It makes no sense to ship atoms when you can ship bits.
My advice to graduates is to do anything except what you are trained for. Take that training to a place where it is out of place and stimulate ideas, shake up establishments, and don’t take no for an answer.
Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.
Very often kids don’t ask questions in class because they don’t want to be seen asking a question.
You can see the future best through peripheral vision.
It’s hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you’re going to depend on the community to make software for it.
Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.
I’ve spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don’t want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.
A Wired reader told me once, Get a life, which I read from the back of a yacht in the Aegean, while eating fresh sea urchins and drinking terrific Montrachet.
If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop.
In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, “One laptop per child.”
Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.
Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
Scale will get you strategy.
The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas.
The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential – small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.
Rote learning is a killer for most of us and for some people, it really excludes them.
Juan Enriquez will change your view of change itself.
But just as elevators have changed the shape of buildings and cars have changed the shape of cities, bits will change the shape of organizations, be they companies, nations, or social structures.