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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.
"
"Honestly mom, that pr0n was just going THROUGH my device. I think it just got stuck!"
Well blow me, this guy is obviously a genious. I mean after all this time that several million people have been using P2P, somebody thinks it might be used a lot in the future..
Come one, did we really need some computer geek to tell us that?
There's nothing more to see here, next story please.
Almost like...The Internet!?!?!
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.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
You should realize that this Nick Negroponte is the SAME GUY that whored himself to Swatch to promote their ridiculous "Internet Time" initiative.
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?
A: Peer-to-peer is key. I mean that in every form conceivable: cell phones without towers, sharing leftover food, bartering, etc
Is it just me or is his answer devoid of reasons why "peer-to-peer is key"?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.
Ok... so, why is "peer-to-peer key"?
Key to what?
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.
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.
Da Blog
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?
..typical Negroponte - jumping on the bandwagon way after everyone else has a seat - look how long it took the MIT media lab to get a website.
Kids, back in the olden days of the 1990's, there was a whole magazine that consisted of repeating "Atoms are heavy; bits are weightless." over and over again, interspersed with pictures of stuff they said you had to buy. Strange times.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
His law I guess from the early 90's said that everything that was airborne would become fixed conduits and the reverse.
Example: Television is mostly fixed and stationary so cable will take over. Telephones is for people that is moving so they will switch to Wireless.
Help fight continental drift.
Unless you could do it by distributing it over a new wireless network supported by thousands of regular people, then no.
Actually, that'd be kind of interesting, being able to defecate via wireless ethernet. Bosses would love it a bit too much though since they wouldn't have to pay for our bathroom breaks. Of course, if we somehow get around to the point that we could do such things, at least maybe P2P would stop being such a sticking point with the government, since they'd have bigger things to worry about, like regulation of bathroom dropoff locations, making sure they aren't, banks and such. Or making sure we don't wirelessly transfer ourselves into bank vaults or.... What?
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
Now that same magazine mostly consists of pictures of things you are supposed to buy interspersed with pictures of Sergei Brin and Steve Jobs. Its still mostly toilet paper though.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Whats interesting is how wrong he got some parts. He totally missed the web...he seemed to be stuck on some vision of uber-TV.
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.
#define CLUE 0
Because historically, smaller groups of very poweful people will always do everything to control the masses. Sure, P2P is great and all, and nature's self-organization is a good model, but human society works like that only in certain limited ways. Free market is supposed to work like that in theory, but in practice, it's obvious the market is not really free.
Those with money and power will continue to control and influence the masses while giving the masses the illusion of lack of centralized control.
RIAA, MPAA, governments, banking and financing industries, are all out to centralize control of flow of things. They are not going to give up that power easily. This is partly why we have social classes, and that in the world, the wealthy get wealthier and the poor get poorer, why government's agricultural subsidy create farmers who are not wealthy, but become addicts to subsidy, and why certain companies make so much money from them.
Nicholas Negroponte is f a r being from a geek. He is a suit that pretends to be one. I have not read a single piece written by this person having anything resembling substance. He embodies the prototypical techological-determinist, quite ill read or prepared for anything besides business-talk. For this, amongst many other reasons, I'd rather read a publication like "Scientific American" than "Wired" any day. This guy is seriously brain-damaged.
Now what would an interview with this guy be doing in Slashdot?
HAD
When you drop your mail into the mailbox, it enters a highly regulated, automated, centralized system that collects fees
Any mutually inter-dependent system can become self-organising and regulated according to custom and expectations. The key issue is the "centralisation". That's the central point.
I argue that the centralisation in this case stems from the State monopoly on money. In their recent history States have generally monopolized the right to issue fiat money for settlement of all debts, public and private, throughout their territory. For this monopoly to prevail they rely on consent, coercion, and the implicit threat of judicial or police violence.
Privatised money that removed this monopoly would also invalidate your counter-argument. There have been cases of non-State delivery networks for private citizens. Today we are in fact living through another periodic renaissance of non-State delivery companies (Fedex, UPS, etc). I think private money is just a matter of time and when and if that happens then a lot of formerly "centralised" economic networks will be reshaped.
Da Blog
But really, what would be wrong with an approach similar to that of lightning: probe routes quickly, caching along the way, then using the shortest-path algorithm (or some such) to choose which path to "solidify" for a bursted data transfer?
;-)
Yeah, i'm half talkin out of my ass there, but ya know, sometimes good ideas show up that way
Oh yeah, the other prob with that, wouldn't it need lots of network traffic and ram just to maintain a network of path/nodes/phones/whatever?
who knows nothing.
... ." He goes on
From 1998:
Nicholas Negroponte predicts "You're going to see within the next year an
extraordinary movement on the Web of systems for micropayment
to predict micropayment revenues in the Billions of dollars.
When someone from MIT says peer-to-peer is a good thing, he's talking about peer-to-peer as an architecture. He does not mean "KaZaA 0wnz!! fr33 pr0n = 1337!!!!111oneoneone." People are interested in peer-to-peer for reasons other than file-sharing because they're scalable architectures that can handle load balancing very well, and have no central point of failure.
Most peer-to-peer research in universities regards creating better, faster Distributed Hash Tables, or DHTs for short. Typically, for N nodes on an overlay network connected by a DHT, insertion and queries come at log(N) cost. MIT has one of the best, called Chord. Some DHTs are very fragile and their routing topology can "break" when under extreme churn (when a flash of nodes suddenly join or leave the network), or malicious nodes attempt to manipulate other nodes' routing tables by creating fake identities (see the Sybil attack) -- Chord has been shown to be very resistant to both. Other notables are Kademlia from NYU (which is under the hood of eMule), and Pastry from Rice (Microsoft collaborated).
MIT has done some pioneering research in DHTs, and they have a lot of great minds on it. I'm making my own peer-to-peer program (hopefully it will be ready in a few months) and it will incorporate quite a few of the ideas they've developed. One of their ideas that I find particularly interesting (and I think should be incorporated into BitTorrent, because it seems like the perfect application) is called Vivaldi. You can read for yourself on how it works, but when applying it to BitTorrent, basicially the tracker would give you peers it thinks you have a low ping time to, as opposed to a random list which may be sub-optimal.
They're also involved in Project IRIS, which aims to develop a decentralized Internet infrastructure using all the latest DHT technology. It's funded indirectly through -- gasp -- the government via the NSF.
So yeah, don't just think that MIT is jumping on the bandwagon. They've been on the bleeding edge for some time.
- shadowmatter
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.
This is a fallacy you don't even need to be a PhD to figure out (which is lucky for me). To each person, their social network might appear to be a hierarchical system with them at the top, but that is only because of their rather limited scope, and some helping of selfishness that all of us carry at least a bit of. However all these little social networks are just pieces of the real "Social Network" sitting out there.
If you know no one, it's really hard to get anything done in this world. The old saw of, "It's not what you know, it's who you know," is truer than many people would like to believe. I route my friends to people and places I know that have what they want or need, exactly like a node on a p2p network does. Me and the people I know are just a small chunk of the Social Network that humanity has built and made itself a part of for the last...gods how long has humanity been around? It's so big it's hard to get a grasp on it. Most people just see themselves and those they know and ignore everything and everyone else, most of the time out of necessity. It's hard enough to cope with the immediate for the vast majority of people out there. Taking the time to look at all the connections and build the big picture is just not something that's worthwhile to most people, but that doesn't mean it's not there if they're not aware of it.
Central control is not the way humanity, left to it's own devices, organizes itself. Centralized systems try to limit the natural peering we do to focus people for some particular end (closed countries and economies, corporate officers determining the company direction, jobs period limit us and what we do and who we talk to) and it's neither good or bad. Unrestricted peering is an unfocused haze of not much getting done. People spend a lot of time dealing with things that don't further any specific agenda. Focus requires limits on what we do, and not much good has happened in this world without a lot of people focused on it.
However, even then the most it can do is limit it. Sometimes to a very strong degree (like North Korea) but even then the peering happens and communication and commerce happens outside that central control. People get smuggled out of North Korea to freedom in South Korea despite the efforts of the most draconian regime on the planet. People get smuggled into Western nations as slaves (for sex, sweatshop work, or whatnot) despite the abolishment of slavery, tough laws, and seemingly almost universal abhorrence of the practice. If centralized control was the way people actually worked, this kind of stuff would be pretty much impossible.
The point Negroponte was making was that p2p
has not yet achieved its potential. You must
admit that after the boom in filesharing,
new applications of peer-oriented network
protocols dropped off dramatically. But the
economies and liberties enabled by p2p have
not yet begun to emerge in many areas where
they can be applied to good effect.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Negroponte is a windbag. Every one of his "endpaper" essays for Wired mag in the bubble was wrong, or superfluously obvious. Then his cashin _Being Digital_, retreading the most obvious. So maybe he's right about P2P - but by the time he's praising it, it's no longer "News" to nerds.
--
make install -not war
Blockquoth the parent:
The Catholic Church gave us hierarchical command structures? Umm, then what happened during those 4,000 years of human civilization before the birth of Christ?