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. Nicholas Negroponte Read Quote
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. Nicholas Negroponte Read Quote
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?’ Nicholas Negroponte Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water. Nicholas Negroponte Read Quote
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. Nicholas Negroponte Read Quote
Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they… can never be without some element of education. Nicholas Negroponte Read Quote
