One Laptop Per Child Talks

Negroponte at Forrester

In November 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at Forrester's Consumer Forum outlining OLPC's progress, the obstacles they've faced, and the promise of connecting children all over the world.

The transcript of Negroponte's speech:

Intro: One Laptop Per Child is the non-profit organization shared by Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte is on leave of absence from MIT to help the organization redesign the laptop computer and make the machines available to children in impoverished countries around the world. Negroponte spoke to the Forrester Consumer Forum on October 25th about using technology to empower the masses. His speech was followed by a Q&A conducted by Forrester Vice President Josh Bernoff.

Speaker: Thank you very much. Um, I'm going to use about 15 minutes to uh, describe the project and then I gather there's a Q&A session, um, and the Q&A session to me is the most important part. So for these 15 minutes, which is in some sense the entertainment portion of your day because it will not relate directly to what you're doing but it certainly will relate to the lives of your children and your grandchildren.

And if you think of any big problem, think of ones that are so big we don't even do anything except talk about them as individuals and often as organizations, um, whether it's something like peace or something like eliminating poverty or saving the environment or doing those big things. Whatever the solutions, and there's always an "s," may be, they include education, in some cases it can be done just with education, and in no case that I've ever come across can it be done without some element of education. And if you take that as a given, and then you look at the world, there are about 1.2 billion children in what we call primary and secondary schools.

Roughly 50% of them do not have electricity, roughly 50% and not exactly the same ones, but very, very much overlapping um, live in rural remote parts of the world. Uh, it might interest you that almost 50% of them are in China and India alone. Uh there's some startling facts, and if you look at the world and say "Well, what if we could provide to those children what we have enjoyed in Europe, the United States, Japan, Korea, so on, what could we do to make that happen?" Now some people will tell you that the thing to do is to train teachers, to build schools, to make curricula better, to make sort of the current education system better, and in no way, for those of you who are blogging at the moment please underline this, in no way are we saying don't do that, stop doing that, teachers aren't important, schools aren't good.

What we're saying is that that method like building roads, pouring concrete, and doing all of those things is going to take a very long time. It's going to take years and years. So is there something we can do in the meantime, something to, in fact, leverage the children themselves? That doesn't mean every child is an Abraham Lincoln, it doesn't mean that, you know, you just put it on autopilot and you send laptops to kids in the jungle and it happens by itself. But is there a way of thinking not about learning as it comes from teaching, but learning as it comes from the way most of you have learned most of the things you know. In fact, everybody in this room learned how to walk, learned how to talk, and learned a great deal of the common sense you currently have without a walking teacher, without a talking teacher, and without somebody who taught you about common sense.

How did you learn those things? You learned them by interacting with the environment. As a young baby it was a real reward for the investment that you made to learn how to talk because you could get something, learn how to walk because you could stand up and reach it, and that whole very interactive process where you, in fact, get something very immediately by learning and interacting and so on, comes to a more or less abrupt halt at the age of 6. When you're told "Go to school," and for the next 12 years if you're really lucky actually, but for the next 12 years you will be learning by being taught by people like me, standing in front of a room, or books, but the process is teaching. Now, that's ok, and again, please, I'm not saying don't do that, I'm saying that that's one form of learning.

That the other forms of learning may be the ones we have to bring to the rescue and use and that's why One Laptop Per Child got started. And we have actually adopted a way of doing it that is one that is very design-centric in the following sense: there are two ways to make something inexpensive, be it a laptop or a cell phone, or whatever. You can take cheap components, cheap design, cheap labor, and cheap everything, and slap them together and make a cheap machine. And I really mean cheap in the pejorative sense of the word. Or, you can do something totally different and that is have a very large scale highly integrated process where you basically pour chemicals into one end of a factory and outspew these ultra-modern, slick, iPod-like laptops at a very low cost. And we have clearly gone the latter. So, let me take you through some slides very quickly.

Um, I put this as the cover page because that image is 1982, uh, I started working with computers and children through the influence of a man named Seymore Papert. Uh, if you haven't read his works you should, that's P as in Peter, A, P as in Peter again, E, R, T as in Thomas. Um, Seymour is alive and well, he's at the doorstep of 80, he's probably the deepest thinker alive about how children learn. He was very much, and still is, at the media lab, he was Jean Piaget's last active associate when Jean Piaget was alive and practicing in Geneva in the 50s and early 60s. Um, Seymour and I did this project in 1982 Senegal before the IBM PC was released in Europe. Steve Jobs gave us about 100, maybe even 200, Apple IIs. These kids in that particular school, um, had more computing power than the Senegalese government. We had work in Pakistan, Columbia; we've been doing a lot of this. Seymour had done a lot of it before in New York City. He learned something very simple, and that is the children who write computer programs come the closest we can come to thinking about thinking. And what those children are doing when they write a program to draw a circle, they learn about circle-ness, if you will, because they are teaching a program how to do it, and then the process of debugging and I can go on and on and on. Um, I've sort of said this so I won't uh, dwell on the slide, um, there's Seymour 25 years ago, a different school, a little richer.

Uh, Costa Rica started in '88, Costas Arias was running for president, it was on his platform. This is in the 90s in Kashmir, both the Indian and the Pakistani side, we connected schools with WiMax, it wasn't called WiMax at the time, it wasn't even called WiFi at the time. Um, and we thought that the problem was connectivity. I truly believe that's not the problem anymore because there's WiMax, WiFi, 3G, and I can go on, I can change it, we can move it faster, we can change the regulatory regimes, but it's elastic at least. If I bring 2 Mb, in fact you might see a satellite dish in the background there, that satellite dish has 1 Mb down and half a Mb back, that can serve 30 kids, 40 kids, 50 kids, 5 more kids come, it doesn't matter, it's elastic, it works. If you believe in One Laptop Per Child as we do, it's not one cell phone per child, it's not one desktop per child, it's one laptop for a very specific reason. It has to be a seamless part of their lives.

They have to bring it back and forth like they would a book, and we should want them to use it for music, movies, instant messaging, for all of the things that make up their life and play and work. We want to destroy, if you will, the boundaries saying, "This is school, and this is fun," or "this is home," or "this is weekend, this is weekday, and this is holiday." It's very…it's to do for the children what's probably happened in all of your lives, that there is a seamlessness. So, this picture was very influential, um, they actually built that school, um, and it was some work that I was doing charitably. Uh, my son, my wife, a lot of people were involved in this. We sent uh, laptops up to this village, and this was in the start of 1999. And it was a little accidental, and I don't want to pretend otherwise.

Kids here, and by the way the average income in this village is $47 per year. I'm not making a voice error there, it's per year, that's less than $4 per month. Um, no electricity no water, no... no nothing, and now there are 5 villages and two of them don't even have a road still, but they've got pretty broadband internet access, WiFi, in the village, um, a generator at the school that charges the laptops, kids take them home at night and as long as the battery lasts they're connected. Parents love it because it's the brightest light source in the house. It's pretty good both literally and metaphorically. In parallel to this the Governor of Maine legislated One Laptop Per Child 2002, it's in its 4th year at the moment, and we can't find a teacher who doesn't like it whereas 80% of them were apprehensive to start. So what did we do? We created this nonprofit, our website is pretty expensive, it's laptop.org if you want to go look at it, um, raised the funding to do something that has scale. Now scale is absolutely critical. Why do you need scale?

Well, one answer is you need scale because you can get components cheaply, that'll be embedded in this laptop that's going to use the process I mentioned in the first place. Yes, that's true but that's not the important one. The important reason for scale I'll illustrate by example. At the beginning of this project I went to a company I will not name, the CEO, and said, "We need a small display, doesn't have to be that bright, doesn't need perfect color uniformity, it can even have a few pixel defects. Uh, but it's got to be very inexpensive." And he said, "Nicholas, you know, our corporate strategy is to make large displays, very bright, perfect color uniformity, zero pixel defects, so clearly, our corporate strategy is such that we just can't help you. It's just at odds with what you're doing." And I said, "Well, that's a shame because I need 100 million units a year." And he said, "Well, let's see. Maybe we can change our corporate strategy." Ok. That's why you need scale. You need scale to change corporate strategy.

Ok? When we started this, we were told by companies that it was crazy, the chairman of Intel called it a gadget, and what happens a month later? They offer a product that is near, I won't say identical, but is very much competitive with the idea. And you know what? That's terrific. That's the best thing and when I tell people that I'll probably say "You know, that's one of our biggest achievements, because if you can get other people to copy a, we're nonprofit, we're not in the laptop business, our business is to get the maximum number of laptops, connected laptops, into the hands of kids. And that's one way to do it, is to get other people to do it as well." Um, I've sworn to myself that this will be the last meeting where I bring a model. I was at the factory last week and the assembly line starts rolling at the end of next week. So we're really close. Uh, this was a little less than a year ago when Kofi Annan is your partner you get kind of a lot of press. Uh, this particular laptop was the one we showed in November. It's kind of charming, I look at the slide with a little embarrassment today, but this particular laptop, on November 17 of last year really launched the project and everybody remembered the pencil yellow crank. Everybody did. And even today we get e-mail from people saying "Where's the crank? The crank's not on your machine anymore."

Well it is on our machines, it just happens to be on the AC adaptor, it's in a more intelligent place. But being in the wrong place on this image was just fine because people realized there's something different about this laptop, and this laptop is indeed very different. Um, and it, and in fact, it's not a crippled machine at all, we get some people who said, "Well gee, get a real computer." Haha, hello, this is going to work faster than yours, its going to be instant on, instant off, and it's going to run like a bat out of hell, ok. Why? Because you know, the fat lady can't sing anymore, and the reason is when somebody is really, really fat they are using all their muscle to move their fat. That's what's happened with most software. I'm not picking on one company. Almost every piece of software, the new release is distinctly worse than the one previous because it's slower, it's got features you don't want, and the ones you got to know are gone, ok?

So, we're going on a diet, we're using Linux, um, but the key things are the three, in bold, very low power, less than 2 watts is out average which is important. Your laptop runs between 25 and 45 watts. That's heavy duty. Ok. So we're down to about one-tenth or less of the power. Um, it's a mesh network which means that the laptops themselves make the network, you're not looking for hot spots or something, in fact when the laptop's closed, it's still on as a router. Every laptop is a router even when it's closed. And they make that mesh network. And the dual mode display, um, is just, is just fantastic. Uh, Jeff Besos came to see it about 10 days ago and I think we knocked his socks off.

Uh, and a lot of people have seen it and its real, it works, in both transmission mode, which is what you're accustomed to in laptops and dvds, and it works in reflective mode which means you can take it out in the sunlight and its what's sometimes called a transreflective display. And it's a very low cost one. Um, it works in both black and white and color, so in black and white you get over 200 point dpi, dots per inch, and in color the reason you see two numbers is that each pixel is an active pixel, hence you, its kind of hard to say what's the resolution of color, but at minimum its 800 x 600, and actually much higher, and it's really pretty good. That's, that's the laptop, as I said, I promised myself not to come with models, um, but it… Story of my life is after this presentation I go to the airport to go to Korea, so its not as If I'm going to be milling around afterwards, but this gives you a sense of its size and so on, it's designed so it has absolutely no holes or edges, of course I'm lying, there's one for the AC adaptor. But it's been designed very carefully, it turns into an eBook, and has a camera and all of that stuff. The problem is, I'm so excited about the laptop, and it's as cute as hell actually, the problem is that people here might sidle in and say "They're making a laptop, they're in the laptop business."

So bloggers, please, please yes, I am excited, there are about 3 or 4 technical breakthroughs, there is a saying that when you do a project you're only allowed one or two miracles, usually one miracle per project, we're counting on about 10, and uh, I will admit that very, very quickly. Um, hand power, it's not on the machine anymore, there's a pedal a crank and a pull cord. This one, even though it's a little counterintuitive it's the best. You can generate, if you're a well nourished 12 year old, you can generate about 15, 16 watts for maybe 3 or 4 minutes. So if we can get a one to 10 ratio, for one minute of cranking or pulling, you get 10 minutes of laptop use, that's pretty, that's pretty good. I mean, we think of that as kind of the minimum. Clearly if you start using bicycles and pedals you can do a lot better. There's about a 10 to one difference between your legs and your upper body. But limiting yourself to the upper body, those kinds of numbers.

This particular one is kind of cute because it auto adjusts itself, so if the kid is weaker, it actually is easier to pull. And if it feels it is being pulled too easily it gets harder and generates more power, and if you have a longer, you know, reach, you're a bigger person, it will let out more strings. So this under $10 device is unto itself a kind of interesting piece of invention and technology. Um, countries, one quick word about how we're launching it, everything we believe is kind of bottoms-up do this and sort of do it that way, but keep in mind that we need the scale to launch, sort of the 5 million machines just to pop out of the box, this doesn't go as a marketing experiment where you release a few hundred thousand and try them then another million and then build a market, and then do that. You know, we don't even think of it that way. If there is something similar to sales and marketing in our organization, you're looking at it, ok. Here it is. The entire sales and marketing department is standing on stage, ok.

We have 250 people working in this project around the world. The full-time equivalence is probably much larger. It probably is much larger if you count the government groups set up in Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand, so on and so forth. It's probably 1,000 people. But just in terms of who's in the execution path, there are about 250 people, 150 of them are in Taiwan at the moment, the rest are scattered around the world. We're launching by going to countries that are big, like Brazil, like Thailand, like Nigeria, and saying "Look, do a million units in the first year, pop it out of the box, cluster them, we'll help you do it, that gets it launched, then the UN, particularly the UN DP helps us launch it in all the other countries. We made one exception recently, it got a lot of press, we went to a smaller country, Libya, and the interesting thing about Libya is that it's small but its also one that can afford to do every child which al-Gaddafi has agreed to do. So Libya will do every child in Libya within 12 months after launch.

That's going to be spectacular because you suddenly have every child in the nation with a laptop. Not just the 7th graders in Maine or a school here or a school here, but an entire nation. So that for us is different, but is really very exciting. If there's anybody in this room who has use for the caps lock key, please send me e-mail, ok? Or go to out website. I only know of it as something we accidentally hit and have to go back and correct. And whoever put it just above the shift key is the most perverted person I have met. Ok. Now, so, there may be no results from One Laptop Per Child, but at least we'll get rid of the caps lock key. Thank you. Host: So, there's one question that's been on my mind since I learned about this project and what you're trying to do. Which is a harder problem to solve, engineering or politics? Speaker: Oh, um I'm sure it's the latter. But uh, we do as little of that as possible. Notice our ratio is one to 250 in terms of the energy we're spending on the politics of it. Uh, one thing about politics is you can only deal with the Head of State. And when other people contact me we say "Sorry, you know, if your Head of State is interested we'll talk to you." And the reason isn't arrogance; the reason is to get buy-in from the Head of State. Because you're going to have to get to him eventually, might as well start at the top. Well not only that, you go through a very time consuming process of, excuse my language, but of people who are covering their ass, ok? Or it's their bureaucratic job in some sense to take the least risk possible. A bureaucrat is the most unrisk-prone person you can be. The Head of State will look at it very, very differently and it also depends if they're coming up for election, whether they're there through other means, whether they're about to start, whether they're, just a lot of personal things. Host: So I mean, you know, we're talking about Muammar al-Gaddafi here, you know, he's been demonized for you know, running a repressive state and yet you sat across from him and were able to do this. Tell me about what it takes to get Muammar al-Gaddafi to say, "Every child in my, in my uh country is going to have a laptop." Speaker: Well first of all, they asked us. We didn't ask them. Uh, and- Host: You don't say no to anybody. Speaker: Um, I say no to small countries. We get, a lot of small countries at the Head of State level, have asked us and Rwanda's one, Panama's one, Dominican Republic's one, uh, Ethiopia's one, I can go through lists. Now Ethiopia's big and we will probably do Ethiopia, I'll go there shortly. But if it's a very small country, um, it doesn't help us in the launch. But we include them in whatever way we can, and we have a distribution model, because we're supply limited. Uh, so we will include them, get machines, and you'll see machines in Panama, you'll see machines in Guatemala, and so on. Host: But al-Gaddafi, I mean, you said he came to you. What's it like to deal with Muammar al-Gaddafi about a challenge like this? Speaker: Well, first of all, you're doing it in the middle of the desert at 50 degrees centigrade uh, in his tent, ok. So that unto itself is pretty fascinating ok. Um, also fascinating to me is that he is a very humble man. Uh, he is a person with extraordinary physical presence; he's a couple years older than I am, in great physical shape, very impressive physically, sits down, and believe it or not, listens.

And because if the regime, and most Americans don't know a thing about it, most Americans still remember him as a terrorist, uh, this is a man who se succession will not be his children. He's set up what he considers is the perfect democracy and the succession will not be one where you anoint somebody. So he's really interested in education. He's really interested in opening up the country, and he's particularly interested in quite frankly changing his image here because he has changed. Now I'm not part of his political campaign but clearly he's doing this for both the expression and to basically if you will, make a statement to Africa because in the $250 million agreement we have, um that will include for at least two other countries in Africa, maybe more. So he sees himself as an African leader, not as a, really a, integral part of the Arab world. Host: So we're going to get to host questions in a minute but there's definitely one thing I want to hear about. Um, Bill Gates is, I'm sure you know, got quoted about this saying the last thing he wanted before shared use computers is to have something without a hard disk and with a tiny little screen and he's generally poo-pooed the device. Now uh, I look at this and if I were Microsoft I'd be terrified because you say you've taken all the bloat out of this, instant on and an underpowered machine. Now, maybe this isn't the right machine for me right now on my desk, but I'm sure if your job is to get this to as many people as possible you'd license it, license the design to somebody who wants to make a corporate version for a little bit more than $100 but a little bit less than $1000, that's sort of challenging. I mean, do you think Microsoft should be scared of this? Speaker: Well, first of all, read your first sentence again. Host: About what he said? Speaker: Yeah Host: At least well, I took out the most negative parts. Speaker: Yeah, read, read it. Host: He said the last thing you'd want for a shared use computer is to be something without a hard drive. Speaker: Ok. The last thing you'd want for a shared use computer. Huh? This is One Laptop Per Child. Ok? Next part of the sentence? Host: With a tiny little screen. Speaker: With a tiny little screen. This is a half inch bigger than origami, better screen, double the resolution. Huh? Next sentence? Host: Uh, sorry, that's all I've got. Speaker: Ok. Host: Hey, well, my question is, is there a version of this that all of us will be using a year from now, or 10 years from now. Speaker: It's the most frequently asked question that we get, and a version of it is why aren't we doing schools in the United States and Europe. Um, what we're going to do is the following, and Jeff Besos, bless his heart, and he's got wonderful creativity for these sorts of jingles, he said, "You know Nick, there's this expression 'buy one and get two?'" he said, "you've got to have a jingle that says 'buy two and get one.'" Bingo. 100% margin. So we will release it in the United States and Europe on a buy two and get one basis, where you pay whatever it is, $300 for it, and what you're doing is you're buying one or more for a kid in Africa, and you walk around with this it'll be like a yellow bracelet, it'll be an expression, it'll actually say that. Host: So uh, let's take a question from the audience. Audience: Hello, its Bill Band I'm with the business process and applications team at Forrester. I have a two-part question from the audience. The first part of the question is, is there any way for companies in this room to become usefully involved in your project at this stage, and the second part is, is there a way for companies to access the design, lessons learned and process that you developed during this project? Speaker: Um, the answer is a big uppercase yes. To both of those. Host: Without the caps lock. Speaker: Without the caps lock, yes. You're good, that's good. Maybe we found a use for the caps lock, to write yes. Uppercase is volume, I get it. Um, the first, the answer to the first one is really simple. Send me e-mail, personally. My e-mail address is trivial to remember, just the initials n n, at MIT dot edu. And I promise you an answer. Um, and nn.edu will also, well it depends who asks. If you happen to be a hitech company it's one answer, if you're McDonalds it's another answer, if you're Pepsi it's another answer, there's a lot of different answers, so that's the way to get an answer. And learning stuff you know, please, please go to laptop.org, it's a wiki, it's updated every few hours, we put everything out there.

In fact I was reading there last night a criticism on a website that said, "Geez, these guys changed the name," because we were struggling what do you call the laptop, you know, what is it for a name. We've been, and of course we, we put this out on the wiki like we do everything, out designs, our engineering, our whole thing's out there. And in fact we will give it away, we won't license it, we'll give it away to people to make it, if that's going to get it to the kids.

Will we give it to you to make for you know, a military? No, but we'll give it to you if you want to make some for kids. Doesn't really work to give it licensing, you need this factory where you pour the chemicals in one end and out comes, you need the scale. But we're completely open and as a consequence, I hope people learn from it because there are things we make, mistakes we make, boy do we broadcast them. And so uh, I hope people can learn from that. For me, the biggest lesson has been that, and I've always known this stuff, I've always operated this way, but I never knew the extent, and that is the word impossible should sort of be removed from the English language, it should be removed from your vocabulary at least, because a lot of things that look impossible really aren't. Media lab made its entire reputation and sort of did everything that way.

What I found which is different in One Laptop Per Child is that there's been such a swing of goodwill and enthusiasm from apprehension and sort of reservation or this isn't really, people are now coming to us and saying, "Hey, you know, stop being so conservative. You guys can you know, this is really possible." And we're getting offers from companies that, that it isn't that they're losing money on it, but they're coming up and contributing ideas that really have surprised me, the degree to which now we have people telling us to be you know, wilder and try harder and new things because we're being told that sometimes we're accepting the word impossible. Host: So let me just make one thing clear here, are you patenting portions of this? Speaker: We patent as fast and as much as we can. Host: Ok. Speaker: Per day. And the reason is not to license it, the reason is so that we can make sure we can use it. If you don't patent it somebody else might and then say we can't use it, so we patent galore. And uh, you know I just can't get people to sign just, put out the disclosure as fast as… Host: And then, if I want to license one of our patents, do we have to pay for that or is that for free? Speaker: Depends who you are. And it depends what you want. I mean, just to put this in context, the display manufacturer is building a fab. We will use 50% of the capacity of the fab for the display for this machine. That fab costs $2 billion. Now, that's pretty serious money. Are we going to give you, you, or somebody in this room licenses to the display patents? No. That fab has to be amortized. Without that fab we can't make it. So we are business savvy. And that is part of the process. So some things we have to keep and make sure we patent so we can use them but also to get this executed and out there. Host: So let me take one more question from the audience, last question. Audience: Yeah, this question is kind of two questions, they go together. The first really is what are the killer applications on this device and the second which is related to it is why is this device better than a cell phone in these markets? Speaker: Um, I like it when the last questions are easy. Um, the killer app is certainly communications child to child, peer to peer, instant messaging, connectivity, being part of a group, our user interface is not a desktop, our kids are not office workers, it will not look like Windows, or Macintosh, it's a very buddy list, group oriented, web mesh network system.

Now below it there is the OS that you can access, you don't have to buy into our user interface, but our user interface is much more like a buddy list on a phone system, and sort of cell phones and the way kids connect, uh, and share. So we think of the kids as creators not recipients. We think of them as makers of things. So the applications when you actually get it and the software that's on it which can be deleted pretty quickly is constructionist software to make music, to make things. So making is a key word, sharing is a key word, um, that's very, very much how that works. The cell phone, now just for full disclosure, um I'm on the board of directors at Mororola, I know the cell phone business. I'm quite involved with it. It isn't an alternative, why paint, I mean painting it as an either or is just, quite frankly, stupid. They don't relate to each other, ok.

And I'll say, I'll tell you, first of all, books have a size for a reason. An atlas is a bigger physical page than a novel for a reason. Textbooks tend to be bigger than literary works for a reason, ok. The reason has to do with vision and so on, browsing, etcetera. So to suggest a cell phone might be the, so then somebody says "Well wait a minute, take that cell phone and you connect it to your TV set." Hello? Connected to the TV set? A. My kids don't have TVs. B. When they have TVs, imagine, just imagine a kid going home and saying "Mom, Dad, I need to connect to the TV." I'm not talking about during the World Cup or soap operas. I'm talking about just in general. And then these families often have seven kids. Do they have seven TVs? No, but they'll have seven laptops. So it's, it's the cell phone is so ludicrous that I don't even, it's a great last question, because it's truly, it's not even it's not related. I mean, sure you know, you could also have a bicycle. Host: Maybe if, maybe if we put that caps lock key on the cell phone it could do many of these things. But be careful, I'm on the Motorola board, I want you to buy cell phones, ok? That's all we have time for, thank you very much. It was fascinating talking to you.