A 30-Year History of the Future
Post #822
Friday Video: TED Talk – MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. The consummate predictor highlights interfaces and innovations he foresaw in the 1970s and 1980s that were scoffed at then but are ubiquitous today. And he leaves you with one last (absurd? brilliant?) prediction for the coming 30 years.
The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He’s the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.
Why you should listen
A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, Negroponte founded (and was the first director of) MIT’s Media Lab, which helped drive the multimedia revolution and now houses more than 500 researchers and staff across a broad range of disciplines. An original investor in Wired (and the magazine’s “patron saint”), for five years he penned a column exploring the frontiers of technology — ideas that he expanded into his 1995 best-selling book Being Digital. An angel investor extraordinaire, he’s funded more than 40 startups, and served on the boards of companies such as Motorola and Ambient Devices.
But his latest effort, the One Laptop per Child project, may prove his most ambitious. The organization is designing, manufacturing and distributing low-cost, wireless Internet-enabled computers costing roughly $100 and aimed at children. Negroponte hopes to put millions of these devices in the hands of children in the developing world.
What others say
“If Nicholas Negroponte can achieve his ambition of distributing $100 laptops to the world’s disadvantaged children, he will help redefine philanthropy and see his name added to a list alongside the likes of Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller.” — Technology Review
[ted id=2043]
