Inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee says that he no longer understands how the web works and wants to stick it under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour.

He said that boffins are starting to study the effect of the web within disciplines like social science, economics, psychology and law. He has set up a Web Science Research Initiative to bring all that research together because when it was established nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine.

Sir Tim said that humanity had no real data about the stability of the emergent systems that have cropped up on on the Internet or how they affect society.

The internet was fast becoming a huge human brain, and just as we don't know how the brain works, we have not got a clue how the Internet effects life on earth. (Apart from increasing the amount of porn in circulation to the power of n. sub.ed.)