Nicholas Negroponte
Greek-American computer scientist best known as founder and director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.
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Isn't it odd how parents grieve if their child spends six hours a day on the 'Net, but are delighted if those same hours are spent reading books?
I think the Net is scaling very well. Because of the way it was designed, I don't think it will come to its knees and crash. I see it as very organic in the way it's capable of living and reproducing itself.
Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource.
True personalization is now upon us. It's not just a matter of selecting relish over mustard once. The post-information age is about acquaintance over time: machines' understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human beings, including idiosyncrasies (like always wearing a blue-striped shirt) and totally random events, good and bad, in the unfolding narrative of our lives.
I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.
The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential — small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.
Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 — a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 — meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world.
The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time — you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing.
Scale will get you strategy.
You can see the future best through peripheral vision.
Personal computers will make our future adult population simultaneously more mathematically able and more visually literate. Ten years from now, teenagers are likely to enjoy a much richer panorama of options because the pursuit of intellectual achievement will not be tilted so much in favor of the bookworm, but instead cater to a wider range of cognitive styles, learning patterns, and expressive behaviors.
If you think about it, being digital is Italian. It's underground, provocative, interactive. It has humor, discourse, and debate. It has a kind of liveliness to it.
MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.
Unlike television — at least as it currently exists — the Internet is a medium of choice.
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