Lack of creativity will kill evolution of IT, expert says
Ten years ago information technology expert Nicholas Negroponte, author of the bestseller Being Digital, told us how IT was going to change our lives.
Now he warns that, unless we change the way we work and live, the future of IT is in trouble.
Professor Negroponte, a founder of Wired magazine, is on a crusade to stamp out the killers of creativity - an element from which technological advances are born.
In the 1980s, he co-founded the MIT Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which marries creativity and technology.
Projects undertaken at the lab include cyberflora - a robotic flower garden - and an artificial tongue that would have the human capability of taste.
While some of the projects seem off-the-wall, the laboratory has made advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence.
What all the projects - both the useable and seemingly impractical - have in common is their creativity. And often, Professor Negroponte points out, something useable is born out of the unusual.
At a lunch in Hong Kong last week, Professor Negroponte, who last visited the city in 1999, gave the example of a chair created in the lab for American magicians Penn and Teller. Dubbed the 'spirit chair', it was used to stage an escape trick.
The sensor system in the magicians' chair was later used by NEC in cars to prevent an airbag from deploying in the front passenger side when it contained an infant sitting in a baby carrier - thereby averting a potentially fatal situation.
'It is now the largest baby seat technology on the market,' Professor Negroponte said, adding it was a perfect example of how creativity spawned a practical solution to a serious problem.
He said some cultures - in particular Asian - inherently and unknowingly stifled creativity.
One problem was that they were homogenous - different cultures and points of view were needed to stimulate creativity, he said.
A bigger proportion of foreign students in universities would help foster the exchange of ideas and cultures. Professor Negroponte said an ideal ratio of foreign students was 35 per cent - which happens to be the proportion at the MIT Media Lab.
'Some people say that 35 per cent foreign students [at the lab] is unpatriotic. What a ridiculous point of view. They contribute extraordinary different points of view,' he said.
MIT founded the Asia Media Lab in India in 2001, but it closed last year.
The university cited disagreements with the country's government over the focus and management of research projects, which included developing rural wireless networks and building speech interfaces to make information more accessible to illiterate people.
Despite the failure of the Asia Media Lab, Professor Negroponte believed India had a bright future in IT - but one that China might overshadow.
If one were to compile a list of the qualities needed to cultivate a successful technology sector, India and China would fulfil all the requirements, he said.
'Three years ago, China could have changed the world by skipping 3G and going right to 4G,' he said of the country's move, which had been disparaged by some critics as a substantial favour to the United States and its home-grown CDMA mobile equipment company Qualcomm.
