Статьи 5 семестр / _N. Negroponte. The guru of cyberspace 2
.docone of Negroponte's "heroes" and a Media Lab colleague. "If they pushed something out of the way enough times, the machine would move it somewhere else." It did work. The problems, Negro-ponte notes, were keeping the gerbils awake and dealing with concerns expressed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (the robot would occasionally seize an unsuspecting gerbil) and a women's organization (the gerbils were all male).
"Back at M.I.T., less zany work was proceeding, which more and more evolved the idea of personalized computing," he continues. In 1976 the group devised the notion of a Spatial Data Management System, or SDMS, a seminal step in the development of multimedia. The idea, in brief, was that people would more readily interact with computers if they could access data as they did any other needed object—by reaching for it. The single most important part of SDMS, Negroponte says, was Dataland: a demonstration room equipped with an instrumented Eames chair, a wall-size color display and oc-tophonic sound. Someone sitting in the chair could "fly" over Dataland as if it were a landscape, touching down on calculators, electronic books or maps.
"SDMS was so far ahead of its time that its impact was mostly lost," Negroponte writes. Indeed, Dataland drew his first nomination for the Golden Fleece Award, which Senator William Proxmire of Rhode Island gave to those federally funded research programs he deemed gratuitous. "I don't know how many times I have been nominated," Negroponte writes. "Proxmire's office was cagey and coy. In retrospect, it is easy to want to have won. It is always nice to be considered totally wrong and then proved right." Dataland was the first computer interface to rely on a desktop metaphor. And although many of the ideas, behind Apple's Macintosh design came from Xerox, the use of icons, and the name itself, came from Arch Mach.
Also during the 1970s, Negroponte's team forged the link between computer graphics and television and broke new ground in interactive movies and teleconferencing. "Nicholas has a great way to keep research on the forefront," Min-sky reports. "When something becomes generally accepted and popular, he encourages the lab to abandon it! NN often understands what will be important years before others do and encourages projects in those areas."
Not everyone at M.I.T. has put such faith in NN's judgment over the years. When he proposed in 1978 that M.I.T. build a new "arts and media technology laboratory" to explore the convergence
of the broadcast, publishing and computer industries, "some people found the idea ludicrous," he concedes. But Jerome B. Wiesner, another "hero" and president of M.I.T. at the time, did not. In 1979 MJ.T.'s corporation gave the go-ahead, and Negroponte and Wiesner set forth to raise $12 million. "Five years, two million miles and $50 million later, the Media Lab existed."
"With Wired, Being Digital and even you, I am far too public for
my Media Lab job."
Shortly after its doors opened in 1985, the Media Lab took off, nearly doubling its income each year. "Because telecommunications were sniffing at the information business, and computer companies were worried about their declining margins, it was hard for the Media Lab not to grow," he says. Now, of course, the two industries are moving toward the altar—although it is unclear what this union will produce. "The legal and economic issues are harder to understand than the technical ones," he writes. "The law is flapping around like a dead fish—which is an early warning about the complexity that lies ahead." He advocates complete deregulation to let competition decide.
Although the Media Lab began courting telecommunications and computer companies at the right time, Negroponte credits much of its success to Wiesner: "He taught me everything I know about being entrepreneurial in an academic setting." Negroponte has learned away from M.I.T. as well. He is a special general partner in a venture-capital fund that finances start-up information and entertainment companies. He personally invested in Wired because the "people were perfect, and the timing was perfect." And he has put his own money on holographic chocolates. ("It hasn't gone belly-up," he writes. "The real winner will be lollipops, because you hold them to best advantage—for a transmission hologram—and you can imagine the image changing as you lick.")
Wiesner, he says, also taught him how to run a lab: "You work for the faculty, and the best faculty are usually the biggest pains, but worth it." As examples, he offers Media Lab legends Seymour A. Papert, who initially co-directed the Artificial Intelligence lab with Minsky, and the late Muriel R. Cooper, described
as the lab's "primary design force." The effort paid off. "Ten years ago we were considered all icing and no cake," Negroponte writes. "That has gone away. But people still think we are isolated."
In style, if not in science, they are. The sleek, white, tiled building where the Media Lab is housed, designed by I. M. Pei (yet another "hero"), stands in sharp contrast to the gray concrete maze where most everyone else works. The aim lies more in demonstrating new ideas than in building marketable products. Unlike the "boot-camp attitude toward teaching and research" at other departments, the lab tries to give young faculty "rope, not duties, to prove themselves." The grace period, Minsky says, is made possible in part by a "buffering of future funds," which gush in not only from "old friends" of M.I.T., such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, but from greener friends in Tinseltown and Tokyo as well. And Negroponte is far more visible than most M.I.T. administrators.
"With Wired, Being Digital and even you, I am far too public for my Media Lab job," he declares. (A review of Being Digital appears on page 214.) "I am trying to be a nouveau Yankee, learning slowly" and hoping to avoid attention. But given his infectious optimism and flair for presenting the future, it's not easy. As Negroponte sees it, we will all soon be blessed with computer interfaces as pleasant and personable as a well-trained butler. They will handle our affairs, assemble personalized newspapers and help to free us from the constraints of time and place. The Media Lab's newest enterprise, called Things That Think, aims to invent ways for making everything from cuff links to coats more accommodating. "Being digital, whatever it means," he writes, "means having it your way."
With such a pitch, it is only natural that many people pester him for details. Critics such as Cliff Stoll, the author of Silicon Snake Oil, warn that being digital will create lonely legions of on-line addicts. Negroponte, who describes himself as a compulsive user of E-mail for the past 25 years, says this charge makes him laugh. Ever enthusiastic, he argues that if anything, being digital stands to improve everyone's life—except maybe those older generations too busy to catch up. It has clearly worked for him. "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," he writes. "I have got a life and a nice one. Same wife, same house, same car, same boat, new bulldog (because the old one died). But that life is pretty private." —Kristin Leutwyler
52 scientific american September 1995