Nicholas Negroponte
Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.Collection: Computers
Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.Collection: Computers
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.Collection: Computers
The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.Collection: Learning
Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.Collection: Learning
This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.
By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.
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.
Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they... can never be without some element of education.
It bothers me when people spoil the market.
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.
We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.
Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.
I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.
My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business.
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.
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.
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.
Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.Collection: Creativity
It makes no sense to ship atoms when you can ship bits.Collection: Atoms
Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.Collection: Business
Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible.Collection: Digital
Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. 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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Differences
It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate.Collection: Technology
My advice to graduates is to do anything except what you are trained for. Take that training to a place where it is out of place and stimulate ideas, shake up establishments, and don't take no for an answer.Collection: Ideas
Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.Collection: Thinking
Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Cities
One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of peoples walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo.Collection: Pride
Good education has got to be good entertainment.Collection: Entertainment
You can see the future best through peripheral vision.Collection: Vision
The wild, the absurd, the seemingly crazy: this kind of thinking is where new ideas come from ... The people capable of such playful thought carry forward their childish qualities and childhood dreams, applying them in areas where most of us get stuck, victims of our adult seriousness. Staying a child isn't easy.Collection: Dream
Google has a very powerful and new advertising model that, for them, prints money.Collection: Powerful
The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas.Collection: Ideas
The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills.Collection: Real
By the year 2020 the largest employer in the developed world will be the self.Collection: Self
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?Collection: Machines
I grew up with free television. Now, it wasn't free, there was these commercials, and so the economic model was driven through commercials and through advertising.Collection: Economic Models
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.Collection: Drinking
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.Collection: Debugging
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. The US has a jump-start on the practice, in that 65 percent of local school funds come from real estate taxes - a practice Europeans consider odd and ill advised. But 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.Collection: Business