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A book about being a refugee and learning a new language in 1940.
By Hans Natonek

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What are they and what's the difference

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Web 3.0 is a simple term with a much more complicated meaning, which is why the simple question of "What is Web 3.0" may get you dozens of different answers.

One of the biggest difficulties in nailing down a definition or metric for evaluating Web 3.0 is the lack of a clear, distinct definition for it, especially compared to what we already know about Web 2.0.

Most people generally have some idea that Web 2.0 is an interactive and social web facilitating collaboration between people. This is distinct from the early, original state of the web (Web 1.0) which was a static information dump where people read websites but rarely interacted with them.

If we distill the essence of change between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, we can derive an answer. Web 3.0 is the next fundamental change both in how websites are created and more importantly, how people interact with them.

Many people believe that the first signs of Web 3.0 are already here. However, it took over ten years to make the transition from the original web to Web 2.0, and it may take just as long (or even longer) for the next fundamental change to make its mark and completely reshape the web.

The phrase "Web 2.0" was coined back in 2003 by Dale Dougherty, Vice President at O'Reilly Media, which became popular in 2004. If the next fundamental change happened in roughly the same time span, we should have officially broken into Web 3.0 sometime in 2015. Indeed, we're already seeing it with what people are calling "The Internet of Things" and smart home appliances connected to wireless networks.

So, when we ask ourselves what Web 3.0 might be, we must realize that we will experience a lot of change before it emerges. For example, not only will you have replaced the computer on your desk because it became way too slow, but you will probably have replaced its replacement for the same reason. In fact, the sum of all human knowledge may very well have doubled by the time we're well in Web 3.0.

Now that we sort of have a vague idea of what Web 3.0 really is, what exactly will it look like when it's here in full force?

The truth is that predicting the Web 3.0 future is a guessing game. A fundamental change in how we use the web could be based on an evolution of how we are using the web now, a breakthrough in web technology, or just a technological breakthrough in general.

Despite the guesswork that's involved, we can certainly nail down some likely scenarios...

Sadly, this is probably the most likely way that we'll be using the term "Web 3.0" in the future. Web 2.0 has already achieved monumental buzz, and "2.0" has already been attached to Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Mobile 2.0, Shopping 2.0, etc.

As the Web 2.0 buzz declines, we will probably be seeing websites popping up hoping to create a new buzz, claiming to be "Web 3.0."

Many people ponder the use of advanced artificial intelligence as the next big breakthrough on the web. One of the chief advantages of social media is that it factors in human intelligence.

For example, social bookmarking as a search engine can provide more intelligent results than using Google. You're getting websites that have been voted on by humans, so you have a better chance at hitting something good.

However, because of the human factor, the results can also be manipulated. A group of people could vote for a particular website or article with the intent of making it more popular. So, if artificial intelligence can learn how to separate the good from the bad, it could produce results similar to social bookmarking and social news sites while eliminating some of the bad elements.

Also, an artificially intelligent web might mean virtual assistants. These are already emerging today in the form of third-party apps if not already built-in to the device by default. Some of these AI assistants support natural language, meaning you can say something relatively complex into your phone/computer and it will pick apart the important components of your speech and then follow your commands, like to make a reminder, send an email, or do an internet search.

There is already a lot of work going into the idea of a semantic web, which is a web where all information is categorized and stored in such a way that a computer can understand it as well as a human.

Many view this as a combination of artificial intelligence and the semantic web. The semantic web will teach the computer what the data means, and this will evolve into artificial intelligence that can utilize that information.

This is a bit more of a far-fetched idea, but some have speculated that the popularity of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) like World of Warcraft might lead to a web based on a virtual world.

Kinset created a virtual shopping mall ( see a video here) where users can walk into different stores and see the shelves populated with products. It isn't a stretch to see this expanded into an idea where users can interact with each other and walk into a wide variety of buildings, some of which might not even sell anything.

However, the idea that the entire web would evolve into one single virtual world with buildings, shops, and other areas to explore and people to interact with - while not unbelievable in a technological sense - has more than just technological hurdles to overcome. The virtual web would need to get the major websites on board and to agree to standards that would allow multiple companies to provide clients which, no doubt, would lead to some clients offering features that other clients don't, and, thus, fierce competition.

It would also increase the time it takes to bring a website into the virtual web since the programming and graphic design would be much more complex. This extra expense would probably be too much for smaller companies and websites.

This virtual web presents a few too many obstacles, but it should be kept in mind as a possible Web 4.0.

This isn't as much of a prediction of what the Web 3.0 future holds as it is the catalyst that will bring it about. The ever-present Web 3.0 has to do with the increasing popularity of mobile internet devices and the merger of entertainment systems and the web.

The merging of computers and mobile devices as a source for music, movies, and more puts the internet at the center of both our work and our play. Within a decade, internet access on our mobile devices (cell phones, smartphones, pocket PCs) has become as popular as text messaging. This will make the internet always present in our lives - at work, at home, on the road, out to dinner, the internet will be wherever we go.

This may very well evolve into some interesting ways in which the internet will be used in the future.

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What in the World Is "Web 3.0" and Is It Even Here Yet?

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Web 3.0 is a simple term with a much more complicated meaning, which is why the simple question of "What is Web 3.0" may get you dozens of different answers. One of the biggest difficulties in nailing down a definition or metric for evaluating Web 3.0 is the lack of a clear, distinct definition for it, especially compared to what we already know about Web 2.0.

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The latest breakthrough in home technology is a fridge which orders your food online, offers up recipe ideas, then switches the oven on for you. Susie Steiner is not convinced

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How Will Earth Change If All the Ice Melts?

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Documentary by Sir David Attenborough

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Beaver Lodge Construction Squad | Attenborough | BBC Earth

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Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, last week. Credit Credit Erik Tanner for The New York Times

corner office

Growing up in India, he slept on the floor of a house without a refrigerator. Today, the chief executive is steering Google through the most turbulent period in its history.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, last week. Credit Credit Erik Tanner for The New York Times

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Google is facing more challenges today than at any time in its 20-year history. Employees are outraged over sexual harassment. Executives are under scrutiny for an effort to secretly make a censored version of its search product for China. Google will shut down its social network next year after a data breach was discovered. Political and social debates, including one over building military-grade artificial intelligence, are roiling the work force.

Yet the man responsible for leading Google through this minefield is not one of the company's founders - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - or even Eric Schmidt, the company's former chief executive and chairman, who was ushered aside last year. Instead, the man in charge of arguably the most influential company in the world is Sundar Pichai, a soft-spoken engineer who grew up in Chennai, India.

Mr. Pichai was a voracious reader as a boy, and attended the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, then Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where he received advanced degrees. After stints at Applied Materials and McKinsey, he joined Google in 2004.

Mr. Pichai helped develop the company's browser, Chrome, and in 2014 he took over product, engineering and research efforts for the company's products and platforms, including search, ads and Android. He was made chief executive in 2015, and joined the board of Alphabet, Google's parent, last year.

This interview, which was condensed and edited for clarity, was conducted in New York.
Tell me about growing up in Chennai.
There was a simplicity to my life, which was very nice compared with today's world. We lived in a kind of modest house, shared with tenants. We would sleep on the living room floor. There was a drought when I was growing up, and we had anxiety. Even now, I can never sleep without a bottle of water beside my bed. Other houses had refrigerators, and then we finally got one. It was a big deal.

But I had a lot of time to read. I was processing a lot. I read whatever I could get my hands on. I read Dickens. Friends, playing street cricket, reading books - that was kind of the totality of life. But you never felt lacking for anything.
What was it like coming over to attend Stanford?
It was the first time I had ever been on a plane. I always wanted to be in the Valley. I kind of knew that's where everything happened. I remember landing in California, and I stayed with a host family for about a week. I was in the car going from the airport, and was like, "Wow, it's so brown here." The family was like, "We like to call it golden."

When I was back at I.I.T., I had access to the computer so rarely - maybe I'd been on it three or four times. To come and just have these labs in which you had access to computers and you could program, it was a big deal to me. I was so wrapped up in that, that to some extent I didn't understand there was a much bigger shift happening with the internet.

You started at Google 14 years ago. Does it still feel like the same company you joined?
When I first joined Google I was struck by the fact that it was a very idealistic, optimistic place. I still see that idealism and optimism a lot in many things we do today. But the world is different. Maybe there's more realism of how hard some things are. We've had more failures, too. But there's always been a strong streak of idealism in the company, and you still see it today.
What's your approach to technology and screen time with your family?
When I come home on a Friday evening, I really do want to let go of my devices for a couple days. I haven't quite succeeded in doing that. At home, our television is not easily accessible, so that there is "activation energy" before you can easily go watch TV. I'm genuinely conflicted, because I see what my kids learn from all this. My son is 11 years old, and he is mining Ethereum and earning money. He's getting some insight into how the world works, how commerce works.

Every generation is worried about the new technology, and feels like this time it's different. Our parents worried about Elvis Presley's influence on kids. So, I'm always asking the question, "Why would it be any different this time?" Having said that, I do realize the change that's happening now is much faster than ever before. My son still doesn't have a phone.
Why does it seem so easy for tech companies like Google to ban pornography and graphic violence from social media platforms, but so much harder for them to root out propaganda, misinformation and disturbing content aimed at kids?
There are areas where society clearly agrees what is O.K. and not O.K., and then there are areas where it is hard as a society to draw the line. What is the difference between freedom of speech on something where you feel you're being discriminated against by another group, versus hate speech? The U.S. and Europe draw the line differently on this question in a very fundamental way. We've had to defend videos which we allow in the U.S. but in Europe people view as disseminating hate speech.

Should people be able to say that they don't believe climate change is real? Or that vaccines don't work? It's just a genuinely hard problem. We're all using human reviewers, but human reviewers make mistakes, too.
How do you approach this in China, where Google is considering returning to the market with a search engine?

One of the things that's not well understood, I think, is that we operate in many countries where there is censorship. When we follow "right to be forgotten" laws, we are censoring search results because we're complying with the law. I'm committed to serving users in China. Whatever form it takes, I actually don't know the answer. It's not even clear to me that search in China is the product we need to do today.

An estimated 20,000 Googlers participated in a sexual harassment protest this month. What's your message to employees right now?

People are walking out because they want us to improve and they want us to show we can do better. We're acknowledging and understanding we clearly got some things wrong. And we have been running the company very differently for a while now. But going through a process like that, you learn a lot. For example, we have established channels by which people can report issues. But those processes are much harder on the people going through it than we had realized.

Is there a morale problem at the company?
There's a lot of challenges in the world, and given what Google does, we feel like we are on the cutting edge of many of these issues. But when people say, "Wow, there's a lot of challenges," I always say, "There's no better time to be alive." I go through the exercise of placing myself at different times in the world. If you were alive during World War I, or influenza, or the Great Depression, and there's World War II to come. If you were in the 1960s, and Martin Luther King was shot dead, and R.F.K. would later get shot dead, and we were in Vietnam and there was a Cold War and a Cuban missile crisis - there is no better time to be alive.

But having said that, I think as humanity we're increasingly dealing with bigger things. As a company like Google, we have a deeper mission, and we feel the weight of that on our shoulders. I feel like people are energized and people want to change and make the world better.
Do you worry that Silicon Valley is suffering from groupthink and losing its edge?
There is nothing inherent that says Silicon Valley will always be the most innovative place in the world. There is no God-given right to be that way. But I feel confident that right now, as we speak, there are quietly people in the Valley working on some stuff which we will later look back on in 10 years and feel was very profound. We feel we're on the cusp of technologies, just like the internet before.
Do you still feel like Silicon Valley has retained that idealism that struck you when you arrived here?
There's still that optimism. But the optimism is tempered by a sense of deliberation. Things have changed quite a bit. You know, we deliberate about things a lot more, and we are more thoughtful about what we do. But there's a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn't solve humanity's problems. It was always naïve to think so. Technology is an enabler, but humanity has to deal with humanity's problems. I think we're both over-reliant on technology as a way to solve things and probably, at this moment, over-indexing on technology as a source of all problems, too.

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Sundar Pichai of Google: 'Technology Doesn't Solve Humanity's Problems'

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corner office Growing up in India, he slept on the floor of a house without a refrigerator. Today, the chief executive is steering Google through the most turbulent period in its history. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, last week. Credit Credit Erik Tanner for The New York Times [ Subscribe to "With Interest."

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Welcome to BBC Earth. Everything you need to know about David Attenborough's new series, Dynasties, and stories to connect you to the natural world.

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O N MARCH 16TH Bartleby left the offices of The Economist to head home. That was the last day when all editorial staff assembled in our London redoubt. And, at the time of writing, no date for a return to the office is in sight.

It is remarkable how quickly we have adapted. The newspaper has been written, edited and produced from couches and kitchen tables. January and February seem like an ancient era-the BC (before coronavirus) to the new AD (after domestication). The shift may rival great workplace transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Twitter has already said that all its employees will be allowed to work from home permanently and Facebook expects half its staff to do so within a decade.

It has been a much more sudden transition than occurred with factories. Steam power meant they were designed around one great power system, complete with belts and pulleys that snaked through the building. A failure at some point in the system meant the whole thing might grind to a halt. Then electrification allowed individual machines to have their own power source. But it took half a century from the introduction of electricity in the 1880s before factories were reconfigured to take advantage of the new power source.

The current, rapid shift to AD was enabled by preconditions. First, broadband services are today quick enough to allow for document downloads and videoconferencing. Second, advanced economies revolve around services, not manufacturing. Back in the 1970s, when Britain adopted a three-day week (to combat a miners' strike), there were power cuts and TV stations had to close down early. In other words, home life was severely affected as well. The pandemic has not turned the lights off.

Not only that, it has made remote work seem both normal and acceptable. In the past employees who stayed home had to overcome the suspicion that they were bunking off. Now those who insist on being at the office sound self-important.

Things are missing, of course. Video calls lack the spontaneity of a normal meeting; no off-the-cuff remarks to lighten the mood. Distance makes it difficult to generate camaraderie. Creativity is probably harder to foster. Octavius Black of Mind Gym, a training company, says new ideas come from weak links in networks-ie, people you meet occasionally. Such "casual collisions" have become rarer.

Yet although offices will not disappear, it is hard to imagine that working life will return to BC ways. For more than a century workers have stuffed themselves onto crowded trains and buses, or endured traffic jams, to get into the office, and back, five days a week. For the past two months they have not had to commute, and will have enjoyed the hiatus.

Employers, for their part, have maintained expensive digs in city centres because they needed to gather staff in one place. The rent is only part of the cost; there is the cleaning, lighting, printers, catering and security on top. When you work at home, you pay for your own utilities and food.

Many businesses and employees may thus have had their "Wizard of Oz" moment: the corporate HQ is shown to be an old man behind the curtain. Faith in the centralised office may never be restored.

Another aspect of the AD era may be the disappearance of the five-day working week. Even before the pandemic many workers became used to taking phone calls or answering emails at the weekend. In the AD era the barrier between home and working life, a useful way of relieving stress, will be even harder to sustain.

It may be lost altogether. Without the Monday-to-Friday commute, the weekend seems a more nebulous concept, as does the 9-to-5 working day. In future employees may work and take breaks when they please, with the company video call the only fixture. The downside, however, is that the rhythm of life has been disrupted and new routines are needed: as Madness, a British pop group, sang about school in "Baggy Trousers", people are reduced to "trying different ways to make a difference to the days".

Looking further out, the AD era may bring other changes. Some may decide to live in small towns where housing costs are lower, since they have no need to commute. Men will have fewer excuses to skip cleaning or child care if they are not disappearing to the office. In a sense, this is a return to normal: until the 19th century most people worked at or close to their homes. But social historians may still regard 2020 as the start of a new age.

Editor's note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our coronavirus hub

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "From BC to AD"

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O N MARCH 16TH Bartleby left the offices of The Economist to head home. That was the last day when all editorial staff assembled in our London redoubt. And, at the time of writing, no date for a return to the office is in sight. It is remarkable how quickly we have adapted.