Nicholas Negroponte
26 quotes
Biography
"Scale will get you strategy."
"Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource."
"You can see the future best through peripheral vision."
"Think about it. Turning pages. How ridiculous that is. It's just unbelievably dumb. … [Apple's] building peripherals for iTunes … We can't turn these kids into couch potatoes."
"MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom."
"The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time — you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing."
"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."
"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."
"Cyberlaw is global law."
"Unlike television — at least as it currently exists — the Internet is a medium of choice."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When you write a computer program you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions. But when there's a bug — and all programs have bugs — you've got to debug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute … and you iterate. And that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning."
"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?"
"Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living."
"Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water."
"We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road."
"If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop."
"My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business."
"Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they... can never be without some element of education."
"We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road."
"Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation."
"The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning."