From Utopia to Dystopia in 29 Short Years

Tim Berners-Lee was honored with the Turing Award for his work inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and "the fundamental protocols and algorithms [that allowed] the web to scale."
Dertouzos Distinguished Lecture - May 2, 2018

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

This year marks a milestone in the history of the World Wide Web: more than half of the world's population will be online. However, threats to the web are real and many; from misinformation and questionable political advertising to a loss of control over our personal data.

If a future web were to empower the hopes we had for the original web, what would it look like? A new web is possible in which people have complete control of their own data; applications and data are separated from each other; and a user's choice for each are separate. Let's assemble the brightest minds from business, technology, government, civil society, the arts and academia to build a new web which will again empower science and democracy.

Dertouzos Distinguished Lecture Series

The Dertouzos Lecture Series has been a tradition since 1976, featuring some of the most influential thinkers in computer science, including Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Donald Knuth, John McCarthy, and Mitchell Kapor. Formerly the Distinguished Lecturer Series, the series has been renamed in memory of Michael Dertouzos, Director for the Lab for Computer Science from 1974 to 2001.