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

What I want to know is...

[jaymzter]

Did Darl refer to cattle rustling when he asked for the code comparison? And what happened to the other two MIT scientists... are they _sleeping with the fishes_?

Re:Authority for its own sake

[CaptainCarrot]

An interesting medical commentary once suggested that the role of government in societal bodies is akin to the role of parasites in biological organisms.

So what is the role of parasites in biological organisms? Are there any that aren't harmful -- in which case this is indeed a value judgement? If you'd said "symbiote" I'd have understood better, with a comparison to e. coli or something like that. But what good does a tapeworm or a virus do for the host?