On August 1 this year, I had the privilege of inaugurating the website of the Alpaiwalla Museum in Mumbai and delivering a lecture titled "From Zero to Web to AI: A Civilisational Journey Through Numbers, Networks and Knowledge". Incidentally, this day is celebrated as World Wide Web Day, a day which “commemorates the birth of the WWW” and its transformative impact on our lives.

My talk reflected not merely on the remarkable technological journey that has transformed our lives but also touched upon a more fundamental question: Have we remained faithful to the spirit in which the Web was gifted to humanity by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, and CERN, where the WWW was invented?

The World Wide Web is arguably one of the greatest acts of scientific altruism in modern history. Conceived by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 as a means of managing and sharing scientific information among the international scientific community, the Web was publicly unveiled in August 1991. More significantly, in April 1993, CERN took an extraordinary decision: it released the Web into the public domain, free of patents, royalties or licensing restrictions. CERN voluntarily chose the collective good over commercial gain, enabling anyone, anywhere in the world, to use the Web for free and to build upon it.

Few technological inventions have transformed civilisation as profoundly as the Web. It has helped governments become more transparent, businesses more connected, education more accessible, science more collaborative, and health more inclusive. Distance ceased to be a barrier to knowledge creation and sharing. The Web democratised........

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