Negroponte, Nicholas

Nicholas Negroponte, (born December 1, 1943, New York City, New York, U.S.), American architect and computer scientist who was the founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory and founded One Laptop per Child (OLPC). Negroponte gained fame with his book Being Digital (1995), which predicted a future in which digital technology becomes an intimate part of everyday life.

Negroponte was born to a wealthy Greek shipping family and lived in Le Rosey, Switzerland, London, and New York as a child. In 1961 he attended MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study architecture. The discipline directed him toward the use of computers as a tool in architectural design. In 1966 Negroponte graduated from MIT with a master’s degree in architecture and joined the faculty there. Over the next few years he also worked as a visiting professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968 he founded the MIT Architecture Machine Group, which performed some of the first human-computer interface research. Negroponte wrote a book, The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (1970), detailing his work.

Negroponte launched the MIT Media Laboratory in 1985. The lab was founded in response to the growing role of computers in modern life and had a mandate to raise funds and find creative ways to develop new digital media technologies. Controversially, the lab grew out of MIT’s School of Architecture rather than out of its School of Electrical Engineering, which housed the computer science department. By 1987 the lab was engaged in developing technologies such as speech recognition, electronic music, holography, advanced television, electronic publishing, and computer games. The lab attracted such high-tech luminaries as computer scientist Alan Kay, cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence philosopher Marvin Minsky, and computer scientist and mathematician Seymour Papert to conduct its research. It adopted an unusual “demo or die” credo, demanding that students and faculty not simply publish their technical research but also demonstrate innovations to the lab’s corporate sponsors.

In addition to his Media Lab work, Negroponte funded more than 40 start-up businesses. One of the most successful was Wired magazine, to which Negroponte contributed $75,000 of his own money in 1992. In exchange for his money, Negroponte was given regular space to write an opinion column on digital culture for each edition, heightening the professor’s profile.

In 1995 Negroponte published his best-selling book Being Digital, in which he described and anticipated a future composed of digital bits that would be distinct from the archaic analog world comprising objects, or “atoms.” He predicted that the things in the world of atoms, such as newspapers, books, films, and cars, would largely continue to exist but would be substituted by digital bits in the form of new media. Most in the digital community agree that Negroponte was on target with his central insight—that bits will transform video, text, audio, and photography into a single unified medium.

In 2000 Negroponte took a leave from the Media Lab and founded OLPC, which seeks to provide laptop computers to the estimated 100 million children worldwide who are uneducated because of a lack of schools. OLPC has designed hardware and software to power rugged low-cost laptops for “self-empowered learning.” As of 2011, more than two million such computers have been distributed to children in developing countries.