Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 2 December 2006, 7:09 AM
Negroponte at NetEvents
[These are some pretty raw notes from Negroponte's presentation at NetEvents, Hong Kong, as it happens. He's showing off the first "production laptop" - although it's not the finished electronics. An ASIC - to run the camera, the flash memory and other functions - isn't fitted, and it's not possible to try the machine. Pictures to follow.]
Not a laptop project, an education project. Whatever you want to do to eliminate poverty, you do with education – in no case without education. We're particularly focussed on primary education.
Seymour Papert said "When children write computer programs about something, like describing a circle, they have to understand the concept of circleness a lot more than if they just drew it on a blackboard. "
When you're debugging a program, you're performing a set of operations which is the closest you can get to thinking about thinking.
[on learning learning]. Teaching is only one way – when you're very young, you learned to do things that didn't involve teachers. Then at six years, you're told to stop and get taught by teachers. But that's a very small part of learning
There are 1.2 billion children. Half a billion live in rural parts of developing countries, where the education is even more primitive. Certainly true of China and India – which between them have 50 per cent of the children in the world. In some countries, one third of teachers never show up. Some show up drunk.
That will take thirty years to fix. So have to give child an opportunity in his or her learning. In the developing world, most schools are two shifts – one group in the morning, one in the afternoon, 8-noon. A child is in school 2.5 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Laptops cost much the same as ten years ago. Features compensate for dropping price.
Non-profit. No shareholders. I don't have to sell one laptop. Pour in chemicals at one end, pour out iPods [I'm 99 percent sure NN said iPods at this point: RG] at the other. So lovely, you'll want one.
Numbers so big, changes corporate strategy. We'll be selling 100-150 million a year. More like the cellphone industry than the laptop industry.
A key specification, the laptop takes 2 watt as opposed to thirty or forty for normal laptops, and you can generate 20 watts with the upper body in a normal well-nourished adult. Need a one to ten ratio (take a minute to charge, run for ten).
We don't run Office. Yes you can, but no we don't. It's for kids. No discussion about games, they're there. Mesh network is always on, even when your laptop is off. It shuts off on 15 percent battery, but otherwise it's always there.
We have a pully charger sketched out, which can generate ten watts with a small girl, twenty or twenty five for big strapping lad.
Will be providing $100 server with 330GB of storage.
It takes 600 people to launch 1.2 million laptops
Pakistan is a launch country.
China is difficult
India not on the list
We'll be launching at $148, anticipating $100 at end of 2k8, $50 at 2010. Depends on the cost of memory, nickel.
Gray market issues. There are countries where the kids get given shoes at school, and the parents sell them. So one way to solve this is not to put it on the market – in the history of the US postal system, not one post office truck has been stolen. If you have a OLPC, you're a kid or a teacher - no other way to get one. If you steal it before it hits the school, it's useless. If you steal it from the kid, within 5 days (or whatever), it's disabled. Exceptional security. Person who heads up our security is 22 years old, so you know it's going to be good.
Pay for two, get one -Jeff Bezos' slogan for a form of charitable giving between countries that may work.
Whoever put the capslock key about the shift key has to be so perverted.
I haven't been in a country for more than two days since 2005.
The numbers are so big it's daunting. China has 220 million students in primary and secondary school. Ministers of education have a block that the teachers won't like it – the kids will know more will destroy the children-teacher relationship. And India and China think they can do it on their own, and they shouldn't China, for god's sake don't announce your own 3G system tomorrow. The world is global
How about Microsoft? I've known Bill his entire adult life. We put in an SD slot just for Bill, we didn't need it, so it can run Windows. The machines are at Microsoft right now, having Windows put on. They have a genuine issue with open source. They struggle with it. It's their issue. Intel's issue is less genuine, we don't use their processor. We went to them, they turned it down, went to AMD, they accepted in less than 3 hours.
Intel introduced their Classmate. That's fantastic. Having that machine on the market is wonderful – annyone who makes a low-cost laptop is enouraged by us.
When people ask me about China, people assume the regime is the issue. The issue is Confucious. Confucism is a very top down, structured, hierarhical philosophy. It's the opposite of our bottom-up idea. Most Chinese don't have much faith in their kids – they don't think they can do as much as they can. Given some opportunity, some freedom to explore, they can do a great deal. And that's not rooted in the Confucian philosophy.
On the mesh and incumbent telcos: I describe the mesh, of which the laptop is going to be the largest roll-out in the world, as flowerbox model. Go to Switzerland, people put out flowerboxes for all sorts of reaason – they have an ugly view, or they want to occupy their mother-in-law. Not every house has a flowerbox, and some flowers are dead. But the collective consequence is terrific. Doesn't mean there isn't someone worried about the green spaces, the public areas, but the two co-habitate. The mesh will co-habitate with the commercial sector. They're still trying to build their walled garden, and they'll shoot themselves in the foot. They've become the most hated industry in the world. They'll go through a blip, and then they'll get it.
About deployment and follow-through: when Gadaffi says he'll spend 250 million, he doesn't write me a cheque The money doesn't come near us. Everything is outsourced.. Manufacturer is Quanta, which makes 37-38 percent of the world's laptops. When Quanta said they'd do it, nobody asked if we could do it any more.
First year will be between 1 and 1.5 billion dollars – daunting numbers. But now it's big players – Google, Citicorp, Nortel – people who wear long pants.
Used to tell people that the grey market would be the distribution channel. We think we can lick the grey market technically and culturally. When the head of state makes it a campaign of it, it's stigmatised. Once I make a commercial laptop, I'm in trouble. Can the Pakistani government lash thousands together to make a supercomputer? Only if they have the key, and we hold the key.
What about the low-cost GSM handset as competition? Motorola didn't want to do it, but when we did [Negroponte is on the board of Motorola], the stock price went down – analysts penalised us for lowering our average cost per handset. The financial community needs to be educated. Low price does not mean low margin.
Have a signed agreement with Wikipedia - there'll be an ebook reader with a wiki for kids to share their thoughts. There's no DRM on the machine. There'll be a lot of stuff in the machine that allows kids to make things – Logo, Squeak, Scratch.
You go into a school, and they're teaching kids Word and Excel. That makes me cry. They should be making music, making things. They shouldn't be office workers. Textbooks – which can be multimedia or just existing textbooks, put into the ebook reader. In some countries, the government owns the textbooks, or there'll be licence agreements
The entire software community is to blame for bloat. Every release is worse than its predecessor. It's not just Windows - the version of Linux on this started at half a gigabyte. It should go down to around eighty, but it should be muh smaller.
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