Skip to main content

tv   Talk to Al Jazeera  Al Jazeera  December 24, 2015 5:30pm-6:01pm EST

5:30 pm
available to online streaming services. more than 200 songs of the original 13 albums are available for free, paul and ring 0 wishing fans happy christmas as the announcement was made. more on everything right here, aljazeera.com. a visionary in the field of computer-aided design and the founder of one laptop per child. >> let's make $100 laptop. that was so implausible. >> negroponte co-founded the mit media laboratory - which is credited with driving the multimedia revolution. the research center brings together hundreds of leading thinkers in design, science and technology. >> we had license to do things,
5:31 pm
which, you know, i can be a little revisionist and tell you it's all because we were smart. but, some of it is because we had a lot of space. >> from gps to touch-finger technology, negroponte has - for the most part - accurately forecast what "new thing" was on the horizon in the digital world. now he's suggesting we'll be able to ingest information - just like we eat food. >> you should be able to swallow a pill and know english. or swallow a pill and know about the french revolution. >> he had a decades-long relationship with apple's steve jobs, but has some pointed criticism for the company now. >> apple, if you had to think of a company that's contributed zero to science and technology, it's apple. >> negroponte has funded dozens of startups, including wired magazine. i spoke to him in new york. >> let's go back to the '80s with predictions that you had made about some basic things that have come to pass. and one of them- was that things
5:32 pm
like the tv, which we didn't move around, got their signals over the air, and things like phones, which were designed to be mobile, were- most cases attached to a wall with a hard wire. and you had said that wasn't gonna happen, it was going to be the other way around. >> it really goes back to the late '60s, early '70s, where it was clear that everything that could be digital would be digital. so when you transmit digital signals, they lend themselves to doing things that previously they couldn't. so for example, over the air became a much more controllable- you could make cells, you could do things that previously were not possible. and the tv set, and the cables that came into our homes at that time, were fixed. they were using real estate in the sense that there it was, and it couldn't move. so why would a tv set use anything but a cable, and why would phones, it was so certain that
5:33 pm
it was gonna happen. but what accelerated it was that it coincided historically with the de-regulation of phone companies. >> you also said- and in fact- were involved in the development of a device- which was going to use your fingers as the input. but the concept that most of your communication would be done with your fingers as an input was also something that you and others were laughed at for. >> very much laughed at. (throat clear) people wrote even technical articles as to why it wouldn't work. and people said, "no", for three reasons it won't work. number one, your finger occludes what you wanna touch." in other words, it's blocking. "number two, that it doesn't have enough resolution." also wrong. but the one that was the most amusing, they said, "it'll get the display dirty." and we didn't want dirty displays with finger prints on them. >> so nicholas, this is a long way to- get my audience to understand that- you were involved in something called the mit media lab.
5:34 pm
it's an innocuous name for a place where so much of what we do, and how we interact, and how we communicate was developed. so let's just go back a little bit. you went to mit as a freshman. >> yes. >> and i'm not quite sure you've actually left. >> i actually haven't. i've been there for 55 years. when i joined the faculty, it was the faculty from which i graduated, which was architecture. so i was in the architecture department. i'd fallen in love with computers, and so the things that i did research on, i taught, had to do with computer-aided design and computer graphics. >> and when you say computers, you're talking at a time- what were computers like back then? >> computers at the time were small tennis courts. but they did have displays. they were expensive, they were early, it was the early days of computer graphics. and it was sort of experimental
5:35 pm
before displays had anything to do with television-like devices. in those days, they were like aircraft traffic control, or radar, or sort of that kind of rather expensive so-called calligraphic display, which just means it can write anyway that you command the beam to go. i started the media lab as an off-shoot of that, where the focus of the media lab would be human computer interaction. a couple of interesting things were happening at the same time. the personal computer was being invented. it was clear that telecommunications was gonna become, you know, much more widely available at lower costs and bigger reach. and it was also clear that in this digital transformation, things that we call television news, newspapers, magazines,
5:36 pm
computers, and all these things would kind of merge into one. many people were pouring money into the media lab, so it was like sort of the golden goose laying the golden eggs. plus we had a trump card. the trump card was my partner in starting the media lab, 'cause i'm often introduced rightfully as the co-founder. nobody asked who the other was. the other was a man named jerry wiesner. jerry was jack kennedy's science advisor, 25 years older than i. but it was his baby too, he loved it. he just happened to be the president of mit. we had license to do things, which, you know, i can be a little revisionist and tell you it's all because we were smart. but some of it is 'cause we had a lotta space. >> does that space to be that innovative exist today? clearly, things are happening. clearly things are being built, clearly apple comes up with a new product every year.
5:37 pm
>> yeah, but apple's new product every year, which is absolutely true, i use nothing but apple products. but apple, if you had to think of a company that's contributed zero to science and technology, it's apple. so yes, they're a creative company, but they don't help in the sense of being an open, sort of very different research lab. >> you had naysayers. some of them were in powerful places. clifford stoll in newsweek wrote, and i quote, "nicholas negroponte, director of mit media lab, predicts it will soon buy books and newspapers straight over the internet." uh sure, this was 1995. >> i really got pleasure out of that kind of criticism, 'cause i knew they were wrong. and, there was just kind of- so- "okay, let's just wait and see." i remember when we did early work on color displays, we built- this is very early in my career- color displays that were driven
5:38 pm
by computer memory, which is the way actually all displays are now, it's how your laptop works and at the time, people said it was arrogant because, you know, only a rich institution could buy what at the time was a quarter of a million dollars worth of memory to drive a display, to prove a point that that's the way you should do it believing, which it now happens to be true, that that quarter of a million dollars would drop to $10. i mean, that it would really make that kind of plummet. and i wrote, in fact one of my first articles for wired magazine was, that color will be what we all use. that it'll be more expensive to find a black and white display than a color display. >> wired's a magazine that was one of your first investments. >> it really was, and i was their first investor- and worked with wired- very extensively and with great enthusiasm.
5:39 pm
we actually went cash flow positive after the first issue. >> what are the things that you expected to be happening in the world of technology and design today that haven't yet happened? >> well, i wrote about it 20 years ago, and being digital. i wrote about speech being a very dominant interface, which it really hasn't. it's only started in the past year or two. i thought holography as a display medium would have moved much faster. >> we've seen some movement on that, and some experimentation, but it hasn't become mainstream. >> it- it- not at all, no. so those are the specific kinds of things. perhaps a different phrasing of this question. what were the ones that weren't even on the horizon that appeared ...a little bit ano[ny]mously? you know, the twitter,
5:40 pm
i mean, take twitter for example. you know, we did a lot of the things that are now companies, like the basics of facebook, and youtube was up and running at the media lab 25 years ago, but twitter we missed. so there are certain aspects of- >> but it could've been a cultural phenomenon more than it's a technical phenomenon wouldn't you argue? >> sure. >> twitter exists, because it fulfills some cultural need. >> but it's enabled by, you know, the technology and the spread of it. when i was a student in the 1960s at mit, there was a program- i even remember, it was running on the mainframe, called computer aided routing system, which obviously is c.a.r.s. and what was c.a.r.s. doing? you'd type in an address and another address, and it would have some cars going around, it would find the nearest one, and have it pick
5:41 pm
you up and take you to that point, and maybe drop somebody off on the way. okay, this was in '65. >> that then moves well into this internet of everything idea, and i never know whether the internet of everything is really the way it's going to go, so that a bridge can tell you that it's going to collapse, or a water main can tell you that it's broken before you have the sink hole. it's not enough for the world's people to be connected, but everything around us needs to be connected. tell me your views. >> the basic premise is that everything will be potentially connected to every other thing. that something having self-awareness of some sort is a slightly different issue. i mean, does a pipe know when it's about to break? can a light bulb tell it's about to go out? but the communications part is pretty self-evident, and you'll just see more and more.
5:42 pm
just imagine every light bulb in the world should be able to communicate that it's broken, versus somebody observing that it's off. now, is that important? well, you bet it's important for cities, you better- it's important- this and that that- that kind of communication of things, whether the refrigerator has to tell you if you have enough to make the next bouillabaisse is- you know, that may be gratuitous, maybe not. >> so we're all smart enough not to suggest that anything you've come up with or any idea you might have is silly, and one i happen to like- partially because i eat a lot, is this idea of ingesting information. what do you mean by this? >> what i mean by it is, and let me jump to the end and then work back toward it, is that you should be able to swallow a pill and know english. or, swallow a pill and know about the french revolution.
5:43 pm
and the reason i say that, crazy as it sounds, is that the best way- and i think the word best is appropriate, to get close to the neurons in the brain, is really through the blood cells, through the blood stream. that if you can put nano-robots in the blood stream, they can basically visit every part of your brain, every part that a blood cell goes to. deposit things, take away things. so, you know, if you need to have some plumbing done, that's one thing, but if you need information deposited, is that plausible? and if it is, does french live somewhere? do things live in certain places? and if they do, then you actually could get it through the blood stream, which means you could ingest it. >> still ahead on the program negroponte talks about his relationship with steve jobs and describes the moment when the
5:44 pm
apple co-founder first showed him the iphone. >> "inside story" takes you beyond the headlines, beyond the quick cuts, beyond the soundbites. we're giving you a deeper dive into the stories that are making our world what it is.
5:45 pm
5:46 pm
>> you're watching talk to al jazeera. i'm ali velshi. my guest this week is nicholas negroponte, tech guru and co-founder of the mit media laboratory. >> you made- a switch 15 years ago? maybe i'm- i'm off, i may be off by five years. but you sort of decided that you wanted to use all of this knowledge you had and the- and leverage the relationships you've had to now take technology and design and solve a global problem, the problem of education of children.
5:47 pm
and so you started this idea of one laptop per child- an affordable laptop that can be deployed all around the world easily, without the infrastructure that you would think of as needing computers. >> i said, "okay what is the gating (unintel), what is holding back kids being connected in very large numbers, and having the kind of computing devices that i thought five, six, seven, eight-year-old's should have?" the one that i thought was not gonna be solved by normal market forces was the laptop. this thing was getting bloated, and fatter, and fatter, and it wasn't really being, you know, more responsive to somebody using it. but what this managed to do, because the prices were going down for hardware and they're going down modestly for software but because they were using more of each (unintel) there was a constant. it was like somebody said, "laptops will cost $1,000."
5:48 pm
>> and somehow they always end up costing $1,000, they might be better than the one before- >> exactly. >> -but we weren't seeing prices drop. >> right, there was- so i said, "let's make $100 laptop." that was so implausible, but suddenly those people who didn't know me knew mit. they couldn't imagine that i'd gone off my rocker to say $100 laptop, so they could ridicule a little bit, but it's- it- it was sort of plausible. and some people who really wanted to help said, "well, not only is it plausible, we would like to help you do it." so we ended up raising $30 million in a week to do this project, and it just (makes noise) went off with a launch. we had no trouble getting very high-end, if you will, partners
5:49 pm
to make a low-end device. and this was, for me, the difference between inexpensive and cheap. in fact, that has properties that laptops don't have? for example, is it a laptop that kids can use in the sun? by the way, rotate it, it became a tablet- that was long before tablets were... >> rugged and sturdy. >> drop it, it could- it- it was waterproof, you could drop it from about three or four meters. i mean, this thing- it went through all sorts of drop tests. >> you could charge it on its own with the crank. >> you could crank it, you could charge - in other words, there were many and perhaps some of the demise in the sense that it was so much magic packed into that thing, it was a little bit too hard, but three-and-a-half million of them were built, and they're in the hands of kids, and then they triggered others. and today about 50 million children use laptops, where- in almost every case, that child would have
5:50 pm
never, ever been eligible for- >> and they're not made through that project, necessarily. >> i would say- no. when i say 50 million- 47 million of them were not made by that project at all. >> but that this project, you think spurred this activity to say, "let's make an accessible, affordable laptop that kids can use." >> or, if you're head of state and you wanna put out a bid for people to do that, i say, "look, not only put out a bid but i'll bid and i'll even publish, or leak, or do whatever, my price so that everybody else has to come in lower. >> yeah. >> and i'm not gonna leak (unintel phrase) i'm gonna leak i'm gonna say, "mister head of state, i will do it for" >> for this money. >> whatever. $185- >> competitors sprung up. >> there were people who said, "i can do this" >> absolutely, and they would under-bid us and they'd do it. >> so to- to you that's a success. >> oh god, that's a success. so people knew that this was a mission, not a market.
5:51 pm
>> you had- a long relationship with steve jobs. you had known him since 1979. and at some point you had actually- shown him one of these laptops, these exo laptops, and you wanted him to sort of evaluate some of it. he ended up sending you an email- in may of 2007 where- you had given him this sample to look at, and he writes back to you, he says, "nicholas, we've known each other a long time. too long for me to do anything other than tell you what i think. the software is some of the worst i've ever seen. please don't be too mad at me." >> first of all, he was right. okay, so he really was right. i knew steve so well in the '80s, particularly the early '80s, but- maybe even the late '70s, and i hadn't seen very much of him. but when we announced the laptop, he showed some interest in it, and we exchanged some
5:52 pm
back and forth that- this particular case that spurred the letter, he said, "when you're next out here, let's spend a few hours together. i'd love to- to see it." so i went to apple, and we spent about three hours, just the two of us in a small room. and so he took it off to play with it over the weekend, and that was the result. but i remember the meeting for a different reason, 'cause he had in his pocket- he was fondling his...and the iphone had been mentioned, but nobody had seen it. so he pulls it out, and he says, "i wanna show you my life's work." so suddenly it made my laptop look incidental. my laptop was in production, and so on. and it was on a thursday. and i said, "steve, you remember i'm on the motorola board. can i tell my colleagues what
5:53 pm
i've seen?" he said, "well, look, people know this exists. yes, you can. but again, don't tell the press, but of course you can, yeah, 'cause we're having our announcement." turns out the motorola board meeting was the following monday. and i described what i'd saw, i said, "you know, this is- this is pretty important sort of thing here. and it's- again, it's got lots of stuff going on." they said, "nicholas, we're making 250 million phones. he's not gonna make a million in the first year." and literally at the next- or one after next board meeting, i said, "you see? hasn't gotten up to whatever the number was, 500,000." and- "you see?" >>if you want to know what else the future of technology holds and what you should be betting on, stay with us negroponte tells us that
5:54 pm
after the break. >> we're following stories of people who have died in the desert. >> the borderland marathon. >> no one's prepared for this journey. >> experience al jazeera america's critically acclaimed, original series from the beginning. >> experiencing it has changed me completely. >> follow the journey as six americans face the immigration debate up close and personal. >> it's heartbreaking. >> i'm the enemy. >> i'm really pissed off. >> all of these people shouldn't be dead. >> it's insane.
5:55 pm
5:56 pm
i'm ali velshi and this is talk to al jazeera. my guest this week is the man behind one laptop per child, nicholas negroponte. >> the one thing i can't get
5:57 pm
people to answer when i'm amongst the smartest of the mid-technology, is how all of these leaps forward address a basic intractable problem globally, and that is income inequality, that is the lack of good jobs. because everything we invent makes us more efficient. how do we make up for the fact that we are inventing ways of putting people out of work? >> the discussion actually isn't absent. let me call it nascent, because the jobs that are being eliminated now are the so-called knowledge workers that we thought were the ones that were immune, and the people who worked with their hands, they're gonna be put out of business. the number of jobs that are being created, on the other hand, and the other ways to have living, is also going up. now, are they going up the right speeds, the same rates, in the right places, and so on and so forth? i believe whatever the
5:58 pm
answer is, however you wanna look at the future and division of wealth, which is absolutely terrible, the solutions are gonna have to include education. there's no question. i think the in the solution is to create an intellectual base that is so high, that there really is- a much higher platform for people to find jobs, to find fulfillment. and in fact the word job itself may not be the aspiration. what- people may not be looking for a job with a capitol j in the- in the same way. and when people even think of uber, and i happen to- use uber a lot- what the drivers say is, "you know, i'm- i'm kinda my own boss, and i do it when i want to. and- and i don't have to tell anybody, and- and- you
5:59 pm
know, it was my second job, i was doing something else, and then i liked it so much it kinda became my primary job." and it you know, there- i'm not trying to advocate for uber, but there's a different way to look at employment that may emerge. >> just so that i can make good decision and possibly investments, or career choices, what's next? what- what's the thing that we- guys like me are not thinking about. >> oh that's easy. if you have a kid or a grandchild, biotech is the new digital. there's just no question. there's just, i think a whole frontier there. >> nicholas, always a pleasure to talk to you. thank you so much for your time. >> pleasure's mine. >> comedy great richard lewis. >> i really am in love with the craft. >> turning an angst ridden and neurotic outlook... >> i have to unravel myself on stage as fearlessly as possible.
6:00 pm
>> into an award winning career...from hell. >> it's thrilling when it's working. >> i lived that character. >> go one-on-one with america's movers and shakers. >> we will be able to see change. good for american politics. my thought on the potentially dangerous approach the crop of presidential candidates have taken on foreign policy. i'm ali velshi and this is third rail. after the atrocities in paris and san bernardino, polls show that americans fear more attacks from killers inspired and led by i.s.i.l. presidential c