One Laptop Per Child Talks

In February 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference annual event, where leading thinkers and doers gather for inspiration.

Also in attendance was Wil Shipley, founder and CEO of Delicious Monster who has a humoours introduction to Negroponte on the flight in.

Negroponte's presentation video:

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's speech:

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Ted talks are recorded live at the TED conference and produced with WNYC New York public radio. This episode features Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Hundred Dollar Laptop Initiative. TED talks are made possible through the support of BMW, where ideas are everything. Here's Nicholas Negroponte.

(applause)

Nicholas Negroponte: I'm not sure why I'm the patron saint, and I was also trying to figure out why I was in the history section. It's because of age. I've been at MIT for 44 years. I knew Ricky Werman or I've known Ricky Werman for 40 years. I went to TED one, there's only one other person here I think who did that. There's a likeness between what I did at TED one in the early 80s and what I am going to do today and that is talk about something I'm doing. All of the other TEDs, and I went to them all under Ricky's regime, I talked about what the Media Lab was doing, which today has almost 500 people in it. And if you read the press, it actually last week said I quit the media lab. I didn't quit the media lab, I stepped down as chairman, which is kind of a ridiculous title. But some someone else has taken it on, and one of the things that you can do as a professor is you stay on as a professor.

I will now do for the rest of my life the one laptop per child which I have sort have been doing for a year and a half anyway. So I'm going to tell you about this, use my 18 minutes to tell you why I'm doing it, how we're doing it and what we are doing. At some point I will even pass around what the hundred-dollar laptop might be like. I was asked by Chris to talk about some of the big issues so I thought I would talk about the three that at least drove me to do this. The first is pretty obvious. It's amazing when you meet a head of state and you say what is your most precious natural resource they will not say children at first, and then when you say children they will pretty quickly agree with you. So that isn't very hard. Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they include education, sometimes can be just education, and can never be without some element of education. So that's certainly part of it. The third is a little less obvious. That is that we all in this room learned how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something or be able to stand up and reach it. Whereas at about the age six, we were told to stop learning that way, and that all learning from then on would happen from teaching, whether it's people standing up like I'm doing now, or through a book or something. But it was really through teaching.

One of the things in general that computers have provided to learning is that it now includes a kind of learning which is a little bit more like walking and talking in the sense that a lot of it is driven by the learner himself or herself. So with those as the principles, some of you may know Seymour Papert, this is back in 1982 when we were working in Senegal, because many people think the one hundred dollar laptop just happened a year ago or two years ago. This actually has gone back a long time, in fact back to the 60s, here we're in the 80s, Steve Jobs had given us some laptops we were in Senegal, it didn't scale but it at least was bringing computers to developing countries and learning pretty quickly that these kids, even though English wasn't their language, Latin alphabet barely was their language. But they could just swim like fish, they could play these like pianos. A little more recently I got involved personally. These are two anecdotes. One was in Cambodia in a village that has no electricity, no water, no water, no telephone, but has broadband internet now. These kids, their first English word is Google. They only know Skype. They've never heard of telephony, they just use Skype. They go home at night, they have a broadband connection in a hut that doesn't have electricity. The parents love it because when they open up the laptop it's the brightest light source in the house.

In parallel with this, Seymour Papert got the governor of Maine to legislate One Laptop Per Child in the year 2002. Now at the time I think it's fair to say that 80% of the teachers were apprehensive. Really they were actually against it. They really preferred that the money would be used for higher salaries, better schools, whatever. Now, three and a half years later, guess what? They're reporting five things: drop of truancy to almost zero, attending parent teacher meetings which nobody did and now almost everyone does, drop in discipline problems, increase in student participation, teachers are now saying it's kind of fun to teach, the kids are engaged. They have laptops. The fifth, which interests me the most, is that the servers have to be turned off at certain times at night because the teachers are getting too much email from the kids asking them for help.

So when you see that kind of thing, this is not something you have to test, the days of pilot projects are over. When people say "Well, we'd like to do three or four thousand in our country to see how it works, screw you, go to the back of the line and someone else will do it. Then when you figure out that this works then you can join as well. So One Laptop Per Child was formed about a year and a half ago. It's a non-profit association. It raised about 20 million dollars to do the engineering to just get this built and then have it produced afterwards.

Scale is truly important. It's not important because you can buy components at a lower price, ok? It's because you can go to a manufacturer, and I will leave the name out, but we wanted a small display, doesn't have to have perfect color uniformity, can even have a pixel or two missing, it doesn't have to be that bright. This particular manufacturer said we are not interested in that. We are interested in the living room, we're interested in perfect color uniformity, we're interested in big displays, bright displays, and you're not part of our strategic plan. And I said well, that's too bad because we need a hundred million units a year. They said oh, well maybe we could become part of your strategic plan. That's why scale counts. That's why we will not launch this without five to ten million units in the first run. The idea is to launch with enough scale that the scale itself helps bring the price down, and that's why I said seven to ten million here.

We are doing it without a sales and marketing team. We will do it by going to seven large countries and getting them to agree and launch it and the others can follow. We have partners; it's not hard to guess Google would be one. The others are all pending.

Once people start looking at this, they say ah, this is a laptop project. No, it's not a laptop project. It's an education project. The fun part, and I'm quite focused on it, I tell people I used to be a light bulb but now I'm a laser. I'm just going to get that thing built. It turns out its not so hard. Because laptop economics are the following: sixty percent of the cost of your laptop is sale, marketing, distribution and profit. We have none of those. None of those figure into our cost because first of all we sell it at cost and the governments distribute it, it gets distributed to the school system like a textbook. So that piece disappears. Then you have display and everything else. Now the display on your laptop costs in rough numbers, ten dollars a diagonal inch. Now that can drop to eight, it can drop to seven. It's not going to drop to two or one and a half unless we do some pretty clever things.

It's the rest of that little brown box that is pretty fascinating. Because the rest of your laptop is devoted to itself. It's a little bit like an obese person having to use most of their energy to move their obesity. We have a situation today which is incredible. I've been using laptops since their inception. My laptop runs slower, less reliably and less pleasantly than it ever has before. This year is worse. People clap sometimes you even get standing ovations, and I say what the hell is wrong with you? Why are we all sitting there? Somebody, to remain nameless, called our laptop a gadget recently. And I said God, our laptop is going to go like a bat out of hell. When you open it up, it's going to go BING, it will be on. You'll use it and it will be just like it was in 1985 when you bought an apple Macintosh 512, it worked really well. We've been going steadily downhill.

The two pieces that are notable, is it will be a mesh network, so when the kids open up their laptops, they all become a network and just need one or two points of back haul. You can serve a couple of thousand kids with two megabits. You really can bring into a village and the villages can connect themselves, and you really can do it quite well. The idea is to have a display that both works outdoors, isn't it fun using your cell phone outdoors in the sunlight? But you can't see it. And one of the reasons you can't see it is because it's backlit most of the time in most cell phones. Now, what we are doing is one that will be both backlit and front lit. Whether you manually switch it or do it in software is to be seen. When it's backlit it's color, when it's front lit, it's black and white at three times the resolution.

Is it all worked out? No, that's why a lot of our people are more or less living in Taiwan right now. In about 30 days we will know for sure whether this works. The idea was that it would be not only a laptop but that it would transform into an electronic book. So it's sort of an electronic book, this is where when you go outside it's in black and white. The games buttons are missing. But it will be also a games machine, book machine, set it up this way and it's a television set, etcetera, etcetera.

Ok, seven countries. It's kind of agonizing because a lot of people say lets do it at the state level, because of course states are more nimble than the feds just because of size. Yet we can't. We are really dealing with the federal government. We are really dealing with ministries of education. If you look at governments around the world, ministries of education tend to be the most conservative, and also the ones that have huge payrolls, everybody thinks they know about education, a lot of culture is built into it as well, it's really hard. It's certainly the hard road. If you look at the countries, they are pretty geo-cultural distributed. Have they all agreed? No, not completely. Probably Thailand, Brazil and Nigeria are the three that are the most active and most agreed. We are purposefully not signing anything with anybody until we actually have the working ones. Since I visit every one of those countries within at least every three months I'm going around the world every three weeks.

When everyone says its a hundred dollar laptop, you can't do it. Guess what, we're not. We're coming in probably at a hundred and thirty five and then drift down. That's very important. So many things hit the market at a price and then kind of drift up. It's kind of the loss leader and then as soon as it looks interesting it can't be afforded or it can't be scaled out. So we're targeting fifty dollars in 2010.

The gray market is a big issue. One of the ways, just one, but one of the ways to help in the case of the gray market is to make something that is so utterly unique it's a little bit like the fact that automobiles are stolen every day in the United States, not one single post office truck is stolen, OK? Why? Because there's no market for post office trucks. It looks like a post office truck. You can spray paint it, you can do anything you want. I just learned recently in South Africa no white Volvos are stolen. Period. None. Zero. So we want to make it very much like a white Volvo. Each government has a task force. This perhaps is less interesting but we are trying to get the governments to all work together and it's not easy. The economics of this is to start with a federal government, and then later to go to other sort of subsequently go to, whether it's child to child funding, so a child in this country buys one for a child in the developing world, maybe the same gender and the same age. Or an Uncle gives a Niece or a Nephew that as a birthday present. There are all sorts of things that will happen and it will be very, very exciting.

Everybody says well, I say it's and education project. Are we providing the software. The answer is the system certainly has software, but no, we are not providing the educational content. That is really done in the countries. We are certainly constructionists and we believe in learning by doing and everything from Logo, which was started in 1968 to more modern things like Scratch, if you've ever even heard of it, are very much a part of it. That's the rollout. Are we dreaming? Is this real? It actually is real. The only criticism, and people really don't want to criticize this because it is a humanitarian effort, it is a non-profit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid actually. But the one thing that people could criticize was "great idea, but these guys can't do it." That could either mean these guys, professors and so on couldn't do it, or that it's not possible. Well on December 12, a company called Quanta agreed to build it, and since they make about one third of all the laptops on the planet today, that question disappeared.

So it's not a matter of if it's going to happen. It is going to happen. if it comes out at 138 dollars, so what. If it comes out six month late, so what. That's a pretty soft landing. Thank you.

(applause)

Announcer: That was Nicholas Negropointe recorded at the TED conference in February 2006. TED talks are produced by WNYC New York public radio. TED talks are made possible in part by the support of BMW where ideas are everything. For more information on TED, visit TED.com.