Andrew was on BBC Radio Scotland to mark 35 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee quietly posted a message to a newsgroup announcing something called the World Wide Web, the moment it stepped out of a physics lab in Geneva and became everyone’s.
Fittingly, I did the interview over WhatsApp from France, itself a small demonstration of everything that’s changed since.
We talked about how the web has moved through four distinct eras: Web 1.0, read-only, you could look but not touch; Web 2.0, the social web, where we started talking back; Web 3.0, the Bitcoin and NFT era; and now what I call the AI-agentic era, where the next layer of the web isn’t people connecting to information, it’s AI agents connecting to each other.
I also shared one of my own earliest web memories: standing in a university computer lab in Australia in 1994, watching a live webcam feed of a canal in the Netherlands, and thinking it was close to magic. Even as a futurist, I didn’t predict how completely we’d come to depend on it. Take the internet down for an afternoon and watch how fast ATMs and card payments grind to a halt.
It’s a topic close to home. In the mid-1990s I was building the data infrastructure that would eventually carry the web into people’s homes, launching Australia’s first public ATM and Frame Relay network at Optus in Australia.
Three decades on, I’m still tracking the same pattern: today’s radical infrastructure becomes tomorrow’s invisible plumbing.
It happened to the web. It’s happening now with AI.
