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

I wonder...

[hazy_fakie]

exactly how can peer-to-peer networks come into our lives so easily. I mean how do you trust totally unknown people to transfer your data/food/whatever between any two points?
As a matter of fact, who would trust their credit card number to travel through a peer-to-peer network to get to the company he/she's ordering from? And this is just money... how about food as mentioned in the article?

Mail

[meehawl]

I mean how do you trust totally unknown people to transfer your data/food/whatever between any two points?

This happens every day when I drop mail into the postbox. Or when I buy a banana in the local market.

Re:Mail

[Nakito]

This happens every day when I drop mail into the postbox.

I think your analogy actually cuts the other way. When you drop your mail into the mailbox, it enters a highly regulated, automated, centralized system that collects fees (i.e., stamps) of which the government gets a cut. Yes, it's true that you do not know the people, but you sure know who they work for.

By contrast, Negroponte seems to be suggesting that you would (in effect) hand your letter to a stranger on the street, who would hand it off to another, who hands it off to another, etc., until it gets to where it's going, with no intervention by a centralized agency.

It's an interesting theory, but we'll never see it happen, for one obvious reason: it does not lend itself well to being taxed.

How can distributed P2P maintain its speed?

[Monty845]

Wont it take a lot longer for a message to work its way threw a massive network of wireless devices than it would otherwise take for the message to travel threw a conventional backbone? Has anyone come up with a method to reduce the impact the additional routing will create?

he's stating the patently obvious

[circletimessquare]

isn't this news as of 2000?

the killer apps that proved the model: im ala icq, music sharing ala napster, are already dust in the wind, taken over by aim, kazaa, etc.

and we know what the concerns are with those apps: patent infringement, viruses, spam, etc.

what we need is a wireless killer app without these concerns thwarting it

we also need a user base: enough infratstructure and people with bluetooth or whatever wireless protocol enabled gadgets to make a critical mass for the rest of the world to notice

and then we can start talking about p2p again the way negroponte is

i don't know what this killer app is, i'm no futurist, but some of you out there closer to the ground with some wacky ideas may be, and i say, to you goes the spoils of the future of computing/ the internet/ media itself

roll up your sleeves and get programming

the internet is still a very young place, we are still on the upside of the bell curve of innovation yet to come, so even though what negroponte says is dubious and/ or obvious and therefore useless, the basic observation of the youth of the internet and its promising future remains unchallenged

that's why futurists like negroponte sound interesting, because they get that (no matter if their predictions are crapola)

one of you out there reading this is going to become very rich/ influential/ famous

that is for sure

but how you are going to do that probably has very little to do with what negorponte is talking about

Erm...

[MindNumbingOblivion]

Most of this stuff is fairly obvious (to /. at least). It is nice to see mainstream treatment of it though...

P2P has already proven its effectiveness, whether you look at programs like KaZaA, Mercora, etc. But it works on wired systems because there is established infrastructure that makes the rest of the system work. For his system to work, it would be like taking out the router/server farms from the ISPs and turning every desktop computer into both a router and a server. It adds complexity, and while it ensures redundancy and would keep outages like the earlier one at Akamai from happening, it would require lots of overhead.

There is a reason that we assume that centralised systems work better; they are easier to establish, coordinate and control. This outlook only works if you are going for a fully anarchist system, which you will never get everyone to buy into, barring a massive sociological paradigm shift; something has to happen that convinces everyone that a truly open society is more beneficial than the current model.

Another Self-Appointed Expert

[rudy_wayne]

who knows nothing.

From 1998:

Nicholas Negroponte predicts "You're going to see within the next year an
extraordinary movement on the Web of systems for micropayment ... ." He goes on
to predict micropayment revenues in the Billions of dollars.