Computer science departments have always considered ‘user interface’ research to be sissy work.
When we go to school, very often, we don’t see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.
The cost of electronics in a modern car now exceeds the cost of its stall.
If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other, not see what each other is doing, not coordinate their functions?
What’s the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.
Kids drop out of school mostly because school is boring and not particularly relevant.
Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching – but good teaching and by good teachers – a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.
There is a belief that children drop out of school because they’re needed by their families to work, or the little girls are needed to take care of younger siblings. It turns out that’s not really true.
The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.
Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it’s a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way – and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things – is one of the best ways to learn.
You go to developing countries today and you’ll find automobiles that you haven’t seen since you’re childhood and that’s because they really are valuable, they’re taken care of, they’re repaired, and when something breaks, they just don’t buy a new one, they actually fix it.
Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.
Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.
Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.
Good education has got to be good entertainment.
By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.
MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.
In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it’s computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.
When you meet a head of state, and you say, ‘What is your most precious natural resource?’ they will not say children at first, and then when you say, ‘children,’ they will pretty quickly agree with you.