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Home » Nicholas Negroponte Discusses The 30-year History of The Future – TED Talk Transcript

Nicholas Negroponte Discusses The 30-year History of The Future – TED Talk Transcript

In this TED Talk, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. And then he leaves you with one last (absurd? brilliant?) prediction for the coming 30 years.

Audio-Only:

 

 

Video:

 

Nicholas Negroponte – MIT Media Lab founder

(Starts with Video) Can we switch to the video disc, which is in play mode?

[[Video] I’m really interested in how you put people and computers together. We will be using the TV screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future. (Music, crosstalk) Very interested in touch-sensitive displays, high-tech, high-touch, not having to pick up your fingers to use them. There is another way where computers touch people: wearing, physically wearing. Suddenly on September 11th, the world got bigger.]

Thank you. Thank you.

When I was asked to do this, I was also asked to look at all 14 TED Talks that I had given, chronologically. The first one was actually two hours. The second one was an hour, and then they became half hours, and all I noticed was my bald spot getting bigger.

Imagine seeing your life, 30 years of it, go by, and it was, to say the least, for me, quite a shocking experience. So what I’m going to do in my time is try and share with you what happened during the 30 years, and then also make a prediction, and then tell you a little bit about what I’m doing next. And I put on a slide where TED 1 happened in my life. And it’s rather important because I had done 15 years of research before it, so I had a backlog, so it was easy. It’s not that I was Fidel Castro and I could talk for two hours, or Bucky Fuller. I had 15 years of stuff, and the Media Lab was about to start. So that was easy.

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