Guest: Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
Host: Editor
Editor
One Laptop per Child is the non-profit organization shared by Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte is on leave of absence from MIT to help the organization redesign the laptop computer and make the machines available to children in poverish countries around the world. Negroponte spoke to the Forrester Consumer Forum on October 25th about using technology to empower the masses. His speech was followed by a Q&A conduct by Forrester Vice President Josh Bernoff.
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
Thank you very much. I am going to use about fifteen minutes to describe the project and then I gather there's a Q& A session and the Q&A session to me is the most important part. So, for these fifteen minutes which is in some sense the entertainment portion of your day because it will not relate directly to what you're doing but it certainly will relate to the lives of your children and your grandchildren. And if you think of any big problem think of ones that are so big we don't even do any thing since we talk about them as individuals and often as organizations, whether it's something like peace or something like eliminating poverty or saving the environment or doing those big things.
Whatever the solutions and is always in as maybe, they include education and in some cases it can be done just with education and in no case that I have ever come across cannot be done without some element of education. And if you take that as a given and then you look at the world, there are about 1.2 billion children in what we call primary and secondary school. Roughly 50% of them do not have electricity, roughly 50% and not exactly the same ones but very, very much overlapping lives in rural remote parts of the world. It might interest you that almost 50% of them are in china and India alone. There's some startling facts and if you look at the world you'll say well what if we could provide to those children what we have enjoyed in Europe, the United States, Japan, Korea so on, what could we do to make that happen?
Now, some people will tell you that the thing to do is to train teachers, to build schools, to make curriculum better, to make sort of the current education system better and in no way for those of you who are blogging at the moment please underline this, in no way are we saying don't do that, stop doing that, teacher is not important, schools aren't good. What we are saying is that that method like building roads and pouring concrete and doing all of those things is going to take a very long time, it's going to take years and years. So, is there something we can do in the meantime? Something to in fact leverage the children themselves.
That doesn't mean that every child is an Abraham Lincoln, it doesn't mean that you just put it on autopilot and you send laptops to kids in the jungle and that happens by itself. But is there a way of thinking not about learning as it comes from teaching, but learning as it comes from the way most of you have learned most of the things you know. In fact everybody in this room learned how to walk, learned how to talk and learned a great deal of the common sense you currently have without a walking teacher, without a talking teacher and without somebody who thought about you about common sense. How did you learned those things? You learned them by interacting with the environment.
As a young baby, there was real reward for the investment that you made to learn how to talk because you could get something, learn how to walk because you could stand up and reach it, and that whole very interactive process where you in fact get something very immediately by learning and interacting and so on comes to a more or less abrupt halt at the age of six. And you're told go to school and for the next twelve years if you're real lucky actually but for the next twelve years you would be learning by being taught by people like me standing in front of the room on books but the process is teaching.
Now, that's okay and again please I am not saying don't do that I am saying that's one form of learning that the other forms of learning may be the ones we have to bring to rescue and use and that's why One Laptop per Child got started. And we have actually adopted a way of doing it that is one that is very design centric in the following sense. There are two ways to make something inexpensive be it a laptop or a cell phone or whatever. You can take cheap components, cheap design, cheap labor and cheap everything and slap them together and make a cheap machine and I really mean cheap in the pejorative sense of the work.
Or you can do something totally different and that is have a very large scale, highly integrated process where you basically pour chemicals into one end of a factory and outspue these ultra-modern sleek iPod like laptops at a very low cost and we have clearly gone the ladder. So, let me take you through some slides very quickly. I put this as a cover page because that image is 1982, I started working with computers and children through the influence of a man named Seymour Papert, if you haven't read his works you should that's P as in Peter - a - P as in Peter again e - r - t as in Thomas. Seymour is alive and well, he is at the doorstep of 80, he's probably the deepest thinker alive about how children learn, he was very much and still is at the Media Lab.
He was John Peugeot's last active associate when John Peugeot was alive and practicing in Geneva in the 50's and early 60's. Seymour and I did this project in 1982, Senegal before the IBM PC was released in Europe Steve Jobs gave us about a 100 maybe even 200 Apple tools these kids in that particular school had more computing power than the Senegalese government. We had worked in Pakistan, Colombia we have been doing a lot this - Seymour have done a lot of it before in New York City. He'd learned something very simple and that is the children who write computer programs come the closest that we can come to thinking about thinking.
And what those children are doing when they write a program to draw a circle they learn about circleness if you will because they are teaching a program how to do it and then the process of debugging and I can go on and on and on. I've sort of said this so I would dwell on the slide, there is Seymour 25 years ago a different school, little richer, Costa Rica started in 1988, Oscar Arias was running for President, it was on his platform this is in the 90's in Kashmir both the Indian and the Pakistani side, we connected schools with WIMAX, it wasn't called WIMAX at that time, it wasn't even called Wi-Fi at that time and we thought that the problem was in connectivity.
I truly believe that's not the problem any more because there's WIMAX, Wi-Fi, 3G... and I can go on, I can change it, we can move it faster, we can change regulatory regimes, but it's elastic at least, if I bring two megabits in fact you might see a satellite dish in the background there, that satellite dish has one megabit down half a megabit back that can serve 30 kids, 40 kids, 50 kids; five more kids come it doesn't matter it's elastic, it works. If you believe in One Laptop per Child as we do it's not one cell phone per child, it's not one desktop per child, it's one laptop for very specific reason. It has to be a seamless part of their lives.
They have to bring it back and forth like they would a book and we should want them to use it for music, movies, instant messaging for all of the things that make up there life in play and work. We want to destroy, if you will, the boundaries say this is school and this is fun or this is home or this weekend, this weekend, this is weekday, this is holiday, this is - do for the children what's probably happened in all of your lives but there is a seamlessness. So, this picture was very influential may I actually built that school and it was some work that I was doing charitably my son, my wife lot of people were involved in this. We sent laptops up to this village and this was in the - started in 1999 and it was a little accidental and I don't want to pretend otherwise.
Kids here -- by the way, the average income in this village is $47 per year, I am not making a voice error there; it's per year, it's less than $4 a month. No electricity, no water, no nothing and now there're five villages and two of them don't have a road still, but they've got pretty broadband internet access Wi-Fi in the village, a generator at the school that charges the laptops. The kids take them home at night as long as the battery lasts there, they are connected. Parents love it because it's the brightest light source in the house. It's pretty good both literally and metaphorically.
In parallel to this the governor of main legislated One Laptop per Child in 2002, it's in its fourth year at the moment. And we can't find a teacher who doesn't like it whereas 80% of them were apprehensive to start. So, what it we do, we created this non-profit -- our website is pretty extensive, it's laptop.org, if you want to go look at it. Raise the funding to do something that has scale, now scale is absolutely critical. Why do you need scale? Look, one answer is you need scale because you can get components cheaply that will be embedded in this laptop that is going to use this process I mentioned in the first place.
Yes, that's true but that's not the important one. The important reason for scale I will illustrate by example, in the beginning of this project I went to company that I will not name, the CEO and said we need a small display, doesn't have to be that bright, doesn't need perfect color uniformity. I can even have a few pixel defects, but it's got to be very inexpensive. And he said Nicolas you know our corporate strategy is to make large displays very bright, perfect color uniformity, zero pixel defects. So, clearly our corporate strategy is such that we just can't help you. It's just at odds with what you're doing. And I said well gee that's a shame because I need a hundred million units a year. And he said well let's see maybe we can change our corporate strategy okay, that's why you need scale.
You need scale to change corporate strategy. When we started this we were told by companies that it was crazy, the Chairman of Intel called it a gadget and what happens a month later, they offer a product that is nearly but I won't say identical but is very much competitive with the idea and you know what, that's terrific, that's the best thing. When I tell people that I probably said you know that's one of our biggest achievements because if you can get other people to copy it we are a non-profit, we are not in the laptop business, our business is to get the maximum number of laptops, connected laptops into the hands of kids and that's one way to do it is to get other people to do it as well.
I have sworn to my self that this will be the last meeting where I bring a model. I was at the factory last week and the assembly line starts rolling at the end of the next week, so we are real close. This was a little less than a year ago when Kofi Annan is your partner and you get kind of a lot of press. This particular laptop was the one we showed in November, it's kind of charming, I look at the slide with a little embarrassment today but this particular laptop on November 17th of last year really launched the project and everybody remembered the pencil yellow crank, everybody did and even today we get email from people saying where's the crank, the crank is not on your machine anymore? Well, it is on our machine it just happens to be on the AC adapter, it's in a more intelligent place. But being in the wrong place on this image was just fine because people realized there is something different about this laptop and this laptop is indeed very different.
And in fact it's not a crippled machine at all; we get some people who say gee! Get a real computer. Ha, ha hello, this is going to work faster than yours, it's going to be instant on, instant off and it's going to run like 'bat out of hell', okay. Why? Because you know the fat lady can't sing anymore and the reason is when somebody is really, really fat they are using all their muscle to move their fat. That's what happened with most software. I am not pecking on one company, it's almost every piece of software, the new release is distinctly worse than the one previous because it's slower, it's got features you don't want and the one's you got to know are gone.
Okay, so we're going on a diet, we're using Linux but the key things are the three in bold very low power less than two watts is our average which is important. Your laptop runs between 25 and 45 watts at heavy duty. So, we're down to about one tenth or less of the power, it's a mesh network, which means that the laptop themselves make the network, you're not looking for hotspots or something that they -- or in fact when the laptop is closed it's still on as router, every laptop is a router even when it is closed and they make that mesh network. And the dual mode display is just fantastic. Jeff Bezos came to see it about ten days ago and I think we knocked his socks off and a lot of people have seen it and its real, it works in both transmission mode, which is what you're accustomed to with laptops and DVDs and it works in reflective mode, which means you can take it out into the sunlight and its what sometimes is called the transflective display and it's a very low cost one.
It works in both black and white and color, so in black and white you get over 200 points dpi (dots per inch). And in color the reason is C2 numbers he said each pixel is an active pixel and hence you -- it's kind of hard to say what is the resolution of color, but at minimum it's 800/600 it's actually much higher and it's really pretty good. That's the laptop and as I said I promised myself not to come with models but -- and story of my life is after this presentation, I go to the airport and go to Korea, so it's not as if a I am going to be milling around afterwards, but this gives you a sense of its size and so on its design, so it has absolutely no holes or edges of course I am lying this one for the AC adapter, but it's been designed very carefully, it turns into an e-book and has a camera and all that stuff I can a take.
Now, the problem is I'm so excited about the laptop and it's as cute as hell actually. The problem is that the people hear my excitement and say ha! They're making a laptop, they're in the laptop business. So, bloggers please -- yes I am excited there about three or four technical breakthroughs. There is a saying that 'when you do a project you're only allowed one or two miracles'. Usually one miracle per project we are counting on about ten and I will admit that very, very quickly. Hand power, it's not on the machine anymore there is paddle, a crank and a pull cord. This one even though it's a little counterintuitive works the best. You can generate if you're well nourished twelve years old, you can generate about 15 to 16 watts for maybe three or four minutes.
So, if we can get a one-o-ten ratio for one minute of cranking or pulling you get ten minutes of laptop use that's pretty, that's pretty good. We think of that's kind of minimum, clearly if you start using bicycles and pedals you can do a lot better. It's about a ten-to-one difference between your legs and your upper body, but limiting yourself to the upper body you get those kinds of numbers. This particular one is kind of cube because it auto adjusts itself. So, if the kid if weaker it actually is easier to pull and if it feels it's being pull to easily it gets harder and generates more power and if you have a longer reach, you're a bigger person it will let out more strengths. So, this under $10 device is unto to itself a kind of interesting piece of invention in technology.
Countries, one quick word about how we are launching it. Everything we believe is kind of bottoms up, do this and sort of do it that way, but keep in mind that we need the scale to launch sort of the five million machines just to pop out of the box, this doesn't go as a marketing experiment where you release a few hundred thousand, try them then another million and then build the market and do that. We don't even think of it that way. If there is something similar to sales and marketing in our organization you're looking at it. Okay, here it is the entire sales and marketing department is standing on stage. Okay, we have 250 people working on this project around the world that's full time equivalent it's probably much larger, not probably it is much larger.
If you count the government groups set up in Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand and so on and so forth, it's probably a thousand people, but just in terms of who's in the execution path are there are about 250 people; 150 of them are in Taiwan at the moment the rest are scattered around the world. We're launching by going to countries that are big like Brazil, like Thailand, like Nigeria and saying look do a million units in the first year, pop it out of the box, cluster them, we will help you do it that gets it launched and then the UN, particularly the UNDP helps us launch it in all the other countries. We made one exception recently got a lot of press we went to smaller country Libya and interesting thing about Libya is that it is small but it is also one that can afford to do every child, which Gaddafi has agreed to do.
So, Libya will do every child in Libya within 12 months after the launch. That's going to be spectacular because you suddenly have every child in the nation with a laptop not just the 7th graders in main or a school here, but in the entire nation. So, that for us is different but is really very exciting. There is anybody in this room, who has a use for Caps Lock key please send me email okay or go to our website. I only know of it is something we accidentally hit and have to go back and correct and whoever put it just above the shift key is the most perverted person I have met, okay. Now -- so there may be no results for One Laptop per Child but at least we'll get rid of the Caps Lock key, thank you.
Editor
Oh my gosh! Thanks that was terrific, so there's one question that's been on my mind since I've learned about the project and what you are trying to do. Which is a harder problem to solve engineering or politics?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
I'm sure it's the later but we do as little of that as possible. Notice our ratio is 1:250 in terms of the energy we are spending on the politics of it. One thing about politics is you can only deal with the head of the state and when other people contact me, we say, sorry. If the Head of the State is interested we'll talk to you and the reason isn't arrogance, the reason is to get buy in from the Head of the State.
Editor
As you going to have to get to him eventually you might as well start at the time.
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
Well not only that you go through a very time consuming process of excuse my language, but of people who are covering their ass, okay for it's their bureaucratic job in some sense to take the least risk possible. A bureaucrat is the most unrest prone person you can meet. A head of state will look at it very, very differently and it also depends when they are coming up for election, whether they are through other means, whether they are about to start whether they are -- well, I mean just a lot personal things.
Editor
So I mean, we are talking about Muammar Gaddafi here, who has been demonized for running a very repressive state and yet you sat across him and were able to do this, tell me about what it takes to get Muammar Gaddafi to say every child in my country is going to have a laptop?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
First of all, they asked us we didn't asked them
Editor
Okay.
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
And --
Editor
But you don't say no to anybody?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
I say no to small countries. We get a lot of small countries at the head of state level have asked us and Rwanda is one, Panama is one, Dominican Republic is one, Ethiopia is one. I can go through list. Now, Ethiopia is big and we will probably do Ethiopia, I am going there shortly. But if it's a very small country it doesn't help us in the launch but we include them in whatever way we can and we have a distribution mark because we're supplying limited. So, we will include them get machines, so you will see machines in Panama, you will see machines in Guatemala and so on.
Editor
But, Gaddafi -- you said he came to you, but what's it like to deal with Muammar Gaddafi about a challenge like this?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
First of all, you're doing it in the desert at 50 degree centigrade in his tent, okay. So, that onto his self is pretty fascinating, okay. Also, fascinating to me is he is very humble man; he is a person with an extraordinary physical presence. He is couple of years older than I am, in great physical shape, very impressive physically, sits down and believe it or not listens and because of the regime and most Americans don't know a thing about it, most Americans still remember him as a terrorist. This is man who's succession will not be his children.
He's set up what he considers is the perfect democracy and the succession will not be one where you annoyed somebody. So, he's really interested in education, he is really interested in opening up the country and he's particularly interested in quite frankly changing his image here because he has changed. I am not part of political campaign but clearly he's doing this for both the expression and to basically, if you will, make a statement to Africa because in the $250 million agreement we have that will include machines for at least two other countries in Africa maybe more. So, he sees himself as an African leader not as really an integral part of the Arab world.
Editor
So, we're going to get to audience questions in a minute, but there is definitely one thing I want to hear about. Bill Gates is -- I am sure you know, I got quoted about he saying the last thing you want for shared used computer to have something without a hard disk and with a tiny little screen and he's generally pooh-poohed the device. Now, I look at this and if I were in Microsoft I'd be terrified because you say you've taken all the bloat out this instant-on (Inaudible) and underpowered machine.
Now, maybe this isn't the right machine for me right now on my desk but I am sure if your job is to get this to as many people as possible you'd license it, license the design to somebody who wants to make a corporate version for a little bit more than a $100 but a little bit less than a $1,000 that's sort of challenging. Do you think Microsoft should be scared of this?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
Well, first of all, read the first sentence again.
Editor
About what he said?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
Yeah.
Editor
I took out the most - negative points and he said the last thing he wants for a shared use computers to be something without a hard disk.
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
Last thing you want for a shared use computer, this is one laptop per child. Next, part of the sentence?
Editor
Okay, with a tiny little screen.
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
The tiny little screen. This is half-inch bigger than the Origami better screen, double the resolution, next sentence?
Editor
Sorry, that's all I've have got. My question is simple, is there a version of this that a lot us are going to be using a year from now or ten years from now?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
It's the most frequently asked question that we get and a version of it is why aren't not doing schools in the United States and Europe. What we are going to do is the following and Jeff Bezos blesses hard, he's got wonderful creativity for these sorts of jingles. He said you know Nick there's this expression 'buy one and get two'. Yeah they see that. He said you've got to - have a jingle that says buy two and get one, bingo 100% margin. So, we will release it in the United States and Europe on a buy two and get one basis where you pay whatever it is $300 for it, and what you're doing is you're buying one or more for a kid in Africa and when you walk around with this it will like a yellow bracelet, it will be an expression, it will actually say that.
Editor
So, let's take a question from the audience.
Bill Band - Forrester Research
Hello it's Bill Band, I'm with the business process and application team in Forrester. I have a two part question from the audience. The first part of the question is there any way for companies in this room to become usefully involved in your project at this stage, and the second part is there a way for companies to access the design lessons learned and process that you've developed during this project?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
The answer is a big upper case 'yes' to both of those.
Editor
Without a Caps Lock.
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
Without the Caps Lock, you're good, that's good, and maybe we found the use for the Caps Lock is to right yes. Its upper cases volume I get. The answer to first one is real simple, send me email personally, my email address is trivial to remember, it's just the initials nn@mit.edu and I promise you an answer. And at nn@edu will also depends who asks. If you happen to be a high-tech company it is one answer, if you're McDonald's it's another answer, if you're Pepsi it's another answer. So, there are a lot of different answers.
So, that's the way to get an answer and learning stuff please go to laptop.org it s a Wiki it's updated every few hours. We put everything out there. In fact I was reading last night a criticism on a website that said gee theses guys changed the name because we're trying to -- struggling what should -- what you call the laptop? What is it for a name and we have been -- and of course we put this out on the Wiki like we do everything our designs, our -- whole things out there and in fact we will give it away, we won't license it, we will give it away to people to make it if that's going to get it to the kids.
We give it you to make for -- military or in the United no but we will to you if you want make some for kids, doesn't really work to it licensing you need this factory where you pour the chemicals in one end and out comes, you need the scale. But, we are completely open and as a consequence I hope people learn from it, because there are things we make mistakes, we make, but boy do we broadcast them and so I hope people can learn from that. For me the biggest lesson has been that and I always known this I have always operated this way, but I never knew the extent and that is the word impossible should sort of be removed from the English language, it should be removed from your vocabulary at least, because a lot things that looking impossible really aren't.
Media Lab made its entire reputation and sort of did everything that way. What I found which is different in One Laptop per Child is this that there's been such a swing of goodwill and enthusiasm from apprehension and sort of reservation or this isn't really -- people are not coming to us and saying hey stop being so conservative, you guys can -- this is really possible and things and we're getting offers from companies that isn't they are losing money on it but they are coming up and contributing ideas that really have surprised me, the degree to which now we have people telling us to be wilder and try harder new things because we're being told that sometimes we're accepting the would impossible.
Audience Member
So, let me just get one thing quick thing clear here. Are you patenting portions of this (voice overlap)?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
We patented as fast as much as we can on a per day and the reason is not to license it the reason is so that we can make use it. If you don't patent then somebody else might and then say we can't use it. So, we patent Galore and I just can't get people to sign this -- put up the disclosures fast enough.
Audience Member
And then if I want the license one of your patents, do I have to pay for that or is that for free?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
Depends who you are.
Audience Member
Depends who you are?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
And it depends what you want. Just put this in context, the display manufacture is building a Fab. We will use 50% of the capacity of the Fab for the display for this machine that Fab costs $2 billion. Now, that's pretty serious money. Are we going to give you, you, or somebody in this room licenses to the display patents? No. That Fab has to be amortized. Without that Fab we can't make so we're business savvy and that is part of the process. So, something's we have keep and make sure we patent so we can use them but also to get this executed and out there.
Editor
So, let me take one more question from the audience, last question.
Audience Member
This question is actually kind of two questions, they go together. The first really is what are the killer applications on this device and the second which is related to it is why is this device better than a cell phone in these markets?
Nicholas Negroponte - One Laptop per Child
I like it when the last questions are easy. The killer app is certainly communications child-to-child, peer-to-peer, instant messaging, connectivity, being part of a group. Our user interface is not a desktop, our kids are not office workers, it will not look like windows or Macintosh. It's a very buddy list, group oriented web mesh network system and below it there is the OS that you can access you don't have to buy into our user interface, but our user interface is much more like a buddy list on a phone system and sort of cell phones and the way kids connect and share. So, we think of the kids as creators not recipients. We think of them as makers of things.
So, the applications when you actually get it and the software that's on it which can be deleted pretty quickly is constructionist software to make music to make things. So, making is a key word, sharing is a key word that's very, very much how that works. The cell phone -- not just for disclosure I am on the Board of Directors of Motorola. I know the cell hone business; I'm quite involved with it. It isn't an alternative -- why -- patent (ph) as an either or is just quite frankly stupid they don't relate to each other okay, and I will say first of all, books have a size for a reason and Atlas is a bigger physical page than a novel for a reason.
Textbooks tend to be bigger than literary works for a reason; okay the reason has to do with vision, internet (ph) and so on browsing etcetera. So, this is just a cell phone might be that. So then somebody said wait a minute you take that cell phone and you connect it to your TV set, hello connected to the TV set; a) my kids don't have TVs okay, b) when they have TVs, imagine just imagine a kid going home saying mom, dad I need to connect to the TV. I'm not talking about during the world cup or soapbox I am just talking about just in general and then these families often have seven kids, do we have seven TV's? No, but they will have seven laptops.
So, it's the cell phone option is so ludicrous that I don't even... it's a great last question because it's truly it's not even -- it's not related I mean sure you could also have a bicycle, maybe if we put that Caps Lock key on the cell phone it could do what we need to do. Now, be careful I am from the Motorola board and I want you to buy cell phones Galore.
Editor
Okay, that's all we have time for, thank you very much for a fascinating talk.