[MUSIC PLAYING]
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE: I should have been so offended that I
said oh well, then I won't come.
But I will use my time to take you through-- first of all a
very big x, which is inspired by Mary Lou's presentation
yesterday, which is the next slide.
That's the really big x.
And it's the opposite.
This is from the year 1910.
It was a postcard made in France and the artist was
showing the fact that their image in 2000
would be wearing something.
And it's got to be possible to put on a helmet, and put a
book into your head without you having to read it.
And if that's true that would change the world in many ways.
I hope people are working on it.
I'm not.
I'm going to show you a much more modest x.
But I'd love to see that happen.
My x is basically something I've been
doing for a long time.
I'm going to talk very little about one laptop per child,
but much more about the general problem, and then a
very specific experiment.
I think primary education is the world's biggest problem.
Now, yes, there are other [INAUDIBLE].
But primary education is important not just because
there are 1.5 billion children and a hundred million of them
don't go to first grade, but primary education is different
than middle school, high school, and university.
It's not what you learn.
It's not the subjects, and the facts you learn.
What you have to learn in primary
education is learning itself.
And then as a sub theme, which is perhaps maybe a super
theme, is you've got to become passionate about it.
So learning to learn and learning to love to learn is
really important.
And what do you do when you have 100 million
who don't go to school?
Then the solution is, what can they learn by themselves?
And the reason I look at that and I think it is a moonshot
is because you don't have to learn everything by yourself.
And if you do go to school it still applies to you.
But for those 100 million, that's all you have. There
won't be teachers for a while.
There are no literate people in the village.
And the kids aren't not going to school because they're
working in the fields.
There just isn't one.
So that's what we're looking at.
The laptop, just by way of background, has about 2.5
million in the field.
Over the past five years we've spent, believe
it or not, $1 billion.
So it's a huge project.
And there's a lot of results from it.
In Peru--
this actually happens to be Peru--
kids are teaching their parents to read and write.
We don't know the exact numbers.
But it could be as high as 50%.
Which would mean that 500,000 kids 6 to 12 years old are
teaching their parents how to read and write.
I don't have a better story.
That's as good as it gets.
And it's very, very different.
I always put this slide up.
It's one of my favorites.
This man in India had never, ever seen a computer.
He had always taught with the kids in straight lines.
They were standing there petrified to answer--
or sitting on these little mats- because they didn't want
to be wrong.
And this is how he teaches today.
So this is a site just sent to me from one of our teams that
went into Ethiopia recently.
And I just put a caption at the bottom, in case you can't
read the handwriting.
And I thought that was quite extraordinary.
That the people of this village were smart enough to
realize that education is cheaper than ignorance.
Here's what learning by yourself, for us, needs.
And so we are framing this in terms of technologies.
I have four of them that I think are important.
The fourth is perhaps the most important.
The $10 tablet--
Herman Hauser has shown you some of his stuff.
I have some printed electronics, we saw some
yesterday for conformable machines, a $10 tablet is
really doable.
And if somebody wanted to do the moonshot for the $10
tablet, and do one tablet per child--
and I'll pass around actually, for those of you who want to
entertain yourself playing with things while I talk, one
is a model.
I'll send it this way.
And one's actually a working machine.
These are the--
you don't count, you're family.
So we'll pass.
And you can pass the cover separately.
And I just pass that around because what we're doing now,
and it's gotten a lot of press.
But what does it need?
What are the four things you need to do?
Printed, I've mentioned.
Mary Lou's made a fantastic dual mode display that is
really high contrast when it reflects and low
power when it transmits.
The fact that this doesn't exist is inexcusable.
Not because Mary Lou hasn't done it, but the world
really needs it.
Your iPad should be a Kindle when you want it to be.
And your Kindle should be an iPad when you want it to be.
At least in terms of the display.
10 meter drop tests we do easily now.
And waterproof is also--
the one being passed around is waterproof.
You can drop it in the water and use it underwater.
I really feel strongly about connectivity and trying to
find ways to create.
And I deliberated between using the term no cost and
almost no cost. And no cost can be done by coming up with
some standby concepts where bits don't get translated,
they get cashed.
And only used when the system isn't being used.
Because bandwidth is the most perishable
commodity on the planet.
You don't use it right now, it's gone.
So if it's there, use it.
And nobody else is using it, there are concepts of no cost
and standby that are pretty simple.
Yesterday, spray on antenna.
Boy would I like to make a phased array.
So kids walking around with things together make a
satellite antenna.
It's perfectly possible.
Also, I imagine going with this spray can and spraying
periodically, making more or less an infinite mesh network
that just went around the world.
And kids would be just sent spray cans.
And you'd create the world's network.
And trickle charging is pretty important.
We are so committed to power.
The machine that's circulating is three watts.
The machine that's coming off the assembly line is one watt.
Your laptop is--
Mary Lou help me--
35 to 40?
What are laptops today, roughly?
MARY LOU: About 15 watts and you've got 1 or 2 watts.
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE: But a general laptop?
Isn't it more like 30 watts, 35 watts?
Yeah.
So one watt is important to us because we want the
kids to wind it.
We want to use your upper body to power these things.
And then there's a lot, again, things you could--
I've always been puzzled that when my cellphone runs out of
power, why can't I just shake it a little bit and then
continue the call.
Say, one moment please, OK what were we saying?
It's doable.
And people just don't do it.
Now here's the hard part.
The hard part is that the constructionists, of which I'm
one, we've done a very bad job over the past 25 years.
A lot of good papers, a lot of good speeches.
But what I'll call instructionism, which is sort
of 3a, has sort of crept forward.
And more and more people think that what we have to do-- and
this is obviously much more for older kids--
is we've got to get things in their head.
And then test whether it's in their head or not.
And we're going to give them a body of knowledge and then
test whether they know it.
Well in our world, especially for younger
kids, that isn't important.
And I know I keep repeating it.
But what's important is have you learned, which is
sometimes called critical thinking, creative thinking.
And writing computer programs has sort of
fallen off the table.
Most people in this room do it.
But I'm talking about kids who are today 20 to 25 years old
who went to the best schools in this country--
private schools--
didn't write computer programs. And 25 years ago we
thought they all would.
When Seymour Papert did Logo back in the '70s, the idea was
that when a kid wrote a program, that was the closest
that child would come to thinking about thinking.
And then when the child debugged the program, which
definitely has to happen, it never works on the first time,
that the act of debugging was a close approximation of
learning about learning.
And we saw in New York City, 1975, the kids who were
writing Logo programs were better spellers.
Huh?
Unrelated.
Why would you be a better speller?
You know why you're a better speller?
Because when they were getting their spelling
tests, guess what.
The programmers were interested in the bugs.
They were interested in which words they got wrong.
They discussed them, they trade them.
They said is it i before e except after c?
When I went to school if I got two out of 10 words wrong, I
was thrilled.
It was a B. I was such a bad speller.
I never got a B. So I took the two that I did and I hid them.
And I just couldn't have cared less.
So simply celebrating the bugs is a
fundamental piece of learning.
And you learn that again.
So it's not whether I have learned my multiplication
tables to 25.
It's not whether I have looked at Kahn Academy videos for six
hours and picked up some body of knowledge.
And it's not even as if I've read lots of books.
Most Americans don't know the difference between the Baltics
and the Balkans.
And we're not going to sit here and say, well you've got
to know the difference between the Baltics and Balkans.
You've got to know how to find out the difference.
And for these kids, the most important thing-- this is
where I'm going to end--
is learning to read.
So what are we doing today?
We're doing a very small experiment.
It's funded out of my pocket.
That's how small it is.
And this experiment is the following question--
can a child learn how to read on his or her own?
The brain has evolved over roughly a
million years or more.
And it knows how to walk and talk.
You're wired to do those.
I can take a five-year-old child from any country--
Nepal, Africa, nation--
drop that child in Paris and within 10 months five-year-old
child will be speaking French.
No question.
Reading doesn't work that way.
The brain does not read naturally.
It's only 3,500 years old.
We haven't evolved a reading brain.
But from that comment you don't leap me to say, oh yes
and reading requires three years of painful sitting in a
classroom and doing calligraphy, and phonetics,
and being yelled at for three years.
No.
There's something probably a lot simpler.
So what we've done--
and this is the first village we're working in--
is we're going into villages that have no literacy.
Zero.
No literate adult within 200 miles.
We've picked two.
This is one of them.
They went in last week.
They, in this case, are 30 tablets with tons and tons of
books that read themselves.
Tom Kalil said he wanted that.
Well, we have thousands of books that read themselves.
Children's books, cartoons with titles, games with
phonetics and letters and so on.
And all sorts of stuff.
And basically the question is--
six months later, eight months later, go back.
Do the kids read?
If the answer is yes, that is so transformational.
Now the first time we go in we want to see-- and then what
we're trying to learn what we should put
really on the tablets.
And the tablets, they're in the field today, as I speak,
in that particular village with those kids and their
friends are probably a far shot from what should be.
But when we can find out stuff that is then
within some short period--
this could be done very rigorously.
OLPC's been criticized for not being scientific enough.
Boy, this time we're doing the opposite.
We're working with our critics.
We're doing it as a real experiment.
And I hope to be able to report in sum, whether it's
two years or one year doesn't matter.
But if we can prove that children can learn how to read
on their own, that's going to help the 100 million kids who
don't go to school.
So that's my mini moonshot.
And the other moonshot, absent the helmet we wear to download
all the books on the planet into our head.
Thank you very much.
MALE SPEAKER: Let us define x.
X is a solution.
A solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem.
Like climate change or cancer.
One that effects the world.
But what if we redefine x as a challenge?
An opportunity for radical thinking.
A chance to light up the world with breakthrough ideas and
cutting edge technology.
The stuff of science fiction that just might fly after all.
Solving for x requires wonder and imagination.
And a vision to build seemingly impossible solutions
to the world's biggest problems. Solve for x.
Moonshot thinking.