From BBC today: Net guru's fragmented future Includes discussion on Broadband
Note: Bolding is mine....
Monday, 29 October, 2001, 09:37 GMT
Net guru's fragmented future
Professor Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, talks to broadcaster Mark Lawson about his vision of a digital future.
Q: People hear about how good technology is. When they sit down, for too many of them, it feels very primitive. The initial experience does not often seem to be there in terms of delivery.
A: It usually has that but you also have to realise it often has the opposite effect. Often, the actual experience is much better than what people have predicted. The cellular telephone industry five years ago was a group of "knuckle-heads" who couldn't believe that anybody would send messages back and forth and so they were kind of bullied into doing it. Finally, it was the consumers who realised that that experience was in fact better than anybody had predicted and was more valuable.
Q: The problem for broadband is that there is an expectation of visual perfection - instant delivery - and it's difficult asking people to switch to something which is almost certainly more expensive for the first time and is probably inferior in terms of what you see.
A: The first thing to do about it is make sure it is not inferior because that's kind of silly because it need not be. Digital TV is intrinsically better and the broadband experience is intrinsically better. There are some countries - Korea is the most advanced - where the broadband experience is now taken for granted, and most people don't realise that the issue isn't shipping, for example, a megabit and having a continuous stream of a million bits per second. The real issue is to get a thousand bits in a thousandth of a second.
In other words, the broadband experience is not a streaming experience as much as a response time experience and most people don't even know that. They don't realise that the value is in the response time as much as, if not much more than, the streaming media. So, sometimes, you look at something and say, "well, that's really no great advantage", partly because it was marketed and talked about in the wrong way.
Q: What was wrongly sold in that sense?
A: I think that what is wrongly sold in some of the broadband marketing efforts is that you can now look at TV on your laptop computer. Well, that's certainly true but that isn't the real feature. The real feature is that you have a different pace, a different rhythm, different response time, different way of dealing with the web itself.
3G is a 'dog'
Q: A lot of telecommunications companies, as you know, have lost a lot of money on 3G technology and people wonder what evidence there was that people really wanted their mobile phones to do all this stuff.
A: Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G. It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here. It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
With that as a backdrop, the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale. In other words, if you give me 9,600 bits per second of connectivity and you give it to me wirelessly - which is what I can get on GSM - that is terrific. 9,600 bits per second is wonderful compared with nothing. Now, you come along and you say, "well, I'll give you 28,800 bits". I'd say, "it's so complicated to get it working". So, you finally have to tempt me with something between 56 and maybe 100 kilobits per second - and then I switch. And now that I have switched to 100 kilobits per second, you come along and say, "well, I'll now give you 300 or 400 kilobits". I'm not interested. You have to give me four or five million to make me switch.
Q: You say that 3G is a dog. How can you judge those ideas are dogs? How do you make those distinctions?
A: You've got to separate out the embodiment of the solution. You can't argue against broadband. Now, it can be implemented in many different ways that are more logical or less logical; or more appealing or less appealing. 3G doesn't even exist. Some people might argue that it'll come in a year or two years (don't think the Japanese have it, that's not 3G). The sad part, and this isn't being discussed enough, is that it's no good.
Q: Why is it not good?
A: It's not good enough because it doesn't give the consumer enough difference. It's giving them 100,000 bits per second more figuratively. It's got to do a lot better and it's got to have more value.
Web's economic impact
Q: Value - that's a good point to raise the question of people paying for these services. If you take the internet - which everyone accepts is a great triumph - but it's commercially in most areas a disaster.
A: I am astonished that you say that because it has had such an economic impact. Look at the behaviour of corporations. The internet has had a huge impact economically and has provided all the opportunities for downsizing and right-sizing and procurement chains. These things that sound like consultant gobbledegook actually have trimmed corporations around the world.
Q: But the content providers though are not making money.
A: Well, we could argue about that. In Latin America, for example, newspapers increasingly find that they have more readership on their websites. Obviously, they have 100% readership on their websites when it comes from expatriates. So, it does have that enormous outreach. The domestic use of it - I think in many cases - my sample is maybe limited to about 20 newspapers - they are certainly breaking even and some of them are doing better than breaking even.
Now, it depends how you do your accounting - how much you value, for instance, the classified ads. Again, I'll pick Korea where there is a great thirst for getting expatriates to come back to Korea and take leadership positions in senior management, companies, government, and so on. If you start looking at those and giving some value to that - it's pretty damn good.
Q: One of the phenomena we see is people being able to buy PCs in high street shops that allow them to make films or documentaries very easily. Where in your view does that leave the professional content providers?
A: When we teach kids how to write and they come home and do their essays as part of their homework and so on, we don't sit there agonising what this will do to journalists in the future. So, somehow, you expand the medium of expression for kids. I don't think that jeopardises the professionals; it creates a pool of much richer talent as these young people and others move through life.
I think that is terrific and the computer has brought much more, if you will, to the right brain: most of us went to school and school is 98% taking your left brain and turning it into a football and leaving your right brain like the size of a pea.
Q: One of the things they fear and broadcasters fear is that authority is being taken away. There is an argument that democratisation is fine but you can end up with a democracy of nonsense, lies and innuendo, and the internet does suggest that can happen.
A: It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned.
Nation state explosion
Q: You say digital technology will end the nation state and eventually produce a global cyber state. Now, speaking at this moment, that looks particularly wrong, doesn't it? You have a war being fought in defence of states; you have people who don't have states - Muslims and Palestinians - saying can we have a nation state, please? So, that prediction has turned out to be very wrong.
A: No, actually, it's turned out to be quite right. Let me explain how. Clearly, the notion of a piece of land, definable - these are atoms and they have an edge and a limiting contour - as something that you relate to as a culture or as an individual is extraordinarily important. What's happened is that the nation state as we know it today happens to be the wrong size. It's too big to be local and it's too small to be global; the UK is a perfect example.
You are suddenly breaking up into pieces. Now, people in Scotland will say, "well, we are going to become a country, eventually". You are breaking up into pieces - more manageable and more culturally relevant sizes.
You haven't done what Yugoslavia did, yet, but you did sort of break up and if you look at countries around the world, that's happening more and more. When they actually break up, and whether Scotland and Wales join the EU 15 years from now, is perhaps less important than this trend. And the trend is a very digital one - that things get bigger and smaller at the same size.
If you look at some of the real winners today - I'll pick Ireland, I'll pick Norway, I'll pick Singapore, I'll pick Costa Rica - these are countries which have done really quite well in the digital world. The four of them have something really interesting in common and that is that each one of them is 3.5 million people - there is a kind of a magic about the number of 3.5 million - it turns about to be a reasonable size.
You have in rough numbers between 220 and 230 countries today. But I think you're going to find 5-, 6-, 7,000 countries in the sense of a nation state 20 or 30 years from now. I think you are going to see the UN becoming either irrelevant or much more important - other entities coming and then the local being much more local.
Future of computing
Q: Not all countries survive now and not all companies survive. What does MIT's Media Lab need to do in the future?
A: We have a very large, relatively unknown biotech programme going on. We have the world's authority on quantum computing, we have lots of people who walk around with little white lab jackets on ordering chemicals. Maybe some TV programmes will be sent in vitamin pills. Just as you now swallow Vitamin E you might also get the news. I don't know.
Q: One of things you do is to predict the future. You say that eventually there will be more Barbie dolls connected to the internet than Americans. Why would they want to be, and beyond that are there any other visions of the future?
A: First of all, put that in context that the largest amount of semi-conductor material to flow into the home will undoubtedly be through toys. It's not TV sets; it's not refrigerators; it's not PCs; it's not handsets - it's going to be toys. The reason I use that Barbie doll example is that the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content.
If you are not making content for Barbie dolls today, you should start real soon.
So, when we talk about Barbie dolls being online, it's part of a very general and I think a very important change. The next 10 years isn't the difference between bits and atoms. The next 10 years is about how bits and atoms come together; how do more bits get embedded in more atoms right down to grains of sugar?
I'm not talking about refrigerators with microprocessors in them, I am talking about right down to the molecular level where you start to put more computation into things and that merger - bits and atoms - as they come together is the caricature we see in the Barbie doll. This is a very serious and important trend.
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