BIOMEDevice keynoter Negroponte calls biotech the new digital

Boston, MA. “Biotech is the new digital,” according to Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and a member of the MIT faculty since 1966. Delivering a keynote address at BIOMEDevice Thursday, he shared his views of what’s happening today and why it looks very much the same as what was happening 20 or 30 years ago when one could project with great certainty that the world was becoming digital—the only question was when.

He noted that he is old enough to have been to the future several times. One thing he has noticed, he said, is that the manmade and natural are becoming one and the same. When he grew up, he said, people built artificial things in the natural world—cities, for example, were made up of manmade objects built in the natural world.

“That difference is gone,” he said. “Suddenly we are engineering not just to be informed by nature but to do better—that’s scary to some people: we can design things better than nature; that’s a huge change.” Biotech becoming the new digital, he said, is happening much faster than most people think.

Negroponte then outlined the role of the MIT Media Lab, which is to do what normal market forces do not do. If normal market forces will do something, he said, then the 700 people in the Media Lab should not do it, drawing a distinction between mission vs. market. “People say we can mix the two—with impact investing and corporate responsibility.” But he added, the result is so trivial that we are better off realizing that markets and missions really are separate. Being good at marketing does not imply being good at missions, he emphasized—a fact he said he observes in the presidential primaries.

He cited several predictions over the years, ranging from e-ink to flat-panel displays. Not all were correct, but most were. He emphasized that he is not a futurist, like Alvin Toffler. “I do not have a futurist bone in my body,” he said. His success at predicting the future grew from his ability to extrapolate from work already being done at MIT—extending back to 1965 with a prototype of an Uber-like car-on-demand mapping program.

He then turned his attention to the 1976 Israeli raid on the Entebbe, Uganda, airport, following the hijacking of an Air France jet. The operation resulted in the rescue of 103 hostages. To prepare for the mission, he said, the Israeli team built a replica of the airport (which they could do because Israeli engineers had designed the airport) in which to practice.

Building physical replicas of potential terrorist targets is generally not feasible, but the Israeli raid got the attention of the Pentagon, which asked what would be possible through simulation.

Negroponte and his colleagues proposed a solution: recording scenes from a vehicle-mounted video camera, using videodiscs for playback in the simulated environment. They chose Aspen, CO, as a test case, filming each street and corner in each direction at one frame per three feet. “In 1978 the Aspen project was magic,” he wrote in his book Being Digital. “Multimedia was born.”

The test location may have been instrumental in the Aspen project attracting the attention of Senator William Proxmire, famous for distributing “Golden Fleece” awards. Negroponte said he was nominated several times and had he received the award would have worn it as a badge of honor. As Motherboard put it, “The Aspen Movie Map beat Google Street View by 34 years.”

Negroponte discussed other initiatives that attracted unwarranted derision, including touch displays. Peer-reviewed papers at the time cited three reasons why touch displays would never work: fingers would occlude the region being pointed at, fat fingers provided insufficient resolution, and screens would get dirty.

Negroponte made one claim—under the rubric “self-evident”—sure to be contentious to the test-and-measurement community: “If you have to measure something to understand its impact, it isn’t worth doing.” You could actually be taking energy away from the inventing process.

That led to a discussion of the idea of being “meta.” If you are discussing a design, try to “…pop up a level and be more meta about it,” he said.

The MIT Media Lab, he said, is a home for misfits, with “anti-disciplinary” part of the job description. “If you can find a faculty position anywhere else in the world, go there,” he said. “If not, come see us.” Describing a project the “misfits” might work on, he said the average car has 10,000 to 20,000 parts. Can you make a car with one part—plant a seed, as it were? The idea may be wacky, he said, but pursuing the target may be worthwhile even if the ultimate goal isn’t achieved.

He then turned his attention back to biotech and medical topics, saying that recent hires at the Media Lab have been from the biotech and medical worlds. Topics of interest include extreme bionics and optogenetics—dealing with the brain from the inside rather than the outside. Such topics may be anti-disciplinary initially, but over the years they become mainstream, allowing there practitioners to earn tenure, and the Media Lab can start over in new anti-disciplinary areas.

Negroponte also cited the work of Hugh Herr, who developed a prosthetic leg for dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, injured during the Boston Marathon bombing three years ago this week.

Negroponte said that when he was a student, brain scientists were divided into the “wets” and “drys”—the latter including psychologists and computational brain scientists. He emphasized the “drys,” including Seymour Papert, who observed that children who could learn to write computer programs got as close as possible to the “meta” process of thinking about thinking. Children who learn to code turn out to be better at spelling—suggesting that learning to spell may be related to learning to debug code.

He then addressed the One Laptop Per Child effort, which got several million rugged laptops in the hands of children worldwide, prompting other organizations to complement the OLPC effort to get a total to 50 million laptops to be distributed.

A criticism OLPC engendered, he said, was that “Negroponte just wants to give a child a laptop and walk away. I never said that.” But the criticism prompted him to ask, what would happen if we did drop off computers in places with no schools, the nearest school is 50 miles away, and where everyone in the village is illiterate, having never seen written words except maybe on a cigarette pack.

So as an experiment, Motorola Xoom tablets loaded with educational apps (in English) were dropped off at two remote Ethiopian villages—the only instruction was that the solar-panel energy sources needed to be placed outside. Within minutes, the children had turned the tablets on and in less than a week were using 50 apps per child per day. As David Talbot described it in MIT Technology Review, “After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the ‘alphabet song,’ and even spelling words.”

In the Q&A session following Negroponte’s keynote, a BIOMEDevice attendee from India asked, if we can get laptops into poor rural areas, why can’t we get medical instruments into the hands of doctors in such areas?

Negroponte put up a slide he said he hadn’t intended to get to in his address but that was relevant to the question. The slide was titled “Capitalism is not Democracy.” If you think business can always do a better job than civil society, he said, you should try riding a train in Switzerland. Medical care, he said, should be the obligation of civil society, diverting funds from the military if necessary.