The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.
Tim Berners-LeeRead
What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is the sort we intend.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of our beliefs and actions shaping the society we create online.
Tim Berners-Lee highlights the profound influence of our beliefs and endorsements on the representation of society in the digital realm. As our interactions and dependencies increasingly take place on the Web, it becomes essential for us to actively contribute to shaping a society that reflects our values and intentions, ensuring that the online environment supports the ideals we aspire to.
In practice
A speaker discussing the ethical responsibilities of tech developers at a conference.
The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.
[The internet] ought to be like clay, rather than a sculpture that you observe from a distance.
The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future.
Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.
One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.
Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.
Any new technology, if it's used by evil people, bad things can happen. But that's more a question of the politics of the technology.
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
It win be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Like a kind of telephone.
I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.
There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.
We're in a situation where the solutions that we have are not good enough. The way to improve anything is to have a discussion about its flaws. To understand what the one or two or three things are about it that would help fix it. The DMCA makes it dangerous to have that conversation.
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