Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

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

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

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

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

Nicholas Negroponte
You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

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

Nicholas Negroponte
Unlike television — at least as it currently exists — the Internet is a medium of choice.

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

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

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

Nicholas Negroponte
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.

Nicholas Negroponte