Nicholas Negroponte

"You can see the future best through peripheral vision."

"I think the Net is scaling very well. Because of the way it was designed, I don't think it will come to its knees and crash. I see it as very organic in the way it's capable of living and reproducing …"

"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."

"When you write a computer program you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions. But when there's a bug — and all programs have bugs …"

"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."

"Personal computers will make our future adult population simultaneously more mathematically able and more visually literate. Ten years from now, teenagers are likely to enjoy a much richer panorama of…"

"Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreic…"

"The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time — you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing."