Nicholas Negroponte quotes

Nicholas Negroponte is an American architect and technology visionary, renowned for founding the MIT Media Lab. His work has bridged the fields of design, digital technology, and education. He is also known for launching the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand access to technology in developing countries. Here are 36 of his quotes:

You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

Nicholas Negroponte

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

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

Scale will get you strategy.

Nicholas Negroponte

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

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

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

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?

Nicholas Negroponte

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

Nicholas Negroponte

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.

Nicholas Negroponte

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.

Nicholas Negroponte

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

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

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

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

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

Cyberlaw is global law.

Nicholas Negroponte

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

Nicholas Negroponte

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

Nicholas Negroponte

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

Nicholas Negroponte

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.

Nicholas Negroponte