Nicholas P. Negroponte

Founder of the MIT Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child

• Born: December 1, 1943
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Primary Company/Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction

In 1985, Nicholas P. Negroponte founded the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pioneering research on human-computer interfaces. He is also a prominent futurist, one of the founders of Wired magazine, and the founder of the One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPC). Since stepping down as chair of the Media Lab, he has been involved in angel investing.

Early Life

Nicholas P. Negroponte was born on December 1, 1943, in New York City. His father, Dimitri John Negroponte, was a Greek shipping tycoon, and his older brother is American diplomat John Negroponte, former ambassador to the United Nations and former director of National Intelligence. Like his brother, Nicholas attended all the best schools—the Buckley School in New York City, Le Rosey in Switzerland, and Choate in Connecticut. When he graduated in 1961, he enrolled in college at MIT, earning first and second professional degrees in architecture, in 1966. Upon graduation, he joined the MIT faculty, although during part of the 1960s he also taught at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, as a visiting professor.

Life's Work

Negroponte's graduate research was on computer-aided design (CAD). In his second year as an MIT professor, he founded the Architecture Machine Group, a think tank studying human-computer interaction. This was followed in 1985 by the founding of the MIT Media Lab, also devoted to the human-computer interface, which became the leading computer science laboratory studying new media. Negroponte opened the lab with Jerome Wiesner, a former president of MIT who was one of the twenty academicians on President Richard Nixon's “enemies list.” Negroponte served as the Media Lab's Director from 1985 to 2000, and remained as chairman until 2006.

Negroponte is a well-known futurist who has advocated technologies such as customized digital news feeds, which he discussed in his 1995 book Being Digital, popularizing the term daily me. His work on the human-computer interface in the 1970s led directly to his belief, as the Internet became more widespread and sophisticated in the 1990s, in using intelligent agents to customize the experience of using the Internet. Rather than flipping through a physical newspaper, much of which consists of content sourced from beyond the newspaper's staff (articles from wire services such as Reuters and the Associated Press and syndicated content such as opinion columns and comic strips), users of customized digital news feeds would be given daily content tailored to their preference profile, which would be generated by some initial preferences modified by reading habits and other behavior. The Internet has indeed taken that direction: Amazon and Netflix depend heavily on the use of recommendation engines, and Google tailors its displayed search results according to the behavior of the logged-in user looking at them. Critics have pointed out that this sort of customization has a number of pitfalls: It requires some kind of static identity, which may not be anonymous or, worse, may appear to be anonymous while actually constituting a profile from which one's identity could easily be derived (for example, there can be only so many independent scholars working as freelance writers of reference books in the 03063 ZIP code). Another criticism is that recommendation engines may give people what they want but not what they need (similar to letting a six-year-old pick what he wants for dinner), whereas physical interaction with an unfiltered newspaper introduces passive exposure to headlines that one may not read but still inform one's understanding of current events. Finally, customization contributes, especially for some users, in the “echo chamber” phenomenon, whereby spaces are carved out on the Internet in which nothing can be heard except people who already agree with the user and augment their existing biases.

The “Negroponte switch” refers to an idea Negroponte introduced, since picked up by other futurists, that traditionally wireless technologies become wired (for example, broadcast television is in the process of being displaced by cable and streaming video) while traditionally wired technologies become wireless (as cell phones become more common, the popularity of ground-line telephones has declined). In Being Digital, Negroponte discussed both ideas and collected several of the columns he had written for Wired. That magazine had been founded by journalist Louis Rossetto in 1992 and first published the following January. It was financially supported by Negroponte and software entrepreneur Charlie Jackson. It billed itself as “the Rolling Stone of technology” and was a more serious, less pretty, and cheaper companion magazine to Mondo 2000, the cyberculture magazine that had begun publication in 1984. William Gibson, a writer regularly featured in Mondo 2000, posed for the cover of the fourth issue of Wired. As anarchic as Mondo 2000 despite a plainer look, Boing Boing, a zine started in 1988, eventually shared many of the same contributors as Mondo 2000. Somewhere between the two—more professional-looking than Boing Boing and dryer than either—was Wired, which proved the survivor of the three. Mondo 2000 ceased publication in 1996; that year, Boing Boing ended its print magazine, although it maintains its web presence. Wired, meanwhile, has expanded to four international editions, garnering several national magazine awards and a new owner in magazine publishing giant Condé Nast. It introduced terms central to the twenty-first century's discussion of itself, such as the long tail and crowdsourcing. Negroponte continued to write a monthly column for Wired until 1998.

After leaving the Media Lab, Negroponte devoted more of his time to the One Laptop Per Child project, which grew out of research at the Media Lab. The project is supported by two nonprofit associations, the Cambridge-based OLPC Foundation and the Miami-based One Laptop Per Child Association. Intel briefly manufactured computers for the project, which creates and provides affordable educational computers in the developing world, but ended its association over a dispute with Negroponte.

Negroponte named $100 as the target price of a laptop in 2006, with a target date of 2008. The project has promoted the OLPC XO-1 laptop, also known as the Children's Machine, a low-power flash-memory computer with a rugged construction that can survive drops and rough transit. Its mobile ad hoc networking is based on 802.11s wireless network protocol, allowing users to share an Internet connection. Theft is discouraged with an optional cryptographic lease, which locks the computer if the correct code is not entered.

XO laptops were sold to governments, whose education departments distributed them, with the goal of giving each child in the education system a laptop. Countries participating in OLPC included Ethiopia, Gaza, Ghana, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Canada's First Nations communities, Mexico, the United States (Birmingham, Alabama), Argentina, Colombia, Haiti, Peru, Uruguay (the most significant participant, by the numbers), Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, Australia, Kiribati, Nauru, New Caledonia, Niue, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. Some funding was raised through “give one get one” programs, in which for a donation of $399 a consumer receives one XO laptop while another is donated to the program. The promotion was last offered in 2008, and the project struggled, in part because of the Great Recession. In 2009, TechCrunch reported that the XO laptop one of the biggest tech failures of the decade due to corporate infighting and "the glare of reality."

In 2012, as Android phones and tablets became more advanced, Negroponte stopped development of the solar-powered OLPC XO-3 tablet. He left OLPC to join the Global Literacy XPrize. The original, Boston-based OLPC Association itself disbanded in early 2014. In 2015, a nonprofit called the he Zamora Terán Foundation bought the association, with the intention of providing laptops to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with minimal hardware updates.

In September 2019, Negroponte was criticized when he defended the MIT Media Lab's decision to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender and alleged sex trafficker. The lab's director at the time, Joi Ito, had met Epstein in 2013, and subsequently accepted a reported total of $525,000 from him, despite Epstein's guilty plea and imprisonment for soliciting a minor for prostitution five years before. Ito posted a public apology on the Media Lab's website on August 15, 2019, just days after Epstein's apparent suicide in jail while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. Negroponte subsequently admitted that he had recommended that the Media Lab take the money in 2008 and still thought it was the right decision. He later clarified that he was referring to what he knew about Epstein at the time but would not have made the recommendation after Epstein's more recent sex trafficking charges.

Personal Life

Negroponte is married to Deborah Porter, the book critic who founded the Boston Book Festival and Boston's One City, One Story project. The couple has one child, Dmitri Negroponte.

Bibliography

Brand, Stewart. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. New York: Penguin, 1988. Print.

Carr, Nicholas G. Does IT Matter? Cambridge: Harvard Business Review, 2004. Print.

Chen, Angela, and Karen Hao. "MIT Media Lab Founder: Taking Jeffrey Epstein's Money Was Justified." MIT Technology Review, 5 Sept. 2019, www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joi-ito-nicholas-negroponte-funding-sex-abuse/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Kaiser, David. Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Print.

Moss, Frank. The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Their Lives. New York: Crown Business, 2011. Print.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print.

White, Pepper. The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. Print.