Nicholas Negroponte Quotations

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.

Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.

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.

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

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.

Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.

This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.

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

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.

It bothers me when people spoil the market.

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn't have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They're going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.

Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.

I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?

When you meet a head of state, and you say, 'What is your most precious natural resource?' they will not say children at first, and then when you say, 'children,' they will pretty quickly agree with you.

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

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.

By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.

One of the arguments here at OLPC is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal.

The plan is for the $100 laptop to do almost everything. What it will not do is store a massive amount of data.

Maine has shown the huge value of using a laptop across all of one's studies. Maine's program demonstrates how laptops can serve as a window into the world and a tool with which to think.

Most people don't realize that common sense is the real thing computers are missing,

I am always asked in my travels through the developing world: 'If this is such a good idea, why isn't America doing it?' ... Well, now they are.

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.

Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.

It is going to happen, and if it comes out at $138 so what? If it comes out six months late so what? I tell people I used to be a light bulb and now I'm a laser.

I said, 'That's too bad, because I need 100 million a year.' They said, 'Well, maybe we can change our strategic plan.' That's the reason you need scale.

People aren't thinking about small, fast, thin systems. Suddenly it's like a very fat person (who) uses most of the energy to move the fat. And Linux is no exception. Linux has gotten fat, too.

Red Hat's experience and core strategy of open collaboration made them a natural fit with this project. Open source and Linux will both reach and engage people in the rest of the world.

We will see a billion users of the Internet before the end of the year 2000,

We have been asked directly about this, ... Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.

We really believe we can really make literally hundreds of millions of these machines around the world,

This selected group of organizations has shown their commitment and leadership in closing the digital divide in emerging countries, focusing on providing access to life-altering technology and information to children across the globe.

When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you're doing something right.

When we talk about an Internet of things, it's not just putting RFID tags on some dumb thing so we smart people know where that dumb thing is. It's about embedding intelligence so things become smarter and do more than they were proposed to do.

unbelievably silly, because terrorists and drug dealers aren't waiting for FedEx to deliver a disk to Libya or Colombia.

You look at countries like Italy and Spain, which both have low (Internet user) numbers, but Italy could actually be more wired than France,

Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education,

And what's really frightening, or interesting, depending on your perspective, is that the change from now will even be faster and bigger than we're expecting.

I've told the governments that our price will float and go down over time,

the most important thing I've ever done in my life.

So when we make this available, it is an education project, not a laptop project. The digital divide is a learning divide - digital is the means through which children learn leaning. This is, we believe, the way to do it.

Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away.

This is not teaching as we know it; only part of our learning comes from teaching. Much of it comes from curiosity. These are tools that can help cultivate that learning process.

This is the right move at the right time,

A colleague of mine said it made him think twice about kissing his wife goodbye in the morning,

It might not be long before we have jackets that can recharge cell phones and you can be sure that is a jacket I'm going to wear more often. In an aging society, it would be remarkable and wonderful if people could buy pants that walk for them. Is the technology there to make walking pants? The answer is yes. There could be shoes that teach you how to dance or perhaps they do the dancing for you, you wear them and suddenly you are a good dancer.

It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.

If you get those kind of results, I'm going to build the machines. There's enough passion and enough kids that are able to do things they were not able to do before that justifies it.

I think $1 trillion a year by 2000 is modest,

Children are the greatest natural resource of any country, and educating these children is at the root of solving our largest and most complex problems. Yet the best education may not come from sitting in a traditional classroom, but rather through independent interaction and exploration. The development of a $100 laptop will now make this possible for all kids -- especially those in developing nations.

I do tell governments we're selling you a Trojan horse,

To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.

Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.

I had come to a stage in life where I didn't need to earn an income, I didn't need to earn a reputation, I didn't need fame, I didn't need any of the things you might want in your early career.

Most children in the world go to schools in two shifts, there's a morning shift and an afternoon shift.

When things are digital, they're all 1's and zero's, and so they commingle in ways we didn't anticipate and you could do things that were not like publishing or television, or computers, but were some intersection of those and that got known to be convergence, so between the switching, or trading of places and the convergence, you have today's media.

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.

National law has no place in cyberlaw. Where is cyberspace? If you don't like banking laws in the United States, set up your machine on the Grand Cayman Islands. Don't like the copyright laws in the United States? Set up your machine in China. Cyberlaw is global law, which is not going to be easy to handle, since we seemingly cannot even agree on world trade of automobile parts.

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.

Scale will get you strategy.

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

Taxes will eventually become a voluntary process, with the possible exception of real estate-the one physical thing that does not move easily and has computable value ... wait until that's all there is left to tax, when the rest of the things we buy and sell come from everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere.

Google has a very powerful and new advertising model that, for them, prints money.

Juan Enriquez will change your view of change itself.

Kids drop out of school mostly because school is boring and not particularly relevant.

When we go to school, very often, we don't see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.

Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work.

By the year 2020 the largest employer in the developed world will be the self.

Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.

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

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

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

Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.

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

In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, "One laptop per child."

Good education has got to be good entertainment.

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.

The notion of collective contribution, like the Wikipedia, is a very powerful one.

What's the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.

[Industrial design in 50 years] will be less about looks and more about personality of artifacts.

Very often kids don't ask questions in class because they don't want to be seen asking a question.

While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching - but good teaching and by good teachers - a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.

The cost of electronics in a modern car now exceeds the cost of its stall.

The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.

I'm not against paying at all. What I'm against is the complexity of paying. And you very often go to a website and you try to click on something and sometimes it will even say it's free, but you have to fill out this form.

If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other, not see what each other is doing, not coordinate their functions?

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.

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

You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

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.

It makes no sense to ship atoms when you can ship bits.

It's even hard for people to imagine today that telephones were wired, and they certainly were and you went to the end of a wire to make a phone call.

Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.

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.