The last time I saw Sir Tim Berners-Lee speak I wrote down this quote: "the web is a sub-set of humans interacting". I saw him speak again last night at a seminar on the future of the web at which he talked about his web science initiative. He was asked a question about whether, with the concurrent huge potential and challenges that the internet faces, he felt that we were expecting 'too much' of the web. His answer, as perhaps expected, was to stop thinking of the web as a 'thing' and start thinking about it as people connected. And so the question should really be about whether we were expecting too much of humanity. And then he said this:
"As humanity, I don't think we're expecting too much. Instead, we must make sure we don't expect too little."
Amen.
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