Turing Scholar Steven Pemberton: We Are in the “Manuscript-Like” Stage of the Internet
The distinguished successor of Alan Turing, Steven Pemberton, served as the keynote speaker at the GOSIM 2024 Europe event held in Delft, the Netherlands. He delivered a speech titled “The End of the Paper Internet.”
Introduction of Steven Pemberton
Steven Pemberton is a researcher at CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica), focusing on interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies. Pemberton co-designed the precursor language to Python, was the first European user of the open internet in 1988, organized the first Web conference workshop in 1994, and has been involved with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) from its inception, chairing the first style sheets workshop and heading the HTML working group. He co-designed multiple technical specifications, including CSS, HTML, XHTML, RDFa, and XForms. Currently, he chairs two W3C working groups and co-organizes an annual declarative technologies conference. Pemberton has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award in 2022, and in 2023, he became an ACM Distinguished Speaker.
The venerable Steven Pemberton, with a career spanning over half a century, took the stage with an energetic stride and began his lecture with dynamic inflections and quick-witted remarks.
“In university, my mentor was Dick Grimsdale, who built the world’s first transistor computer. His mentor was Alan Turing, making me, in a sense, a direct academic descendant of Alan Turing. Coincidentally, I worked in the Manchester division where Turing had worked, developing software for the fifth-generation computers he helped design before his death,” Steven introduced his background succinctly.
In his speech, he emphasized that the current internet still mimics traditional media forms, despite offering more accessible and affordable information, and has yet to achieve a true digital transformation.
“Whenever new technologies are introduced, they tend to imitate the old technologies they replace for a while before evolving into their true form,” Steven posited.
He illustrated this point with three technological revolutions: the automobile, books, and the internet.
For instance, early automobiles resembled “horseless carriages,” essentially horse carriages with engines added. “Even the idea of adding a roof to a car took a considerable amount of time to emerge,” Steven noted, explaining that it took a long time for automobiles to evolve into their current form.
A similar pattern occurred with the advent of books and printing. Initially, printed books mimicked handwritten manuscripts —
Before the introduction of printing in 1450, all books were handmade, a slow and expensive process taking years. With the advent of printing, books became more accessible and affordable. Printing combined various known technologies like ink, paper, and wine presses with the innovation of movable type. “In fact, Gutenberg, the inventor of Western movable type printing, was a metallurgist, and his skills were crucial in developing type molds,” Steven noted, emphasizing how new technologies often build on old experiences.
However, for the first 50 years, printed books looked identical to manuscripts. They used handwritten-style fonts, had no page numbers, tables of contents, or indexes, because that’s what people expected books to look like, and that’s what sold. Only after 50 years did books evolve to include these features.
The introduction of printing transformed the world: information became more accessible and affordable, creating new infrastructure and economy for information dissemination. Ownership of information shifted from the church, the sole source of books before printing, to a broader array of producers, creating significant societal upheaval with the emergence of new thought paradigms.
In contrast, the internet has been around for 36 years.
The internet has similarly transformed the world: information is more accessible and cheaper, supported by new infrastructure and economy. It also created new turmoil as societies adapt to new information acquisition methods.
Steven’s thought-provoking point: “The internet still mimics pre-internet media, merely digitizing paper.” What should the true internet look like? Can we expect it in the next 15 years?
Drawing from his extensive experience in information processing and computer development, Steven provided his unique insights.
Check the speech video here: https://youtu.be/f7-kDbSO6P8
01 Books and the Internet: A Parallel in Information Revolution
“Books eventually gave people a reason to learn to read, marking a paradigm shift. It triggered a proliferation of industries — printing shops, paper production, binders, publishers, bookstores, newspapers — all necessary to support the existence of books.”
This led to an information explosion:
“If we look back to 1450 with Gutenberg’s first printing press, I can show you the expansion of printing over the next 50 years, decade by decade. You’ll see a dramatic increase in the number of presses across Europe from 1400 onwards, reaching 1000 printing shops by 1500, producing 35,000 different titles totaling 20 million copies — a monumental information explosion.”
The internet followed a similar trajectory —
“The internet, emerging in 1988, gave rise to the World Wide Web (WWW). Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN created the WWW, launching their first server in 1991. Like Gutenberg, they integrated numerous existing technologies. Hypertext wasn’t new, nor was the internet’s MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). They invented a few new things like URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) and created an organic whole. Their most significant achievement was making it all free, unlike other similar efforts.”
MIME is a standard for transmitting multimedia data on the internet, enabling email, web pages, and other applications to handle text, images, audio, video, and other file types. MIME ensures different devices and software can correctly display and process these files. Steven compared MIME to printing technology, as both integrated various file types into a single medium.
Steven highlighted an interesting phenomenon: Amsterdam has been a center of both information revolutions.
“After the printing press emerged, the church and state disliked that others could suddenly produce information, leading to censorship. Writers faced death or imprisonment for publishing content disliked by the church,” Steven explained. “Many writers and philosophers fled to escape church control. Amsterdam became a haven, known for its philosophers during that period.”
He quoted American writer Russell Shorto, who lived in the Netherlands:
“These two things — [Amsterdam] becoming a hub for scientists and a publishing center — fed off each other, resulting in an astonishing fact: in the 17th century, about one-third of all books published worldwide were printed in Amsterdam.” — Russell Shorto
With the internet’s development, “just as Amsterdam printed the most books in the 17th century, it now has the world’s fastest internet exchange, peaking at 12 terabits per second, making Amsterdam a hub of the internet as it was a printing center in the 17th century.”
Steven also noted the similar impacts of the printing press and the internet:
“Now, the web is replacing books and many other things — telephone directories, timetables, yellow pages, encyclopedias — they’ve all disappeared. Many reference works and other things will follow. Books, as a physical object, I believe will become a niche market. Eventually, all information will be internet-based.”
In many ways, the web’s development reflects the printing press’s journey:
- The price of information has dramatically decreased.
- Accessibility to information has significantly increased.
- The information services sector has exploded, spawning a host of new industries around information.
“Just as books caused turmoil by creating a new method of information dissemination, disrupting existing power structures, we’re experiencing similar upheaval as we adapt to new information sources emerging from all directions.”
The Internet Still Looks Like Paper
“Printing changed how people thought, contributing to the rise of Protestantism. The Enlightenment is often credited to books’ availability. In 1665, the first two scientific journals appeared, one in France, one in England. Since then, the number of scientific journals has doubled every 15 years until the 20th century. By the 1970s, if you suggested a new method for handling information, people might think you were crazy, expecting growth to stop because there wouldn’t be enough paper to sustain the information produced.” Shortly after, the internet emerged, significantly expanding information capacity.
“BUT!” Steven emphasized, “But the web and the internet still largely mimic old things. They are still very presentation-oriented rather than information-oriented.” Despite nearly 40 years of development, Steven believes the internet is not truly the internet yet. “The only change is that paper documents have been digitized, but otherwise, it’s the same as before.”
He gave an example: “Filling out an online form, printing it, signing it, scanning it, then uploading the scanned copy to send.” He also mentioned a Dutch example: “If you receive tickets, contracts, and receipts, they are sent as images of paper you might have had before. They are usually in PDF format, with no machine-processable parts, just images of paper items.”
“We haven’t fully addressed the paper problem yet,” Steven said. “Notice that we still call them web ‘pages.’”
“Here’s an example of a receipt from Albert Heijn. I can get receipts for my recent purchases in their app, which looks like it came straight out of a printer. They think I need a picture of the paper receipt if they were giving me a paper one. It’s insane because people haven’t adjusted to the idea of losing paper yet. We’re still mimicking paper,” Steven further explained. “We’re just using the internet to transmit this information, but it still looks like paper.”
When Will the Real Internet Arrive?
Thus, Steven posed the question — When will we have a true web, a true internet?
After all, books evolved from mimicking manuscripts to becoming the books we understand today. Similarly, Steven has long pondered the question: “When can we expect the web to stop pretending to be the old thing and start becoming what it truly should be? Why did it take books 50 years to become their true form?”
Ultimately, Steven reached a somewhat reluctant conclusion: “The old generation of users and producers must pass away before new technology can truly become what it needs to be.”
He hypothesized: if a generation that has not experienced the long development of paper books and printing were to ask, “Why do we do these things in such a strange way? Why can’t we just do it correctly from the start?” Once a generation has never used paper tickets, they will begin to ask, “Why are you giving me a piece of paper over the internet?” Then they can start to say, “Just give me the information directly.”
At the end of the speech, Steven drew an analogy to books to summarize the current state of the internet: “Fortunately, we are in the ‘looks like a manuscript’ stage of the internet. Although the technological foundation for an ideal network is already mature, the true internet era can only arrive after the generation of the paper era has passed away.”
And the answer to this question will be written by the new generation of internet developers.