MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium - Fifty Years After 'As We May Think' (Part 4/5)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PRESENTER: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We're ready to start the morning session. And I couldn't think of a better eye-opener than the pioneer of digital convergence, Nicholas Negroponte. As you well know, he is director of the world famous and still unique interdisciplinary Media Lab here at MIT, which just has been celebrating 10 years of accomplishment with a big bash.

His hit book, Being Digital, and his monthly columns in WIRED are helping to educate the lay public about the all-important paradigm shift that is happening because of digital convergence. And I, personally, am very glad that he is contributing his atoms rather than his bits here today. Nicholas.

NEGROPONTE: [? I ?] [? think ?] [? I'm going to ?] [? use this thing. ?] Ah. Keep forgetting podiums have these slopes to them.

[? [NO AUDIO] ?]

Am I live? We're now live. Okay. As Andy mentioned, the Media Lab just celebrated its 10th anniversary, which is not particularly important. But what's happened is that when you make an event of that scale, we invite all of the sort of consortia that form parts of the laboratory and all of the various groups. So this has not been one day. This has been a bonanza of meetings that started Sunday night.

And so you get the dregs this morning, I'm sorry to say. I will do my best. And I don't know if anybody attended the 10th, but I may repeat some of the stories I even told at the beginning of it.

About three years ago, I became involved with WIRED Magazine. And I became involved in a very odd way. It wasn't my idea. I mean, it was Louis Rossetto's and Jane Metcalfe's. But nobody would fund them. None of the big media tycoons or none of the VCs would fund them.

And I agreed to fund them. And to protect my investment, I wrote the back page. I said, I'll write the back page, too. So if this thing goes down the tubes, at least I'll be part of it going down the tubes. And if it's a success, then let me be part of that, too. But I would invest more than money. I'd invest some energy.

And about a year and a half ago-- maybe it's a little more, a little less-- I learned something absolutely astonishing. At least, it really touched me. And that was that the largest number of subscribers were kids buying WIRED for their parents for Christmas. Okay.

[LAUGHTER]

And that touched me, actually. Because it was basically kids saying, Mom and Dad, this is about me. And here's your Christmas present.

Now, when I sort of heard that, and it was about the 18th issue, I said, well, maybe the thing to do is to take the 18 back pages and make them into a book for Mom and Dad, which, of course, is awfully naive. Because I'd like to just take the 18 stories, and you staple them together, and you send them back to the publisher, and they put a cover on it. It was not that at all. It was basically writing something all over again.

But in the process of doing it, I ran across-- and I'm not even sure when and how-- but sort of bumped into the idea of thinking about the world in terms of bits and atoms, and using that perspective. And that, if you looked at something as we normally do-- in fact, as laws are created and so on-- they're usually based on atoms-- things that we can touch and feel and have weight, mass, and so on.

And yet, that the world of bits was really quite different. And even though in my experience at MIT and computer science, either formally or informally, we hadn't really thought very much about the fact that bits didn't have size, weight, color, mass, and more or less traveled at the speed of light, and that this was really a very kind of interesting dichotomy.

And there are two stories that I'm very fond of saying. One will touch your hearts, I think, quite directly. Other's more related to telecommunications. But think of some of the things that have happened in the past 10 years.

And my first example will be in 1983 when Judge Greene broke up the telephone company. He told the RBOCs-- the Regional Bell Operating Companies-- he said, you are not allowed in the information business.

Now, think of that remark. Because it's actually a very strange remark, because every single one of the Regional Bell Operating Companies in this country produces yellow pages. And those yellow pages, in every case, all seven, is the highest margin business that any of them run. It's not the biggest cash generator, okay. But just in terms of margins, they're almost obscene. Okay.

So the yellow pages, which is certainly the information business, was fair game. They could do that. So if you think of what Judge Greene was saying in terms of bits and atoms, what he was basically saying was, it's absolutely okay to, more or less, defoliant to squeeze ink on dead trees, perhaps even to use child labor to hurl these huge, chunky books over the transoms of American doorsteps-- but that it was utterly illegal and against the law to transmit a no-return, no-deposit, ecologically sound bit at the speed of light into the home.

So I mean, if you really looked at it in terms of bits and atoms, it was the most absurd position that he was taking in 1983. And, of course, it took over 10 years to even start to change it.

There are some people in this room who are actively involved in digital libraries. And you look at digital libraries. And you ask yourself, why do library-libraries, or physical libraries-- why do they work? And one of the reasons they work is absolutely-- I mean, it's almost completely based on atoms. The reason a library works today is that I take my atoms down to the library. Some of us have a few too many of them.

When I get there, let's presume I'm allowed in the stacks. And I borrow the book. Something that people don't tell you about atoms is that when you borrow an atom, there's no atom left. Okay, there's empty space.

You take the book off. You read it for a week. You bring it back. And miraculously, somebody borrows it again. You bring it back. Miraculously, somebody borrows it again a week later. And at the end of that little unlikely episode, 52 people have read that book in one year.

Now, as some of you are doing, and people that we all know, when you take that model and you build a digital library and you turn it into bits, what happens? First of all, you don't have to take your atoms down there. And second of all-- and, again, we're never told this, okay, because it's so obvious-- when you borrow a bit, there's always a bit left.

So lo and behold, 20 million people in theory can borrow the same bit. And we've violated copyright law in any country that has it, and certainly violated the sense of intellectual property.

Now, my point is really quite simple. My point is if you look at some very, very-- and, again, they're very simple observations-- and you think of them in terms of bits and atoms, and I'll get back to this afterwards, it really is a very, very different perspective.

And so I started down this path to do that and discovered in the process that what was going on in the United States in general, in the past sort of 12 months, really was much more dramatic than even the most extreme and most sort of wild predictions. We're all sort of falling short.

Let me give you an example. The official statistic is that 45% to 55% of all new personal computers are going into the American home. And it depends who you speak to. I mean, Intel will tell you it's 50-something. But the range is between 45% and 50%. And they think, boy, isn't that a big number? I mean, it's a very big number.

Well, the real number is more like 75%. And the reason it's 75% is for a reason that is obvious, again, but nobody knows how to count it.

And that is that almost every single corporation in the United States, when they look at somebody's desktop and they say, upgrade your 386 to a Pentium or something, what do they say? They say, take the old one home. Or they say, why don't you buy a laptop, and that way you can go back and forth between work and home?

So it turns out that today, 50% of black teenagers have personal computers at home. 75% of all teenagers have computers at home. And none of us, even those who were considered nuts in their speculations, would have ever have predicted that kind of rate of change, partly because-- and this, again, is speculation on my part-- but I think part of it is just our body clocks are exponentially sensitive.

We're not sensitive to things that happen exponentially. We don't know how to understand them. Yes, we all can plot things on log-log paper. But we don't understand things that happen. Web's doubling every 50 days now. We don't know what that means. We don't understand with doubling every 50 days means.

But we do understand, it turns out that today, roughly, there's a new home page every five seconds. That we can understand. We can say, aha, yes, that's [INAUDIBLE] But the doubling part, we really don't understand.

So in parallel with, again, the kids subscribing for their parents, there was this other phenomenon of sort of exponential growth, but in a very, very odd demographic in the United States right now. If you look at the population and you find that there are basically no 15-year-old Americans that are digitally illiterate. Okay.

Now, if I count Nintendo and SEGA, that's 100% true. And if you pulled Nintendo and SEGA out of the equation, it's still roughly probably 90% true. Or at least, it's so true that it's as good as 100%.

And then what happens? It's really very odd. It's a period in time that won't last long. But it's a very odd phenomenon. The highest percentage of people getting online as a percent of their age group are the elderly-- 55 years old and up-- right now. And that really is true.

So what do you have? You've got this big swell that moves very quickly. Anybody who's a parent in this room knows how fast that moves. So you've got this big swell here at the sort of lower end. You've then got this other swell at the other-- not as big, but at least growing very, very rapidly. And what you have in the middle is what I call the "digital homeless."

And the digital homeless, who are they? They're affluent. They're literate, well-educated. And it's people who have the one thing that the other two groups-- or sorry, missing the one thing that the other two groups have in spades. And that is time. They don't have time. They're just too busy. And they're not, like ourselves, sort of in the field.

So you get this very odd sort of distribution right now. And it's the demographics, at least in the United States right now, is indeed very, very peculiar. It's not normal at all.

And probably in four years it'll all shift over. But for the moment, it really is a very special condition, which, in my opinion, leads to a lot of the-- I don't want to call them "problems" because they haven't come up as problems yet, necessarily-- but leads to a lot of kind of the misunderstanding. Because that same digitally homeless group tend to be the people who are making laws and decisions and run companies and do all sorts of things. So in some sense, the intellectual and management power of the United States tends to occupy that space in the middle.

So, again, I started sort of thinking about it. And ran after sort of pushing the book being digital out, I realized when I finally shared the podium in Los Angeles with Don Rickles and [? David ?] [? Koresh's ?] mother. I said, boy, yes, computing maybe is becoming a rather popular thing. And it was a very odd experience. And I don't recommend it.

[LAUGHTER]

And certainly don't intend to-- actually, it was really bizarre. I shared the podium with a four-legged llama. Not sure why. And then I shared the podium on another occasion with [? Martín. ?] [? Martín ?] was a man who changed his sex to a woman in order to have a lesbian relationship with his wife while they brought up the four children.

[LAUGHTER]

So that was considered on the same wavelength as being digital.

[LAUGHTER]

And so it was an odd experience for me. But in doing that, one of the things that happened to me was when I was in Michigan. You sign your life away for two weeks. And the publisher, then, almost puts you on a sort of an orbit for that two weeks. And I happened to be in Michigan in February the day after this kid, Jake Baker, was arrested for posting his message on whatever it was-- all.sex.bestiality or something.

And I don't know if you remember the story. But what he had done is he had written this story, posted it. I forget how many days it lived out there. And a guy in Moscow, okay, which is a cute detail, logged in to whatever it was-- all.sex.bestiality-- and was offended. Now, digest that for a second.

[LAUGHTER]

My image is, walking down a street in Amsterdam, passing what might have been a store front selling I don't know-- god knows what. But the glass has been painted over in black. And it says, with giant, orange letters "sex shop." And dangling from the front door [? are ?] inflated prophylactics.

And you go through, into the door. You're not going to get offended. I mean, you've made a pretty fundamental decision when you go through that door.

[LAUGHTER]

And this Russian, in my opinion, made that same decision. Read it, got offended, and happened to be-- and, again, I don't know how many people know the exact story-- but happened to be an alumnus of the University of Michigan.

And he complained-- I don't know if it was to the alumni office or to the president's office. But he complained. And lo and behold, at 11 o'clock at night, the sheriff arrests Jake Baker, confiscates his reading glasses.

[LAUGHTER]

Okay. Dead serious, okay. Plop him in jail without bail-- okay, without bail. And for those of you who know the story, the part that I've left out is that he had actually used a real person's name. And there were some people claiming that-- oh, I don't know.

At any rate, I don't even want to try and imagine what the case is, because it's the without bail part that got me. Because I didn't think we did that in the United States. And there he sat for over 30 days without bail.

The reason I knew about is because his mother and stepfather came to see me and asked if I could help get him out of jail. And he did, indeed, finally get out on bail. And I don't know what effect I had. But at any rate, he got out on bail.

And when it hit the courts in June, it was dismissed. The case was dismissed as frivolous-- that the government's case was frivolous, that it was fiction. And it didn't get beyond that point. It was just dismissed.

And when you see something like that happen-- and, again, I'm certainly not a lawyer-- but it seems to me that the law is, by definition, a reactive phenomenon. And when it reacts sort of so absurdly, a little bit like a floppy, flopping, sort of dying fish on a dock, I think something rather big-- it's sort of like an early warning system.

Just, again, it's another story I'm fond of telling-- happened a little bit before the Jake Baker incident. And less people knew about it, at least the first part of it. A lot of people knew about the second part.

What happened was, I think it was in the middle of January, a cleric in Pakistan, actually, asked officially that the United States extradite Madonna and Michael Jackson to stand trial for having violated fundamentalist Islamic law. And this did not get the front page of any paper. In fact, I'm not even sure the State Department responded officially. And most people sort of just laughed it off.

But almost at exactly the same time, a couple whose name I can't remember, in Cupertino, or actually the neighboring town, had some bits on their computer that were absolutely legal by Cupertino standards and legal by California law and legal by [INAUDIBLE]

And some guy in Tennessee logs in, sucks the bits over to Tennessee, doesn't like what he sees on his screen. Calls his sheriff. The sheriff doesn't like what he sees on the screen. The sheriff in Tennessee calls the sheriff in Cupertino. They not only arrest the people, they extradite them to Tennessee.

[LAUGHTER]

Okay, we didn't do this with Michael Jackson and Madonna. And a lot of parents would have wished we had. At any rate, there he is. He is put on trial, found guilty, and is guilty today. I mean, they're appealing, but it's still there.

And you say, wait a moment. What's going on? And what's going on is, in my opinion, just something very simple, that this is a big one and we don't understand it, and that the bits and atoms issue, in fact, people will say it's all hype, okay.

Yes, there's a lot of hype. But it is a wild understatement. I think what's going on right now is the tip of an iceberg that, in the next year or so when you get things like untraceable digital cash, when you get some of the intellectual property issues, and all of these things that start to come up, which will all surface in the next 12 months-- it's sort of a big way. I think it's a nontrival period.

The fact that it's the 50th anniversary that created this event-- it's the 50th anniversary also this year of Arthur Clarke's famous paper on satellites. And I mean, there's a lot of sort of 50th's. It's the 50th anniversary of the UN. There seems to be a lot of 50th's, but what's going to happen in the 51st year is going to be pretty dramatic of all of those sort of events.

And I think it's a really big deal. And I think we've all underestimated it. Okay, every single one of us. And a lot of people in this room were very much part of things like the internet and things like the world wide web and multimedia and hypertext.

My god, I mean, what a group-- I mean, of all the people. But I think it's fair to say that every single person in this room, okay, underestimated it. We didn't think it would be as big as it's turned out.

And, again, I think if you just try to understand what it will do to electronic commerce, and so on-- some of us use big words and strong voices and parade with great energy and can say these things-- but deep down in your hearts, I think a lot of you-- including myself-- we don't really believe that it's as big as it probably is. And I think that's quite important. And, again, I'm not sure a symposium like this is the one that's going to change that.

Andy has asked me to sort of end 5 minutes early because there's some group photograph that has to be taken. And I've got a deadline at the other end. And I want to leave time for questions. So I'm only going to use about 5 or 10 more minutes and sort of tell you where I think, again, we-- whatever that means-- what the Media Lab has been doing, since we did celebrate our 10th.

And it's kind of a soul searching phenomenon-- sort of what we think we did and where we think we're going. Because for the very same reason that bits are weightless, colorless, sizeless, travel at the speed of light, we can't experience them. Bits or not something that humans can experience in any way until they're turn back into atoms.

Now, yes, maybe we can start wiring ourselves in the future. But for the time being, we really have to turn them back into atoms. And the art of turning atoms into bits and bits into atoms has, in some sense, been-- though I would have never said it this way-- has been what I've my career doing. It's what people like Andy started 30 years ago, Alan did 25, 30 years ago. Some of us-- I mean, there are just many people in this room who were doing that, though I don't think we thought of it in those exact terms.

One of the things that happened in the late '70s is that a few people-- and it was sort of considered sissy computer science at the time-- felt that there just wasn't a sensory richness to this sort of bits to atoms conversion, and that may be the right thing to do is to look.

Because as the kind of jingle at the Media Lab is, bits are bits, and there's no such thing as video or audio or data. They're all bits. And that you should get into the so-called multimedia environment, et cetera, and the kind of sorts of things that we've done.

What's happening now is that that agenda is over. Industry [? has ?] taken at least the bits into the atom side of it. The richness of the output of most computers is by no means a done deal. But it's at least, compared to 10 years ago, quite extraordinary.

The reverse is still a mess. I mean, my god. I mean, the path back in, in fact, in my opinion is as decrepit as it was 20 years ago. But so that's obviously on the agenda for the next decade.

But we have always-- and "we," again, I'll speak for the 300 people at the Media Lab vaguely-- is that we've always thought of turning the bits into atoms in order to experience the bits. And so the atoms were there, just because that's what you see. And it's the phosphors that glow, or you wiggle a little air and you make a sound, and so on.

But the pervasiveness of the atoms was not particularly important. And that's why, as part of our agenda over the next decade, we've started this thing called "things that think." Because there is, now, a new space that has to do with the personality of objects. And that personality comes from thinking and linking and so on and so forth, and will certainly be for us a major agenda.

And in fact, there's a very big consortium that was launched or was announced on Tuesday which has a lot of, for us, new companies. In fact, it's rather exciting, because it's companies like Nike [? Sneaker-- ?] or Nike the company-- [? they ?] make a lot of other things other than sneakers. Federal Express, Steelcase Furniture. I mean, it's a whole different world for us.

And what they have in common is that they make things, but they don't talk to each other at all. And one of the things we have started doing is to work more extensively, because people had been doing this for a long time, on wearable computing.

And it turns out that some of the faculty have discovered that you really can ship 100,000 bits per second through the body using the body basically as a bus. And it's a whole new definition, I guess, of a "backplane."

[LAUGHTER]

And what that does is, that if you shake hands with somebody, you really can exchange 100,000 bits per second. So maybe in 10 years from now, the next conference you go to, you just shake hands with everybody, and then go home and print out all the calling cards.

Or you might go to a phone booth and pick up a handset, and just in the few seconds it takes to get that handset off the hook to your ear, you have downloaded 100,000 bits per second for the three seconds and put in all of your speech and voice patterns and everything so then, all of a sudden, the handset, it's much easier for it to do the speech recognition, et cetera. And, again, in the things that think, if your body can both radiate and take in the amount of bits, it's probably a pretty interesting thing to be working on.

So those are the kinds of things that I think we'll be doing over the next decade. And what it all gets down to-- and this is, I guess, sort of the right place to end-- is that computing really is not about computers anymore, okay.

And if you think it is, you're in the wrong field. Okay. Computing is about life. And it really has left the desktop. It's left a lot of the things that we have taken for granted.

And that's sort of a hard thing to accept. But I think it's important-- in fact, I think it's very important that we recognize that. Because otherwise, you're just going to just be scaling up that kind of junk sitting on the table. And that's not what it's about. And I think it's time that we recognize that.

And having said that, I'm going to leave the next 10 minutes for questions. And then we break for Andy. And if there's no questions, I'll ask a question of myself, so don't worry.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

NEGROPONTE: Oh, you have to go to the mic. Okay. Okay. Sorry, I didn't know the protocol.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. So I'm [? Michael ?] [? Lesk. ?] One of my problems with all these intelligent objects is that they argue with each other about control.

I heard a wonderful talk from a gentleman at Phillips who said that, well, between the set-top box makers and the TV set makers, and even the remote control makers, everybody wants their box to be intelligent and in control and all the other boxes to be dumb peripherals. And I got no sense-- and I, in general, have no sense-- that we're learning how to solve the social problem of persuading all these companies that they should be making co-operating boxes. And I just don't know what we do about that.

NEGROPONTE: Well, in our image of things that think, we don't think too much about boxes, okay. Because as soon as you say the word "box," it seems to me a giveaway that you have already got a computing engine of some sort that it's expected to do something that is already of a digital nature. For us, we're thinking in terms of doorknobs, hinges, paint, thumbtacks, nails.

It's like a very fine grained parallel processor versus big, chunky things. Because a set-top box and a TV set are, again, in that family. And the set-top box makers are going to be history for another reason. So we can dismiss them. And they're going to evaporate. The TV manufacturers are going to be history for yet another reason.

So I don't care about them too much. But I do care about the people who make toasters and people who make microwave ovens and so on and so forth. Because, again, the personality of an object-- take a doorknob.

It would not be very difficult to get people to appreciate the fact that if the doorknob could see, could listen, could recognize burglars, could recognize the Federal Express man and sign for you, could open the door when you're coming in with packages and so on, that that might be kind of enhancing the behavior and, again, the personality of the doorknob.

The likelihood of that happening in the doorknob is quite small. Okay. Right, at least for the next few years. And even if it could happen in the doorknob, you don't want to replicate it in all doorknobs, necessarily.

And this is where you're dead on-- there's going to have to be a lot of linking going on. And these manufacturers are going to have to talk to each other. But it's not so much, John Malone talking to Apple Computer, or talking to Zenith. It really is Yale Lock talking to-- I don't know-- Stanley Something-or-Other, talking to whoever makes carpet, et cetera. And I think it's a different grain. Yes.

AUDIENCE: With respect to the horror stories you just told about people getting arrested and extradited and stuff, would you consider that to be a reason not to go online in the first place?

NEGROPONTE: Mm-mm. No, not at all.

AUDIENCE: I mean, you're suddenly being found by a whole new category of people who didn't know about you before and you don't know what's involved. [LAUGHS]

NEGROPONTE: No, I wouldn't even begin to recognize that. My goodness. I think I can probably personally claim to have produced 50% of AOL's new users in the past year. I wouldn't say that at all. I think what's happening-- and the part that's grotesque-- I mean, the US gov-- there's something-- did I see Bob Kahn in the back of the room? Oh, I see, yes. Hi, Bob. I mean, you guys down in Washington seem to have all your sign bits wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

Not you, personally, but the people who surround you-- sort of the government.

[LAUGHTER]

I mean, the export laws on encryption are mindless. It guarantees us one thing-- only the bad guys will have it. The Senator Exon stuff is mindless. I mean, because you obviously can't argue too hard against him, because you become a child pornographer if you do. But you can't control it. And why doesn't somebody tell him that?

I think government is going to find-- just in general, the nation state's going to find less and less of a role. And it's already found less of a role in the financial community. And like all things digital, they seem to get bigger and smaller at the same time. And I think you'll find that governance will get smaller and more local and more global at the same time.

AUDIENCE: Mark Bernstein, Eastgate. One of the themes, especially in Bush '45, also in Engelbart and Nelson's original work, was augmentation, liberation, better people. And in the last year or two, it seems we've seen the unexpected side effect come to roost-- laws that a transgression is worse if you're carrying a gun or do it with a computer.

NEGROPONTE: I'm sorry, [? laws ?] [? are ?] worse?

AUDIENCE: Well, for example, pornography is bad. But pornography with the aid of a computer--

NEGROPONTE: Is worse, right.

AUDIENCE: --will get its own law.

NEGROPONTE: Right.

AUDIENCE: Theft is bad. But computer theft is worse.

NEGROPONTE: Right.

AUDIENCE: Trespassing is bad.

NEGROPONTE: Right.

AUDIENCE: But trespassing on someone else's computer is a felony. And this seems to tie in with what you were saying about the [? Gulch, ?] the people who are too busy or otherwise not tied in. But since they are also the people with the power--

NEGROPONTE: Yeah. For a while.

AUDIENCE: For a while.

NEGROPONTE: Right.

AUDIENCE: How do we keep them from stomping out the whole process for a while?

NEGROPONTE: Because they can't stop the whole process. They can do anything they want. And my favorite analogy-- and I want to be very upfront. I first heard this from Mitch Resnick, and then I modified his stories.

But I love the story of the ducks flying south, and that there's some people that think the front duck is leading, which, of course, it isn't. My variation of that story is that if you go out-- and I don't recommend it-- but if you go out and shoot the front duck, they'll all scatter. And then they'll come back together, and there'll be another front duck. And it is not the vice president duck that became president duck, okay.

[LAUGHTER]

And there are people in Washington who think that. And the internet works like the ducks. And until people recognize that ducks flying south and the behavior of the net are one and the same, and unless you shoot all the ducks, you've got nothing.

And so really, it's like fighting against HD TV, which I did vehemently four years ago. And I haven't spoken about it [? since, ?] because it's just going to die of its own weight. Okay, the so-called "grand alliance" is just going to poop out. It's going to look like a sort of yak dung in about two years, on its own accord. And that's why the same thing's going to happen with the people-- they're just going to evaporate, because they just shoot one or two ducks.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. [? Matt Erst ?] from Brown University. I'd like to ask you a question about, basically, bits and atoms. Atoms have the wonderful property that they're accessible. If I get a book, anyone can read a book, whereas bits have to be interpreted. And there's an encoding. And encodings become obsolete.

So as we go to digital media, what steps do you think we need to take to make sure that it's accessible to everyone, both during one time period and for future generations [? whenever the ?] encoding changes?

NEGROPONTE: Well, the future generation part's separate, in the sense of how do you archive the bits. I mean, you could drill holes in tellurium or something that loses a few angstroms a century and then probably preserve the bits in many different ways.

But in terms of the accessibility-- and a lot of people told me, hey, smart ass, you think it's so digital, and yet you publish this stupid paper book which isn't even on the net, okay.

[LAUGHTER]

It's there right. And you know why it's not on the net? Because I may be a smart ass, but the publisher is a smarter ass and won't let me put it on the net.

[LAUGHTER]

And it turns out that the medium right now, at least for that group, that slug in the middle, the display device they have is a book. And one of our biggest projects starting up at the Media Lab is to make electronic paper. And we think we have a way of making a pulp-like medium with a very high contrast ratio that you can write in parallel.

You basically bind 100 pages of this stuff into something that'll look like a book. You write it over 20 minutes. Get, again, the contrast ratio of paper. When you're finished, you plug it back in. It sucks the bits out. It takes away the thing. And then you write it again.

And if we can pull that off, we'll actually have, in a few years, a damn thing that looks and feels like a book. But believe it or not, is eraseable and rewriteable and so on. So maybe that's an interim technology. So there are a lot of bets you have to make along the way. I'm not trying to ride on one particular bits, atoms transducer. Okay, give it to me hard. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHTER AND CLAPPING]

Or this is the last question, okay.

[LAUGHTER]

Okay.

AUDIENCE: It's very simple. Two years ago, New Media Magazine asked me to interview you. And we had a very nice chat. And I asked for a definition of "media." And you got kind of flustered and said you'd get back to me.

[LAUGHTER]

NEGROPONTE: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: And I just wondered if you have one.

[LAUGHTER]

NEGROPONTE: Um.

[LAUGHTER]

Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

Media is like air in the sense that you don't notice it until it's missing. Okay. And that's probably really what's the common denominator. Because see, one of the reasons-- and I get into trouble when I say, the message is not the [? medium. ?] People really dump on me, especially Alan Kay, who knows a lot more about Marshall McLuhan than I [? do, ?] will sort of give a very sophisticated response to that.

But I really have come to the conclusion that whatever carries the bits, and whether you think the carrier is something that has a message in it, even though the bits may be transcodable in the receiver, which is, I don't think, something McLuhan had thought about, that you could actually transmit bits, and that they actually have no, quote, "form" until they arrive at the receiver, whereupon they get transcoded into one form or another, again, it's really like air. It's not that it's paper. It's not that it's TV. It's not that it's a screen. And so it really is the bits. But it's what air is to us.

AUDIENCE: So you've said what it's like.

NEGROPONTE: Right.

AUDIENCE: Could you rephrase that as a definition?

[LAUGHTER]

NEGROPONTE: Could I rephrase that as a definition?

AUDIENCE: Yes. You said media is like air.

NEGROPONTE: Yeah. Okay. The media is air.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

[LAUGHS]

AUDIENCE: So-- [CLEARS THROAT]

[LAUGHTER]

So wind, then--

NEGROPONTE: What?

AUDIENCE: So wind, then--

NEGROPONTE: Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: --would be the motion of bits in some direction under pressure? And weather would be, let's say, the global infosphere.

NEGROPONTE: Sure. And a fart will be a fact.

[LAUGHTER]

I think my time's up. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

PRESENTER: Thanks very much, Nick. I think you did wake us up. All right. Photo op for five minutes. Take a stretch break. The rest of you, Raj Reddy is next. Would the speakers come up front right away, please? Nick really does have to leave.

It's a great pleasure to welcome Raj Reddy to the podium. Raj is, of course, the AI guru's guru. And he's best known for his pioneering work in speech recognition.

He just told me this morning a little detail that I'd forgotten. At the '68 Fall Joint Computer Conference, he competed head to head with the mother of all demos.

[LAUGHTER]

And in a parallel session, presented CMU's pioneering work on computers with hands, eyes, and ears. And he says, just like [? Doug ?] is still working on his program of research, so is he. And so is his school.

He's dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. And that includes not just the Department of Computer Science, but also the Institute for Robotics. And he's the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science and Robotics.

He's won many awards. I'll only mention the Gomory Award and the all-important Turing Award. Turing Award is the big one in our field, as you know. He's also the only person that I know of in computer science who has a Legion D'Honneur, presented by President Mitterrand.

I asked him to speak about an aspect of Bush's writing that doesn't get much press, which is his musings on speech and language understanding, and other things that are related to that-- the vocoder-- and anything else that he wants to tell us about. Raj, please.

REDDY: Thank you. Thank you, Andy. In reading the paper, Bush, and thinking about what he must have been thinking, it was clear to me, as you know, he was the crown prince of scientific establishment in the '40s in this country. And he had many problems.

And the key problem he faced was access to information on demand. And so he invented the Memex and the idea of multimedia databases based on the technologies of the day that he could think of. The theme of my talk is, that problem is still there with us. And it'll be there for 50 more years. When we have the 100th anniversary of Bush's famous paper.

The second thing we want to keep in mind is that time period between about 1945 to '55 was a very important period for the intellectual ferment that it caused to happen as a result of the digital technology being born. While Bush may not have fully understood the implications of digital technology, Alan Turing, who by that time had already invented the symbol processor Enigma and decoded the German encryption scheme, and Simon and Newell and Minsky and McCarthy were all beginning to think about computer as a symbol processor, and how symbolic processing would come to dominate computation as a whole.

And that vision is the thing, I think, that's, for us, kind of important to go away with. Namely, not the specific details that Bush proposed, but the fact that he thought, perhaps there may be ways in which one can capture multiple media, whether it's images or speech a language and text, and have it available at your fingertips on demand.

And so what I hope to do today is to kind of quickly review the progress in each of these fields and kind of show you a videotape of the current status as I see it. And then spend a few minutes talking about what the future might hold in all of these areas.

The other important link to people like Doug Engelbart here is what he was looking for is a way of amplifying [? his ?] own capabilities-- human augmentation. What all of AI is about is about enhancing the capabilities of the human being. "Intelligence amplifier" is the phrase that has been used.

The question is, what are the kinds of things we as a community can do that will make each of us 10 times, 100 times more [? effective, ?] [? then, ?] in the things that we need to do and we want to do, than we can physically be, given our human capabilities?

So those are the twin themes-- human argumentation and multimedia databases-- that I think are the central theses of Bush's paper. So if we look at it, he proposes the capture of image information of various types. And I'd like to review for you where we are in that. That includes capture, storage, retrieval, and processing in some form. He wasn't quite sure how it might be processed.

He had known about the vocoder at that time. Dudley had already shown it. And he thought perhaps it might be possible to begin to use voice input, both for annotations-- I know these days we call it the "talking paper." You can add electronic annotations to your page. And so paper which won't talk back at you can suddenly begin to talk.

And things like that, he was already thinking about. And the whole issue of hyperlinks and hypertext and language processing and text processing was innately connected with all of these [? ideas. ?]

What he did not say, and perhaps was not even thinking about, is the next issue in information and demand. I think several people pointed out-- I think it may be Bob Kahn-- and Herb Simon put it very succinctly. And if you read the recent Scientific American, there's a quote from him-- we have a wealth of information, but poverty of human attention.

The whole issue of future multimedia databases is going to be not simply providing information and demand, or data and demand, but getting the relevant information in decision-ready form to the person that needs it. People that manage that transformation and have those kinds of tools at their fingertips would be 100,000 times more effective than the rest of us who don't have those tools. And that is the key of human augmentation, in some sense.

So where are we in each of these technologies? So in image processing, I kind of first got introduced to image processing when Marvin Minsky came to Stanford in '64. And in our own hubris in AI, we thought we could create a Mars Rover that we could put on the planet Mars in 10 years. And [? Marvin ?] and John McCarthy thought we could do it in three years. So we started interfacing an image input device to the PDP-6, I think it was.

And so the fact that you could actually transmit images or information was known even to Bush. But the fact you could capture them in digital form was already practical in the early '60s, although very painfully.

But only last year it became possible to capture full video for hours on end, and put it on a desk, until we got a card that could plug into your PC or workstation, which would do [? MPEG ?] compression in real time. It was not practical. It was very painful to get any kind of moving data.

So we had to wait almost 30 years. It was, you could always capture a particular picture. But capturing moving scenes was not practical until recently.

So what we can do now, routinely-- and there's no magic to this-- we can digitize, compress, store, retrieve, and display images. And that was primarily the vision of Bush.

What we cannot yet do is what Michael was saying yesterday about image interpretation. That's not quite true. We can do some.

In fact, we have a van-- autonomous vehicle-- which drove from Washington DC all the way to San Diego. And 98% of the time, it was able to interpret the images it was seeing and drove by itself. Whenever it got confused, it beeped at the driver and said, sorry, I'm confused. You better take over.

So the theme of AI has been shown slowly shifting from replacing the human being or doing everything that a human being can do completely autonomously to the theme of human augmentation. Let us do everything that we can do. And if there are 5% or 10% that we don't know how to do automatically, let the human being take care of it. Please wait. I'll call my master. All right.

So that is the theme. And so in the image processing, we can do road navigation, digital mapping, robotic vision. People use that routinely. And there are all kinds of tricks they have to do.