Q&A With MIT's Nicholas Negroponte

Lisa Langsdorf writes "Thought you might be interested in this interview between Nicholas Negroponte and BusinessWeek Online's Steven Baker. In it, Nicholas says that peer-to-peer is his prediction as to which new products or services are likely to make the biggest splash, he says: Peer-to-peer is key. I mean that in every form conceivable: cell phones without towers, sharing leftover food, bartering, etc. Furthermore, you will see micro-wireless networks, where everyday devices become routers of messages that have nothing to do with themselves. 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. "

Comments

Not to be logically fallacious...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should realize that this Nick Negroponte is the SAME GUY that whored himself to Swatch to promote their ridiculous "Internet Time" initiative.

Re:P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny... but misses the point. When you hit a web page from home, all the computers (routers, proxy servers, etc) that the data passes through have been built, configured and installed for the central purpose of moving data. In that sense they have *everything* to do with routing your web page.

What Negroponte means is that your phone will pass data for other clients like a router does, but it will also be your mobile phone (a helpful, interactive, personal device). So instead of having a fairly strict division between client, server, and message-passing machines, each device will contain the transport functions and also do something individualistic.

This architecture, it seems to me, will imply encryption throughout -- somehow, people are more concerned by the idea of their data passing through other individuals' devices (what if they look at it?!) than they are sending the data through the hands of a few mega-corporations. I would say this is a good thing...