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

viruses

[mwheeler01]

let's hear it for a better way to spread viruses. As we all know bluetooth is now starting to spread viruses from phone to phone...this is the wave of the future.

Great article, but.....

[metlin]

I do not agree with some of what he says.

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.

The last person to want real change is not the customer, these days it seems to be the companies making that decision for the customer.

Think of any area, there are millions of customers who want a change for the better -- however the companies are just not letting the change happen and say that it's for the good of the customer, or that what the customer wants is illegal (and if it isn't illegal, they'll just pass a couple of laws and make it illegal).

And to be honest, small companies that bring about great innovations are being stifled, especially because they are shit scared of law suits. I'm surprised that Nicholas did not mention this in his interview.

True, they hold the key. But it does not take much to crush them down, either.

Re:I wonder...

[Otto]

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?
Why do you trust servers/routers that your number passes through now over the internet?

Answer: You don't. You use some form of end to end encryption (https).

As far as the food thing goes, I think he was making a point. I'm not eating anybody's leftovers except my own anytime soon. ;)