AI ·
Tim Berners-Lee’s long-ago dream of an agentic web is becoming real
Two decades after Berners-Lee and colleagues described a Semantic Web navigated by autonomous software agents, the idea is resurfacing as today’s agentic web.
In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a new direction for the network he had created a decade earlier. Writing with two colleagues in Scientific American, he described a system he called the Semantic Web, a version of the internet built to be navigated by autonomous software agents. The aim was for those agents to handle tasks on our behalf, acting across the web without constant human direction.
That vision arrived long before the underlying technology could deliver on it. For years, the Semantic Web remained more of a philosophical aspiration than a working reality, discussed mainly in academic and standards circles while everyday users continued to click through pages themselves.
Today, the conversation is shifting again. Advances in artificial intelligence have revived interest in software that can browse, interpret, and act online with growing independence. The result is a new wave of tools and platforms pointing toward what some now call the agentic web, an internet where autonomous agents take on practical chores rather than merely retrieving information.
This development marks a notable moment for Berners-Lee’s original idea. While the technical details have changed since 2001, the core promise, an internet that works on our behalf, is beginning to move from a magazine prediction into usable technology.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Written with AI from the linked source