I think it’s safe to say that the Internet has had a tremendous impact on our society, and you’ve lived through pretty much all its history, from the very beginnings up until now. What were the biggest challenges back then, and what do you think are the biggest challenges we will face in the next 50 years when it comes to the Internet?

I started my study program in 1973-74, so the Internet started out at around the same time. Back then, I had problems explaining to my friends and family what I was studying - they did not understand what informatics or computer science is. I could not have imagined that 50 years later, the system, together with all its related technology, would become the operating system of our society. Sitting in the first lectures on programming, programming languages, and mathematics, I could also not imagine that 50 years later I would sit at the Royal Society in London and be able to talk about the 50th Anniversary of the Internet.

At the time we started our study program, we still worked with punch cards, so there was no terminal; there was nothing. It was only batch operation on a big mainframe, so there was no device around, and there was no PC. We had to put our punch cards in a reader, and we got the result of our program back some hours later. When it contained errors, we had long error reports. My first experience with the Internet was during my PhD, which was in the late 70s. I was at the Politecnico di Milano during the 80s, and I was there as a postdoc researcher. That was the first time I really used the internet to write e-mails to my friends or colleagues. This was 40, 50 years ago, so we are talking before World Wide Web time, which came in the 90s. All we had e-mails, and some bulletin boards where you could submit something, and that’s it.

I think it was either WordPerfect or WordStar. WordStar was the first. When I did my master’s thesis in the 70s, I did it on punch cards where you were writing lines of code, and each line was on a punch card. When you did a carriage return, the next punch card was put into the slice, and so you slowly had one punch card after another. My master’s thesis was on consistency and contradiction of decision tables. It was one big box full of punch cards that I had to carry around, and one time, the box fell. It took me a whole day to rework it because it was this endless stack of paper, and you had to look for syntactic errors (we programmed ALGOL 68 a long time ago), and then you had to look for content-related semantic errors. I did my PhD on a terminal; it was hard, at first, to imagine that I could work directly with the operating system because, with the punch cards, you had no interaction with the operating system. Today, every high school kid knows how to do that. It was quite a lot of work, but today, it’s completely different.

Thinking about research activities and teaching, how do you think the internet has changed universities more generally?

I think you have one thing, which is the Internet, the protocol, and the infrastructure, and then you have applications on the Internet. The Web is an application on the Internet. The Web really changed everything because the Web provides users with a simple interface and different tools. I think the Internet changed universities fundamentally, and how research is done. Simply by looking for the material you look for, let’s say for literature or for data; today, most of the data is online. It changed how research is done, not just in terms of how easily you can access information, but also from an ontological point of view. You can get to information much faster, but the way you approach a problem is also defined by the tools you are using. So, in some ways, computer science is also defining how research is done. One issue is that science is about modeling, about building models. Models help us to understand the world, but models are an abstract thing. They help us to understand real, artificial, or virtual phenomena. To understand them, to analyze them, and to draw conclusions that give us some kind of idea of what might happen. So, we’re at a prediction stage. With Deep Learning we are going into an area where we have solutions to issues where we have no model. For example, we have Google DeepMind, which was used for weather forecasts. It’s better than every weather model we have in science – so where are the scientists? What is science’s answer to that? This is a fundamental question, one to which I have no answer.

At the same time, teaching has also become much more interactive, but we should not forget that during the past 50 years, we changed from the university as an elite institution with very few students to a university with a much higher rate of first-year students. When I was attending university, we started out with 100 students, maybe. I remember that my mathematics professor knew everybody by name after two weeks, which was not so great because he said: Mr. Werthner, you are late this morning, what happened? That’s not possible today. It’s much easier to streamline and personalize your lectures today, and to reach a wider audience. But back then, the setting was much more intimate.

Do you think that the ways in which students learn and the skills that they acquire are also fundamentally different than they were 50 years ago?

There are two sides to this question. On the one hand, you need technical skills, so you can use different kinds of tools. These tools have become much easier to use over the past 50 years. On the other hand, there are more fundamental things about universities that will not change, like acquiring knowledge and increasing that knowledge, but also being able to contextualize what you learn. University is not just about skills; I don’t really like the word skill. I think it’s about knowledge, I think it’s about reflection, it’s about ordering or reordering and putting things into context. You need to develop the ability to know how to put knowledge together and how to use it, and that’s not just a straightforward skill. Universities are institutions within a society that are there for creating knowledge; not only for transferring it, but for creating it. However, they’re also a space for reflection because universities, at the end of the day, should serve the good of society. This is something we need to reflect on. Not that everything has to be discussed in terms of morals, but there’s a need for some ethical guidelines, and that will never change. This is something fundamental to universities, and something that differentiates universities from Fachhochschulen (Universities for Applied Science), for example.

Thinking about the concentration of power in the tech industry, what role do you think universities, especially European universities, play in that context?

I would like to break that question down. First, from the viewpoint of computer science, because computer science is now starting to realize that it’s changing the world, and that comes with responsibility. Computer science is a discipline in and of itself; you can do research in the field of computer science, let’s say, in complexity theory or programming languages, but of course, that also includes research on all the things that are happening with AI (Artificial Intelligence) now. The other thing is that computer science is a subject in other disciplines. We are a discipline that provides tools for other disciplines. As a discipline, we must be aware that these tools are taken up and that they spread. The second part of the question has to do with the differences between the Global South and the Global North. Another aspect of that is the high concentration of economic power and resources, which is not only money but also the availability of data and computational infrastructure that is in the hands of only a few companies. This is a high-level political issue, and there are different positions on these issues. On the one hand, you have people who take the position that computer science is neutral, that it’s independent, and that we are (just) doing our research. You have those who realize that for doing high-level research in specific areas of computer science, you need resources you do not find at universities. Access to data and infrastructure, for example. But then you have those who take a more extreme standpoint and say that computer science has blood on its hands. So, there are different positions. European universities are in a specific situation because we cannot really compete with the top universities in the US, for example. There are very few European universities, let’s say 5 or 6, who can do that. Then we also have competition with Big Tech companies, which in some sense have very strong research institutions. However, this is a description of the problem, this is not a solution.

If we look at the Internet and AI as an ecosystem of technologies, where do you see the biggest challenges and opportunities? Is it AI?

I think it’s AI, the Internet, and related technologies. You can differentiate them on a technical level, but that doesn’t seem like a fruitful approach to me. Is the Internet an infrastructure? Is it the software, is it the people, is it the society? Everyone has a different definition, depending on who you ask. I see AI as the next tipping point in the development of computer science as well as information communication technologies. The challenge is to use it for the good of society and to mitigate any harm. Having said that, technology alone is not the problem and will not solve the problem. You need to involve other scientific disciplines and other stakeholders, that has become very clear. When you talk about AI, you’re talking about basic research, fundamental research. You’re talking about innovation, and how innovation should work. You’re talking about market structures. You’re talking about misuse and using these technologies for the good of society. You could also use it to close the gap between the Global North and South, and that is an important issue we’re not addressing right now.

Lastly, it’s immediately political. Many countries worldwide already have rules for how to deal with AI. International organizations have meetings about this on a global level. The United Nations will release a report, and even the Pope is talking about human dignity and technology. I think there are issues on a technical level; look at what happened three days ago. It was a simple update mistake by a company, but this is where you can see how everything is connected. However, I think the most important thing is the societal level. These technologies are deeply ingrained in our society, and we have to be aware of them and reflect on them. And then there are organizational issues and political issues. For example, should a technical university be part of the Microsoft Cloud or not? This is when it becomes a political question (I’m not answering that).

I had a discussion recently with someone who said, imagine if Hitler had already had the internet at his disposal. What would have happened? He would have innumerable methods of surveillance and could immediately identify those that go against him or disagree with him. The challenge is to use these technologies for good, but in order to do that, we also need a certain architecture, infrastructure, and guardrails. For example, we are talking about democracy while we still punish Snowden. Snowden is not allowed to come back to the US because he uncovered the misuse of a surveillance infrastructure. This is a contradiction, and this is not reconcilable with the core values of democracy. All that is to say that there are all kinds of issues arising with the use of technologies and that technologies alone are not the problem. They’re part of the problem, but they’re not the only problem.

What do you think were missed opportunities in the past 50 years regarding the Internet?

At the 50th Anniversary Celebration at the Royal Society London, Alan Kay said that there were many roads open for alternative development and use of the Internet. More user-friendly, more accessible, and things like that. And Vint Cerf said, looking back on it now, they should have created a board of scientists coming from different disciplines. Political science, Sociology, Psychology…because it was not clear at that moment in time that it would become the guiding infrastructure of our society. It wasn’t seen as a societal issue, and so they didn’t do that. There’s a very interesting book by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson called ‘Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity’ where he really looks at the history of technology and what it’s used for, and where he also looks at automation. In this book, he explains with several examples that there also would’ve been ways to use Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) differently. The argument here is that these technologies are not meant to substitute anything but to augment.

What are your hopes for the next 50 years of the Internet?

I’m not going to reference Vint Cerf, he said he wants to have an intergalactic Internet. He wants to go to Mars and to the Moon. I think there is a dystopic and a utopic vision of that. I hope that humankind will realize that technology can be used for good. The way it is organized, how it is used, how it is researched, and how it is developed. There is no technological or economic determinism, so it’s a societal issue. Policymakers should be aware of that, but I’m afraid that they are not. That’s when developments are primarily driven by economic interest, which is then sold to the people as something that happens automatically. However, that is not the case; we can decide. We have degrees of freedom, and I think that we should use them. But I will not know how it turns out because in 50 years I won’t be here to check on that. You will be here, and you can have a look.