27 Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

Nicholas Negroponte quotes

1. Scale will get you strategy

2. 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.

3. Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource.

4. You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

5. MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.

6. The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time - you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. Cyberlaw is global law.

10. Unlike television - at least as it currently exists - the Internet is a medium of choice.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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?

1. The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills.

2. The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

3. I think life's turning into an omelet and people will just have to live with that.

4. Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.

5. But just as elevators have changed the shape of buildings and cars have changed the shape of cities, bits will change the shape of organizations, be they companies, nations, or social structures.

6. Good education has got to be good entertainment.

7. Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

8. Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.

9. Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they ... can never be without some element of education.

10. A Wired reader told me once, Get a life, which I read from the back of a yacht in the Aegean, while eating fresh sea urchins and drinking terrific Montrachet.

11. Give One, Get One generated about 100,000 zero-dollar laptops. Somebody else paid for them, but from the recipient's point of view, that's zero.

12. Rote learning is a killer for most of us and for some people, it really excludes them.