Nicholas Negroponte

I was a volunteer for OLPC (one of his projects that came out of the MIT Media lab in 2007) and saw some of vision in that project and people like Walter Bender (who is mentioned in the book). He is a visionary person for things he worked on and saw. The book is from the 90s, when the internet was just starting to be popular. It shows vision in so many areas and is plain spoken as to make it accessible to average people. Even now you can see things he imagined unfolding like the Amazon Alexa, which enables people to 'do something' rather than work on a computer, keyboard and mouse, by using a hands-free technological agents.… (more)

Would have been a good read 10 years ago. The author got some things right, but a lot of the predictions -- or at least a lot of the focus -- is wrong. This was written at the dawn of the Internet. CD-ROM's were still a big thing, and dvd's hadn't appeared yet.

As a study into what we thought the future would hold, it was interesting. But I kept wanting to tell the author to shut up about things like digital, connected toasters. It was a dumb idea, and no one ever wanted such a thing anyway.… (more)