One Laptop Per Child Talks

In May 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) about One Laptop Per Child during his keynote speech.

Nicholas Negroponte's presentation video:

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's speech:

(music in the background)Nicholas Negroponte: (walks on stage) (laughs) OK. OK, now we're really going to talk about MIT.
I'm going to use the few minutes I have to tell you what we're doing, which is called One Laptop Per Child. And this is a project that started about thirty years ago. So let me go to the first slide which amongst other things welcomes Intel to the low-cost laptop world.

The reason we started One Laptop Per Child was to address: " How do you get to every child on the planet a laptop and access to the internet?". And I can't tell you how many times, cause I've spent about a third or more of my life now in the developing world. You go to a place and it may not even be accessible by automobiles. You may even have to walk some of it to get there. You find an entrepreneurial person in the school systems and never be without some component that includes education.

And if you look around the planet, there are about a billion kids. Half a billion kids live in rural areas and many of that half are in such poor conditions that it's not just that the village that's poor, but it also means the teachers themselves may have a sixth grade education. They could be loving, they could be caring, they could sing songs, they can discipline. They can do all of those things, but you can't just teach teachers. You can't solve the worlds problems by building more schools and teaching more teachers because it's going to take forever. You've got to leverage the children.

Children are absolutely extraordinary at learning. You take any child, from any part of the world and you give them a Gameboy and you give them the brand new box. The first thing they do is throw away the manual and the second thing they do is they use it. And they can use it. Adults will say that it's genetic "How can they use it?" Well you're damn right they can use it and we have to be able to leverage that in their own learning. So this goes back to the theories of a man named Seymour Papper. We started. This goes back to the late sixties. Seymour is alive and well and very active in One Laptop Per Child today. His theories of learning were very simple. He said the best way to learn about learning is to write computer programs.

Now that sounds very simplistic, but when you write a program you have to understand. You have to understand how something works. If you're going to understand what a circle is, perhaps the the best way to do it is to write a program to make a circle. And once you try that, invariably there are bugs and you've got to debug the program. And debugging actually teaches you something about how you should learn. And we've found that children who debug programs actually then apply that to their own learning, how they learn and sort of debugging that, and it's a very profound way of thinking about thinking.

Two particular projects started parallel. One in the state of Maine where the governor was persuaded to put through legislation One Laptop Per Child. It went through in the year 2002. They've been rolling them out. There are about fifty thousand now. Eighty percent of the teachers were against it, or at least apprehensive. And today you'll find absolute euphoria, if you will. You find the teachers.. .First of all, truancy has gone to zero or less, teacher parent meetings have sky-rocketed, discipline problems have gone down. Teachers are saying how great it is to be in the classroom because kids are much more involved, much more engaged. And the one I like the most is that kids were asking teachers for so much help by email that they had to turn the servers off at ten PM. Now that's just a different story than when I went to school and probably than when most of you went to school.

A parallel effort, which is a much smaller one, is something that I personally did with my family in Cambodia. There's a village with forty-seven dollars per year, per year, income. No electricity, no water, no telephone, no television. We brought in some generators. You can see a satellite dish in the background. Get the Internet, spread it through, not only the school, but through the village with 802.11. The kids take the laptops home. Their first English word is "Google". And the parents love it. And why do the parents like it? Because, when the kid opens up the laptop it's the brightest light source in the house. There's no electricity. So, running on batteries, as long as that laptop survives that evening, it is literally the brightest light source in the house, as well as metaphorically. Go back to school, plug them in and while they are using them at school, they charge up.

So I thought about Maine, thought about Cambodia and said to myself about a year and a half ago: "If we could just make a laptop for a hundred dollars, this could replicate". Because telecommunications is not the problem. And the reason its not the problem is because WIFI, WiMax, FreeG and all sorts of other things are rolling out.

Yes, we can effect them, we can do out differently I could argue with one approach versus another, but that's habit, that's now going to unfold. Maybe some regulatory regimes will get in the way, maybe some other things will get in the way. But the point is that's unfolding. But the laptop wasn't and the economics just weren't there. The economics, were in fact, quite artificial.

So we set up this organization. It's called One Laptop Per Child. It's a non-profit, and being non-profit is really important. Just in full disclosure, I'm on the board of directors of Motorola. And what happens when Motorola invents a display technology that lowers the cost of the display by ten dollars?

Guess who gets the ten dollars. It's my fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the shareholder gets a big piece of that ten dollars. And I'm not against that, I'm not anti-capitalist, I'm not anti-entrepreneurship, but the way that system is set up is that we have to maximize share-holder value.

Fine, by making it a non-profit if we build a technology that lowers the cost of the display by ten dollars, guess what? The laptop costs ninety. Every penny can go to the kids at the other end. So being a non-profit is very important. It also helps a little bit in the public relations because we are a humanitarian effort. Its kind of hard for people to dump on us even though some of the people are. They shouldn't; A humanitarian effort. And that is also quite important.

Scale. The reason I write scale on the slide so many times is that it's absolutely critical. Most of the efforts in computers and education or understanding learning are pretty small scale. There's a project here, a project there. The United States is hopeless. We've got thirty thousand different school districts. It's ridiculous. There are more school districts in the United States than in all the rest of the world combined.

So you've got.. You've just got some scale. Sometimes its regulatory. Sometimes its just "How do you get it going forward?". A few parents get together, some foundations to things, but it never has scale. Why do I think scale is important beyond sort of the obvious. Its not just to buy components at lower price, it's to be able to change the strategic direction of companies.

I will leave the company's name out, in my example. I went to one company and said: "You know we need a display. It's got to be small, not to bright. It doesn't have to have perfect color, uniformity. You know it can even have a couple of pixels missing. But it's got to be really inexpensive. Like thirty dollars, thirty-five dollars."

The particular company said to me "Well you know, Professor Negroponte, that's not our strategic direction. We're interested in big displays, huge brightness, perfect color uniformity and absolutely no imperfections in the pixels. So our strategic direction does not map into yours. We're very sorry."

And I said " You well that's a shame, because I need a hundred billion units a year". And they said " Well, you know maybe we can actually do something. And so what happens is that scale actually gets you the attention. The attention gets you people to do things that they might not do otherwise do. So, I was going to launch this in China with the Chinese, with Chinese money making it a Chinese company. And after trying unsuccessfully to do that for a year, I called Hector Ruiz, the CEO of AMD, whom I think spoke here two days ago. And I said: "Hector, I need two million dollars to start One Laptop Per Child for a whole number of companies, and would you do it.

It took Hector two hours to decide - yes - and sent me an email "Yes Nicholas, AMD will do it. It took me one and a half years to get nowhere and two hours to get a yes out of Hector. And when that happened, everybody else followed. And Newscorp and Google within five days said yes. And then the others followed thereafter. And I'd like to point out that the Quantas of this list... A Quanta is not just a partner like every one else. But Quanta, a Taiwanese company who makes one third of the worlds laptops today, brought something else to the equation.

Because up until December twelfth, the one criticism you could launch of One Laptop Per Child was: "Great idea, but they can't do it". And "they" could be "us" because we're academics or "they" could be "nobody" could do it. Well, when Quanta raised their hand and said: "We'll do it.", that disappeared, ok, absolutely disappeared. Nobody's questioning whether it's going to happen. It is going to happen. The question is: "When, and how much?". And I'll tell you that in a moment.

Quickly, a little bit about how you make a hundred dollar laptop, because a laptop - the economics are really quite simple. One half or more of the cost of a laptop, and this is true for cell phones and other devices, is sales, marketing, distribution and profit, but we have none of those. So when I say its a hundred dollar laptop, the truth is that it's a two hundred dollar laptop that just doesn't happen to have sales, marketing, distribution and profit. Governments will distribute it, we certainly don't make a profit and marketing is talking to a head of State, so it's not quite the same sort of channel of distribution problem that you have when you're building TV sets, or cameras or normal laptops.

So, let's look at the other half of the equation. It breaks into roughly two parts. One is the display and the other is everything else. And it really is, in rough numbers, fifty-fifty. The display, I'll talk about it in a moment, we have some ways of bringing it down and making it really is quite innovative. The trouble is that you can't make it too innovative or it won't get built. And it's a balance thing. See everything else that is so important.

If you look today, I don't know about you, but my laptop today, which has got the fastest processor, the highest. It's just unbelievable what's in that laptop. It runs slower and and less reliably than any laptop I've ever had. And when I look back five years, I think of five years ago my laptop ran faster, and five years before that it ran faster. And so I say to myself what's happened? What's happening is the fat lady can't sing. OK. We're bloated. We're overweight. And it's just again like a fat person most of the energy and muscle is used to move the fat. So seventy-five percent of your laptop is used for all of this software bloat. And I'm not picking on Microsoft; I'm picking on everybody. Try using Adobe. Load your PDF. Why does it take so long for that stuff? Try using Lotus. Try using all this stuff. It's getting worse and worse and worse.

The reason it's getting worse is simple. It's that everybody sits back and adds features. And they say "Well now what do we do? "We do this." And you end up with a little dog pawing on the screen and waiting. You say " I don't want the little dog pawing on the screen, I want the search to run like a bat out of hell. And I don't want the little dog (applause) Yeah, the funny thing is when you say this you get applause, I sometimes even get standing ovations and I say to myself " why:?. I mean if you agree, say so.

OK, because unless the consumer says so this is going to go on. And I said to one CEO recently: "I've got the solution. I know exactly how to solve it. And that is Pay your computer programmers per line of code they remove, not the line they add." OK. And a lot of us go. So this is what we're doing and people have suggested that the hundred dollar laptop might not be a whole machine or might not run. Rubbish, it's going to run as well as the laptop that I had four years ago.

There are three things that I have put in bold here, which are very important. The first has to do with power. Your laptop runs somewhere between twenty-five and forty watts and we've got to run under two. And the reason we've have to run under two is it's got to be hand powered. You've got to be able to n some way, make this laptop run without electricity in your home. Thirty-five percent of the world has no electricity and most of that thirty-five percent is what I consider our constituency. So we cannot make things that assume homes and schools have power. There's got to be a way to crank it, to pull it, to step on it, to pump it, to do things. And sometimes people joke about it.

You know "Geeze, why a hand crank". Well, you need human power. It's got to be involved. And that forces us into below two watts. WiFi mesh is very important. We can't assume that there are hot spots. We can't assume that there's a, you know a RJ45 or that there's some broadband connection. You need to use the kids themselves as the network. Now I don't want to give a lecture on mesh networks, but it's really important and you'll see that in some of the models that I'll show you. And then the dual mode display is also critical because we have to run in the sunlight.
And so what we've done, and this is the part that's really got to work in the month of July, or else we have to revisit it, is but we have both pieces and questions to get them on top of each other. The idea is you have one mode, which is what I'll call DVD mode. It's a normal, backlit, transmissive LCD. And it's obviously color. And the second mode is to have three times the resolution, but in black and white and reflective so you can go out in the sunlight and the brighter the sun, the better the contrast ratio. And kids could read books and so on and obviously it's power efficiency is extraordinary in that particular mode.

Both pieces work; they should come together shortly. We use open source. We use a skinny Linux, instant on, all of that stuff. In parallel, there will be commercial models. It's not part of us. There will be white box brands. There'll be private labels. It will also run Windows. Starter Edition, as well. And most importantly, it will be run by the kids. The kids are very good at doing this and also one of the best ways to maintain something is to give the kids ownership. It belongs to them.

We sent fifty laptops to Cambodia three and a half years ago and one broke in three and a half years. Why did only one break in three and a half years? Because the kids cherish them. They polish them. It's like a new bicycle. The little boys get their sisters to build bags for them to carry them in and so on.

And yet, outside of Boston, if you go to a very affluent section and there's a science class in high school that has laptops in the back of the room that kids check out and take to their desks, run a simulator, then put back on the shelf at the end of class. Those laptops last three months at best. And its not because the kids are vandals and the Cambodian kids are not. It's just the very simple principle that.. It's been said that you don't wash a rented car. When you rent a car. There are bumps in the road or speed bumps just drive a little faster. It's not your car and so maintenance...So it's not only the kids, ownership is a big piece of it.

I'll just show a couple of slides and come to and end, but I'm going to show you, sort of the evolution of it. This is perhaps the most famous picture, because it got a lot of press in November when we announced it with Kofi Anan in Tunis. Perhaps the hand crank got most of the sort of notice in this particular picture. And until about, oh maybe two months ago, the crank was onboard the laptop. Now its moved off and its on the AC adaptor for a number of reasons. And you can call me a slow learner.

More recent versions of it are illustrated here. And I'll just walk you through it. We need the laptop, as I said, to be both an electronic book which is why it has this so-called converter hinge on it. See it's folded back. That's its so-called ebook mode. Or you'll see the blue one in laptop mode. And this was still at a point in time when we still had the hand crank on it so you can see that the hand crank is still on board at this point and you'll notice it better.

This is the current one. Actually I have not.. this is the first time I've shown this slide because I only got it yesterday morning. This is the current direction. The laptop itself will have much more character and distinction to it, but this is the direction we're going.

It looks a little conventional except that it has the rabbit ears on it which are the WIFi mesh network. We think it is very, very important for the kids to be able to sit there and actually effect those because you can get, for those of you who are technical, up to 6 dB gain by just moving around those antennas and they also expose the USBs and audio jacks and so on and so forth. We're counting on them enormously and of course we're testing them quite rigorously.

Just quickly about rollout. There's no way you can read the coding but almost every country in the world has expressed interest. What we've done is we've chosen six for the time being. And I say maybe Massachusetts because the governor of Massachusetts, we are after all in that state, has expressed interest.

But we have looked at seven big countries that what they have in common is that they are big, they are diverse and the first four the reason they are separated is that those four have a commitment by the head of state. They are by far the most advanced four of the seven. The three below, China and India - just because of sheer size and Egypt because I'm just behind in that case.

These are the seven we've been looking at. And these are the time-lines. Are we going to stick to them? I sure hope so. Do we have to? No. Do we have signed contracts? No, purposely because the last thing we want to do is to release something that for some reason that is flawed. So we're very purposely holding back. You can read the numbers.

Very quickly, people always ask: "Is it really a hundred dollars?" The answer is - It will be below a hundred dollars. The hundred dollar price is the 2008 price. It will probably launch at one-hundred thirty-five. The target is fifty dollars.

And there are many grey market issues. And one of the things that we have to worry about is that when you push this out the grey market isn't just Customs officials stealing it. but it's also parents selling it. Kids are given shoes in some countries and some parents sell the shoes and kids still go to school barefoot.

What do you do about that? Well you do many different things, but one thing is that you make the laptop so unique that it helps stop the gray market. In the United States thousands of cars are stolen every day and not one single post office truck has ever been stolen. Why? It's not because it's owned by the government, it's because there's no secondary market. You can spray paint a post office truck, but it still looks like a post office truck. So good luck stealing one because you're not going to either be able to use it or sell it. And so maybe we can make our laptop equally distinctive.

Each country has set up a task force. They're actually all meeting at MIT in three weeks and the countries, no country should do this alone. I sometimes have trouble explaining that to China. But we shouldn't do it alone. Learn from the other countries, collaborate and eventually things like peripherals will be run like an airbus for people to make different parts. We start. There's an initial launch and then a second one. we're trying to do, just governments again.

If you want to think of One Laptop Per Child as having a sales and marketing department, you're looking at it. I am the total sales and marketing department. I have no staff helping me other than a couple of people in those countries. Actually, that's not true, I do have staff. I have office staff, but it's not hundreds of thousands of people. I'm sorry hundreds of people. But it is hundreds of thousands of dollars and probably if we launch the scale we're talking about it's over five-hundred billion dollars in 2007. So it has to start with single orders and then once the price comes down people ride on the coat tails and all sorts of other things happen.

I just want to end with this slide, and this is sort of the side effect of... You know if anybody in this room can sometime later send me a piece of email as to have they ever used the caps lock key. Have you ever used it, except to swear as you hit it by mistake. OK. So just getting rid of caps lock keys is a great side effect and I hope every keyboard manufacturer deletes them. I can't think of anybody wanting them.(applause)

Power Consciousness. We've got to be more conscious of power, and I don't mean this in the environmental sense, although that has just importance just absolutely, hugely important. But I think just in terms of how we use devices. How many times have you run out on your cell phone? Ok and say "God if I could just shake it a little bit and continue." We just aren't being imaginative. We're not using human power and I hope other people are doing it.

Bloated software, I've talked about it. Viral telecommunications is truly important. The whole notion of a carrier-centric telecommunications system is over. We're going to move to what I call a flower box model of telecommunications which is much more peer-to-peer and in fact everything will eventually be peer-to-peer.

So what I want to leave you with is not so much a David and Goliath story which is what its getting built up in the press, but more about learning. And learning learning, not teaching teachers or even teaching children. Learning learning. Teachers are absolutely critical. Schools are critical, but we have to look much more imaginatively and the best solution I have is to give every kid a laptop.(applause)

Moderator: We came up with a couple of special awards that we'd like to do on behalf of WCIT2006 and I've asked Dr. Negroponte to stay and ?? with me a little while if you would. As a result of going over this during last four hundred, five hundred days, we've come to realize and recognize with all of you out there that there are really two things that are important to the world moving forward and I think Dr. ?? came up with the issue this afternoon about the children of the future, about the children of the internet generation. They are always our future and even more so today.

And we are increasingly conscious of our environment and the future of the environment. Dr. Negroponte focuses extensively on the children. ?? ICT on the environment.

We have two awards that we would like to present tonight. One is the humanitarian achievement award and the other is the sustainability achievement award. I'd like to introduce somebody to achieve the award. I'd like to introduce T?? H?? Chen...