blood as he composed works of towering genius. These days, our geniuses are mavericks who move fast and break things; they are still nearly always male. If every society has their own categorisation for genius, does the concept even exist? Lewis has particular fun describing the lengths some have gone to crack the question. In 1904, the scientist Havelock Ellis came up with a list of just over 1,000 British geniuses. People in East Anglia, he concluded, have 'no aptitude for abstract thinking', while those in south-west England are 'sailors rather than scholars'. Dublin had produced 15 geniuses and poor Sligo none at all. Later, the psychologist Catharine Cox Miles embarked on an eccentric project to estimate the intelligence of past geniuses, doling out an IQ based on the length of their entry in a biographical dictionary. This was bad news for Cervantes and Copernicus, who were given an IQ of just 105; Goethe, meanwhile, scored 210. Shakespeare didn't qualify. In the 1990s, the psychologist Hans Eysenck decided there was enough data for a 'rough portrait' of genius. He (and it should 'clearly' be a he) should have a Jewish background, be born in February and lose a parent by the age of ten. He should die either at 30 or at 90, 'but on no account at 60'. He should have gout. Lewis is such a well-read guide to intelligence that at points you wish she'd been bolder. However, she is insightful on the loneliness of the very intelligent. In the 1980s, high-IQ societies were asked for a name for their members. The most appropriate term they had was 'outsider'.
The Guardian
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Challenge use of ‘nefarious' news sources, says environmentalist
People should confront their family members who read news from 'nefarious' sources, suggests the environmentalist Mike Berners-Lee. 'Challenge your friends and family and colleagues who are getting their information from sources that have got nefarious roots or a track record of being careless – or worse – with the truth, because we need to make this sort of thing socially embarrassing to be involved in,' said Berners-Lee, the brother of the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Speaking at Hay festival on Saturday about his most recent book, A Climate of Truth, the writer encouraged people to ask themselves 'really discerning questions' about their basis for trusting the media they consume. Berners-Lee, 61, said that lack of progress on climate issues comes down to political 'deceit', which he likened to abuse. If a media personality 'is found to have groped someone even once, that's the end of their career, because we've decided collectively that that's abuse, and it's disgusting, and we're not having it', he said. 'If a politician abuses us' by being deceitful, 'we need to start screaming about that' too. Though there have been 29 Cop conferences in the past 30 years, there is 'no evidence whatsoever that those Cops have made any difference' to the rising trajectory of the global emissions from fossil fuel use, he said. 'Those 29 Cops have been totally corrupted and destroyed by the very cynical, very well-funded, very calculating, very sophisticated efforts of the fossil fuel industry to make sure those Cops don't get where they need to get to,' he said. While energy companies argue they are helping the world meet rising energy needs, Berners-Lee said: 'We don't have rising energy needs, not at the global level.' Technology is not the obstacle to solving the climate crisis, he said. 'We've got all the technology we need, for example, for an energy transition and vast improvements to our food system.' The 'simplest mechanic by a mile' for 'helping the fossil fuel to stay in the ground' is a carbon price, he suggested. This creates a revenue stream which can be used for 'all kinds of great things' including relieving poverty and supporting 'all the technologies that we need'. He said that humanity's 'time is going to be up' if we carry on business as usual. 'We've got all this energy and technology at our fingertips, and we don't yet have the wisdom and care to be able to wield it,' he said. 'We're like children running around the playground with machine guns, and we've got to put that straight, otherwise we're going to be in for a very, very, very nasty time, and I don't think it's too far away.'
