Your Data Revolution

Hi, welcome, I'm Lauren Goode.

I'm a senior writer at WIRED,

and I am so excited to welcome all of you

to San Francisco for LiveWIRED, our 30th anniversary.

Today marks a very significant milestone

in WIRED's history.

Throughout the last 30 years,

WIRED has introduced audiences

to incredible innovators, agitators, and disruptors,

we have to get the word disrupt in there,

who are constantly striving to build a better future.

As we look ahead at the next 30 years,

it's easy to feel overwhelmed

by the scale of the challenges

facing this country and the planet.

Issues like climate catastrophes, geopolitical conflicts,

and threats to democracy,

they're shaking our confidence in a stronger future.

Today you're gonna have the chance

to hear from innovators leading the charge

in technology, science, and entertainment.

And our hope for today is that these conversations

inspire and provide a positive outlook

for what's possible with human ingenuity.

So in addition to our conversations,

we have a fantastic lineup on our two stages.

We're calling this

kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure today.

Some of you may have noticed that this is the green stage.

There's also the blue stage.

So depending on where you go,

you're gonna experience some mind-blowing demos,

some panels, and some one-on-one interviews to check out.

Our schedule for the day is going to be posted

on the digital displays throughout the event space.

You can also check out our website.

It's events.wired.com/livewired,

I'm gonna say that again, events.wired.com/livewired

to see when and where you can head next.

So just to give you a quick overview

of some of the speakers that we have today,

we're gonna tackle subjects like the new age of medicine,

the modern space race, and your data.

Reid Hoffman and Fei-Fei Li are going to be part

of Steven Levy's AI Optimist Club talk.

They're gonna be talking about the opportunity

of artificial intelligence.

And yes, there are women in artificial intelligence.

[audience applauding]

We're gonna hear from creators

on how AI is going to shape the future

of storytelling and movie-making.

And then at the end of the day,

WIRED's global editorial director,

Katie Drummond, is going to sit down

with the pioneering computer scientist Jaron Lanier

to talk about how we get to a world of data dignity,

I love that phrase, and much, much more.

We're also gonna have some fantastic experiences

for you to explore.

You can take a trip down memory lane,

walk down this main hallway here,

see some of our most iconic WIRED covers,

illustrations, photos throughout the past 30 years.

You can, if you just look over here,

we've got a whole gear team experience.

That's our Gadget Lab, where you can play around

with different technology

that's evolved in the past 30 years

and get a glimpse of what the next 30 years could look like.

Starting at 11:30, a local San Francisco

audio nonprofit called Envelop is going to host

an immersive 32-speaker listening experience

featuring AI-generated soundscapes.

And then finally, we're really hoping

that you'll stick around throughout the end of the day

because we're going to have a live

musical performance from Tierra Whack.

It's really cool. You gotta stick around for this,

followed by a celebratory party.

And you won't have to go too far

because it's all happening right here in this room.

So throughout the day, we actually wanna hear from you all.

The WIRED team will be following all along

on our social media, so be sure to share

with the hashtag #livewired.

We'd love your feedback.

And finally, I want to extend a big thank you

to our presenting sponsor, PWC,

as well as Toyota, Expedia Group, and LUSH

for making this WIRED 30th anniversary possible.

Okay, so we're kicking things off with a bang.

We're going to fix the web.

It's my goal, but I got 25 minutes, so, okay.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web

while at CERN in 1989.

He is the founder of the World wide Web Consortium,

the international standards forum

for technical development of the web.

He's co-founder of the Web Foundation,

whose mission is that the world wide web serves humanity.

He is co-founder and president

of the Open Data Institute in London.

He was named one of Time Magazine's

100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.

And in 20, pardon me, April 2017,

he was awarded the Turing Prize,

considered the Nobel Prize of computing.

John Bruce has decades of experience as a founder

and an, excuse me, and an executive at global tech firms.

He's the co-founder of Inrupt,

alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Prior to partnering with Tim,

John was the co-founder and CEO of Resilient,

which is now an IBM company,

that developed a new approach to cybersecurity.

And we're gonna touch on all these topics right now.

Sir Tim and John, please come to the stage.

We're thrilled to have you.

[audience applauding]

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, Lauren. Thank you, WIRED.

John, thanks for being here. Thank you for having us.

All right, so I think we took up

probably most of my 25 minutes with that intro.

First, tell the people, what is Inrupt?

Oh, Inrupt's a company Tim and I started

I guess five years ago now.

Tim was at MIT and had worked on the new version

of the web, Web 3.0, Solid.

And we decided to start a company

to focus all the resources and strategy

and consolidate all the activity around Solid.

So we moved the center of gravity out of MIT,

built a commercial, we continue to sponsor

all the open source stuff.

It's open source spec, so you probably all know this,

but we built a company to bring resources to bear

to drive worldwide adoption of Solid.

And Solid is this protocol that you mentioned

that far preceded Inrupt.

Solid is built around the idea

that the web should be decentralized.

I think a lot of people here know what that means,

but tell us what that means

and how that kind of relates

to your original creation of the world wide web.

Okay, so going back 30 years, then everybody,

all the people at the leading edge,

anybody could have a website.

All the people involved with geeks.

You'd have a computer at home.

You'd get an internet connection,

and you'd plug your computer into the internet,

and then you'd download the web software,

and you'd run a server on your computer,

for example, at home or work.

And then you could, you were,

you had sovereignty, you'd now call it, of yourself.

You could do what, on your computer, whatever you like.

And people, if you wrote really good stuff,

people would link to it,

and you would link to stuff you thought really good.

And so in the early days of the web,

before search engines, when search engines were terrible

or non non-existent, it was all about the blogosphere.

It was about links.

And so then, that feeling of being,

of empowerment, of the web being useful

and actually being massive value to humanity,

some of it's there, but most of, a lot of it,

we've lost, that currently, you know,

the web, it was decentralized then everywhere.

Every person on the web was an independent individual.

Now everybody's on Facebook,

and so, you know, and so all of the evolution

of the functionality you get

is determined by Facebook engineers,

you know, and so on. That's right.

So we are going back to the idea

that everybody'd have their own, well, their own website.

Right, I mean, embedded in this idea that Facebook

is to some people synonymous with the web,

synonymous with the internet,

that means we've lost control of our data,

that sovereignty that you talked about.

And one of the creations you've come up with

with Inrupt is this idea of Pods.

When I think of Pods, I think maybe of The Matrix,

you know, we're all sort of jacking in,

but you have a different idea for what these Pods are.

Tell us what this is and what it is exactly you're building.

Yeah, well, you know, the essence of Solid

is to decouple applications from data.

Sounds simple, but then when you've got your data,

you need to store it somewhere.

So that storage area we call a Pod,

and applications can expect to access data

or ask for access to data in your Pod.

Then you get to consent which applications can access it,

for what purpose, for how long, and so on.

So Pods, think of a Pod as your data storage area,

and all the specifications around how applications

can write to it, how you can grant consent

for access to it, and so on is all already described.

It's already public, it's open spec, and so on, so.

[Lauren] And then who ultimately controls that Pod?

You know, that's a great question.

Control's an interesting word, right?

Because in a lot of cases, data that you create is yours,

of course it is, and it should be rightfully yours.

At the moment, the challenge we've got is it exists

in multiple silos or in the big platforms across the web.

But in our world, you get to keep your data,

but there are certain elements of data

that you shouldn't control

and think of them more like credentials,

you know, your driver's license, your bank statement,

whether or not you got a criminal record and so on.

That's data about you that in some of the use cases

we're working on will exist in your Pod, but is it yours?

It's certainly pertinent to you,

but is it yours to control begs the question,

well, in each circumstance,

what's the governance model around it?

And as I say, if it's a credential issued

by a government, do they own it, or do you own it?

Right, because as you're commercializing this,

you're working with people like, or entities

like the Belgian government, for example,

or banks, or like I know you're also working

with the BBC, and so-

[John] Yeah, you can see a number of them online.

Right.

[John] if you Google Inrupt, you'll see a bunch of folks

that've already gone public. Right.

So in that instance, you're creating sort of a,

it's a B to G to C model, I guess,

business to government to consumer, right, that's not,

so ultimately the question is who then does,

if you get it through the government,

who controls that Pod, you know?

Yeah, well, in our world, it's a relationship

between you and the principal organization, right?

So in some circumstances, the majority of the control

sits with the individual.

In other circumstance, appropriately so,

the majority of the control sits with the government,

or certainly the instantiation of the data

exists with the government or the issuing authority.

But it's for everything.

So the Solid, I mean, there are a bunch of protocols

out there on the internet like this.

The calendar protocol allows you to share calendars.

It allows you, it's pretty, it's quite Solid-like, in a way.

Solid, the calendar protocol,

you can pull in calendars from different parts of your life,

from work and home.

You can add in very private calendars and public calendars,

and the calendar system has got,

allows you to sort of create groups

and to delegate authority to read

or to write calendars and so on.

And so the whole calendar world works on the fact

that this calendar protocol is interoperable,

and you can pull in data from different parts of your life,

but it only, it just works for calendars.

And so Solid is the realization,

I want that power to pull in data

from all parts of my life and to run servers if I want,

but to pull it in from public stuff and private stuff.

I want that for everything. I want that for my to-do list.

I want that for my mirrorboards.

I want that for all of my, all the stuff

that happens on websites at the moment

should work with data which is in the Pod,

where I have control of over it

and I can share it with anybody,

anybody I, no matter which social network

they happen to be on today.

What you're describing is sort of this utopian dream

of interoperability, I think.

There are a lot of forces

working against interoperability right now.

Why do you think that is the case?

And do you think that rather than perhaps fighting

against the big forces of big tech,

you'll be working with them,

they'll be working with Inrupt?

Yeah, well, we're already working with a,

as you might expect, there's a few of them

who see that the world is changing.

As to why the web's dominated by the big platforms,

I mean, I think that's the economics of it all, actually.

And it's somewhat of a truism that money talks

in the sense of, you know,

the emergence of the big platforms,

either the social platforms, the transactional platforms,

the technical platforms has really driven

this hole and creation of the huge silos of data,

and I think along the way we all suffered.

I mean, we clearly did.

And so then it begs the question, okay,

will the regulator, will the regulators help?

Of course they will contain it.

But I think now it's all down to user demand

and the innovation of application developers

to see to it that over time,

those big platforms shift and change and adapt.

As I say, to the forward-thinking ones

are already talking to us, so.

[Lauren] But if that's an, it's economically driven,

how do we ultimately change that?

Well, I think it's a truism, right?

You can get network effects, you can get platform effects,

of course you can, which is why a good part

of what we do, if you're intentful about it

and you're sensible about it.

So what we chose to do when we built Inrupt,

A, we built a version of all of this,

which is, if you will, enterprise ready.

It's scalable.

It can operate in the millions of users and so on.

But then what we decided to do was to focus

the majority of our work with the incumbents,

with major entities that already existed on the web

but perhaps weren't one of the, you know,

the first adopters of the platform mentality.

They had huge customer bases or citizenships,

as in the case of Belgium,

but they hadn't yet adopted an orientation

to those folks which was more engaging,

which was more collaborative, which was more, if you will,

you know, customer-side or consumer-side networks.

So what we do is we work with them to help them

begin to appreciate that in the world

we should be operating in,

the pipeline sense of I'm a supplier, you're a consumer,

I'm a government, you're a citizen,

that needs to be changed.

And I think the examples the big platforms have shown

is, yeah, it can be changed.

You've just gotta be sensible about how you do it.

And the body of work around, I mean,

I'm sure we're all familiar with it,

the body of work around platform economics

can absolutely be applied to the big incumbents.

And so when you Google us and you see the kind of work

that's already gone public,

you'll see that very well-known brands are the ones

that have already announced the fact

they're working with Solid and beginning to appreciate

how they can for their own part build a relationship

with their constituents that's much more beneficent,

much more balanced, so.

[Laurent] Sir Tim, do you have thoughts on that?

Yeah, but I mean, you start off in a way with,

you're saying that, well, you know, if it's economic fact

of how people will, how are you gonna make revenue

on the web, there a lot of people in Silicon Valley

particularly assume that the only way of doing it

is targeted advertising,

because that's beat all the others.

But actually, there are people,

there are other business models and some,

and so for example, some people make and sell apps.

Some people already make and sell apps which are beneficent,

beneficent meaning they work for you.

They're actually, the developer was thinking of you

or is thinking of himself when he's using this herself,

when they're using this app,

and they make the app work so whatever they,

I want to, whatever will empower me as a user, they do that.

And of course all the open source stuff,

we've got a huge amount of things.

So all of those apps which are basically beneficent,

they work really well with Solid.

Anybody who makes word processors or spreadsheets,

and they currently, they don't really mind,

you know, it used to be back in the, before the web,

you'd have two disc drives in your computer,

an A driver and a B drive,

and you'd put a data disc in the B drive,

and then you'd run, you'd go down to the shop

and save up your money, pocket money,

and buy really cool apps for the A drive.

And then you'd write a book,

or you'd do taxes with the apps

in a data drive you control

and the data in a completely separate drive

where you can use the same data

with all kinds of different apps.

And Solid, actually, you know, we're sort of,

we haven't had that power really for a long time

because of the silos sort of like Facebook and LinkedIn.

But with Solid then it, once you've got your sociograph,

you've got photographs in your Solid Pod,

then you can use Facebook like that.

So in fact, it may, one of the things it may go

that companies like Facebook, say,

Main thing is we want you to be looking at Facebook,

actually, it's no skin off our nose

if we put all your data in the Pod.

And so some companies will just realize

that the Pod world works pretty well.

And the ones that have been making beneficent apps,

you know, that were making those word processors

and tax things, you know, useful things,

they will then, Yeah, we'll pick up a few lines of code

so that actually we can work with Solid Pods

as well as your local disc as well as our,

and so those things out there.

There are a lot more business models

in the Solid world than before.

Sir Tim, you've said before

that when people are worried about the web,

it's because they're worried about humanity writ large.

What worries you about the web right now?

What worries you most?

Elections, for example. [audience laughs]

[audience applauding]

But 2016 was a shock, yeah.

I was shocked about the results.

But from the point of view of people in this room,

you know, that are driving web technology,

I think when the media turned around and said,

Actually, the elections may actually have been,

had a different result because of people being manipulated

on social media, and then you go back

and even the Martha Coakley people,

that was a very early example where journalists went in

and the web scientists went in,

and they show that actually all of the information

about before the election had been very, very carefully

and very cunningly rigged.

So the web is, it's humanity connected by technology.

It has to serve humanity.

It has to, we need to build those things

which will tend to make people more nicer to each other

rather than nasty to each other.

When you build a social network,

you've got these social networks out there,

some of them tend to sort of accelerate the nastiness.

Some of them tend to accelerate the love.

Notice how, what, do the web science,

figure out, do the network science, do that.

Do the, you know, the user interface,

engineering and the psychology behind it also.

When you build systems,

build systems so that as you roll them out

between now and the next election,

that your systems will be one

that keeps democracy back on track.

I've heard you say before-

[audience applauding]

in an earlier talk that you gave,

you talked about the potential for people

to exist in these sort of silos

because of the internet, right?

You described it as sort of cultish behavior.

And so I think that on some level you did anticipate that

in the earliest days of creating the web.

But did you ever anticipate that we would get to this stage

of the social web, the algorithmic web

to the point where there would be this level

of misinformation or disinformation?

Well, I think the polarization, people, you know,

there was some, you could do the math,

and even if you have a completely fictitious set of people,

and there was a paper where they said if you take

random set of people which are all equally divided

about four different issues,

and you put them in a snow globe and shake them up

and you allow them to have slight tendency

to join the same club as each, as people with the same,

you know, you just have these human tendencies

to work in particular ways.

Then you look at the, and you do the network science

and you end up that bit by bit,

they, instead of having 16 different populations

with different ideas, you end up with eight,

'cause two of the issues have suddenly become aligned,

and then you end up with only two populations.

And basically in America,

we have a red population and a blue population.

So that's, in a way, that's what people do

if you leave them all connected together,

unless you do things, so I've suggested we should have

stretch friends, for example.

So when you're build your social network,

you can build it on top of Solid Pods.

So that will be the storage.

You have to figure out how it works.

One of the ways it could work,

instead of saying, These people who,

these are the people who are immediate friends

of your immediate friends.

Why don't you get in touch with 'em?

it could say, Hey, I'm gonna, here's a stretch friend.

Here's somebody who's a bit different

from you on one axis.

I'd like you to try, be their friend for a month,

for a week, see how it goes,

and then I'll give you another stretch friend.

Stretch friends, just a way,

in a line of code in a social network setting,

but a stretch friend then is to make you try,

make you think about people with a different culture,

think about people who are a bit different,

who are a different gender even,

different nationality, different religion and so on.

So the line you're drawing here is decentralized web,

Solid protocol, Pods built on top of that,

your data living in that Pod

instead of maybe living in Facebook

or Amazon's cloud or Google's cloud.

As a result, we get a more diversified experience

because we're not having this intermediary tell us

how to experience the web.

Am I understanding that correctly?

[Tom] Well, we get an exposure to different apps as well.

Yeah, if you- Well, because,

see, go ahead.

You know, I was just gonna add the point

that once the data is more freely available,

now we can create some truly innovative apps

that don't require, you know, management of multiple APIs

and mashing together various disparate types of data

and figuring, I mean, you know, that whole exercise

of trying to get access to data

that resides in backend silos is a nightmare,

and anybody who's doing it will tell you.

So the notion that once the data's available

in a form that is well understood,

available through one API,

and identified as unique to all of us,

i.e., you get a web ID, wwme.com,

so now we know who you are,

or it can be clearly identified who you are,

the way to access data that's available in the Pod

via one API with your consent,

I don't need to take it away to operate on it,

now you can create some, I believe,

some truly innovative apps.

And so to go back to your earlier point

about the big silos, the big platforms,

isn't it somewhat now game over,

or are they resistant to answer,

I don't think so by a long shot, actually.

I think that what we're beginning to see,

the inklings of which we're beginning to see,

is once you can imagine access to data in an unfettered way

with the user's consent, the application spread is amazing.

I mean, I guess it's like the original days of the web, Tim,

when, you know, who knew Airbnb and Uber and the like.

The innovation spread is amazing.

Yeah, the mash-ups, we used to mash up different data

from different public sources, but we didn't have a lot of,

and some of us, the sort of, I was mashing up all my data,

getting as much data as I could,

and I was running Python programs

to be able to sort, try and get insight from it,

If you, don't you think that.

So Facebook has got your sociograph, okay?

It's only got your sociograph.

It's got your photographs, and it knows your friends.

And Amazon has got a huge amount of data.

It knows everything you bought,

if you bought everything you bought on Amazon,

and everything, and even all the things you would've bought

from not Amazon, and you ended up kind of being forced

to having it delivered to Amazon anyway.

So Amazon's got a lot of data,

but it's only about the stuff you bought, okay?

And then it doesn't have your health data.

[Lauren] Well, it's not just about the stuff

you bought now.

It's also about what you watch

and your healthcare, and the list goes on,

but yes. They're trying.

They're trying, they are.

They're trying to get, so, but then,

but if you imagine that you've,

well, Amazon's got a lot of stuff about retail,

and then you've gotten your,

but then you've got your hospital

that's connected to your Pod and your banks,

so you're pulling in all the retail thing.

Yeah, Amazon knows some of the transactions

but only the ones with,

but it doesn't know your whole bank account.

So in fact, so if you were to go to something

like a travel agent and say, and go enabled and say,

Look, you've got a certain amount of information

about from the flights I bought from you,

but I want to have a really brilliant vacation next time.

And so I'm prepared to open my Pod kimono

and show you all kinds of stuff

you otherwise would not, never have,

I'm prepared to share with you all of the,

who I've been on vacation with before,

what we thought of the restaurants,

all of our ratings, all of our chat.

Okay, I'll do that for a moment,

'cause now I've got so much information

that when we run AI on my, all this data,

between us, we'll be able to find a much better,

a much better vacation.

And it'll be the idea that you can have

access to all of that,

it might blow your mind as a travel agent,

'cause normally you don't get it,

but it'll be much more efficient.

It's called the intention economy.

You should be worried about the attention economy,

but Doc Searls brought up this word like 10 years ago

for the intention economy.

If you're a user, if you're a citizen,

then the intention economy is where you take charge,

much more powerful.

Speaking of us taking charge,

I think a lot of people are wondering

if generative AI is going to take charge of our lives,

so I have to ask you about this.

And you've noted before that in the early days of the web,

people worried that the web,

it was going to take over humanity.

Now I think people are starting to express similar concerns,

some people, similar concerns about generative AI.

How are you thinking about generative AI right now,

and how, quote, unquote, worried should we be?

So we've talked about beneficent apps, right,

a beneficent app that works for you.

A beneficent AI is AI that works for me, that's what I want.

I actually wrote a story about it like five years ago.

I called it Charlie.

Charlie is this AI that I trust, so I give it all my data.

So it's very, so if you look at all the different

AI systems out there, some of them are heading in this way,

and some of them aren't.

But I want AI that works for me,

and I want it to be able to give you access

to all my personal data.

So I issued access to everything,

all of my Pod as well as all of the stuff out,

the public stuff out there.

[Lauren] But do you think that's what the current stewards

of AI want for the end user?

Do you think that they want it to work for us,

or they have their own interests?

Well, if you look at Inflection AI, for example,

have you looked at the-

[Lauren] Yes, Pi, yes.

Okay, Pi, Pi works for you.

It doesn't have access to your Pod yet.

[Laurent] It's quite good. It's very clever.

It's very human-like

Well, it gives the impression,

if you read the terms and conditions, okay,

the terms and conditions are same as, you know,

basically they respect you, your presence.

So it would, so yeah, I think that some of these things

will work for you, some of them won't.

And when it comes to regulation that,

we actually, when it comes to, you know,

we have in the culture, this is not new,

'cause we have doctors.

Your doctor works for you.

Your lawyer works for you, and so we know,

so and we have laws and regulations around that,

so that a doctor who breaks out of that,

the Hippocratic Oath gets in deep trouble.

Lawyers who don't work for their clients,

they get into deep trouble.

So in fact, legislators know how to make the regulations

so that a doctor works for you or a lawyer works for you.

So they do that, so they know how to make regulations

so that AI works for you.

So that might be coming, and so in places, you know,

in Europe, I can imagine that coming,

that concept coming out of the,

also having talked to working groups for some of the people

who are looking at AI regulation, the AI,

when you talk about the idea of an AI that works for you,

they go, Yeah, actually, yeah,

we could make that little thing.

[Lauren] I'm afraid that we're out of time.

I have so many more questions I would love to ask you,

but it's been an absolute honor to have you both on stage.

So thank you.

Thanks so much. Sir Tom Berners-Lee

and John Bruce. Thanks, WIRED.

[audience applauding] Also WIRED,

thank you, WIRED for all of the documenting

over the last 30 years.

Say that once more?

I said thank you also, WIRED,

for documenting the all this stuff

as it went down over the last 30 years.

Thank you so much.