We hear a lot today about the importance of “disruptive innovation,” “deep technologies,”  “moonshots,” and even “technological miracles.” What do these terms mean and how are they related? Are they just silly clichés used to hype techno-exuberant books, articles, and speeches? Or do these terms have real meaning and importance?

This article explores those questions and argues that, while these terms are confronted with definitional challenges and occasional overuse, they retain real importance to human flourishing, economic growth, and societal progress.

Basic Concepts

Don Boudreaux defines moonshots as, “radical but feasible solutions to important problems” and Mike Cushing has referred to them as “innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.” “Deep technology” is another buzzword being used to describe such revolutionary and important innovations. Swati Chaturvedi of investment firm Propel[x] says deep technologies are innovations that are “built on tangible scientific discoveries or engineering innovations” and “are trying to solve big issues that really affect the world around them.”

“Disruptive technology” or “game-changing innovations” are other terms that are often used in reference to technologies and inventions with major societal impacts. “Transformative technologies” is another increasingly popular term, albeit one focused mostly on health and wellness-related innovations.

However one defines them and whatever one calls them, it is clear, as a 2015 report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) argued, that, “the list of potentially disruptive technologies keeps getting longer.” “Inventions previously seen only in science fiction,” the WEF report said, “will enable us to connect and invent in ways we never have before.”

More concretely, when people use these terms in reference to existing technologies, or ones currently on the drawing board, they often mention innovations like:

• Artificial intelligence / machine learning / robotics
• 3D printing / additive manufacturing
• Self-repairing / self-building objects
• Driverless cars / flying cars (VTOL), supersonic transport
• Private space travel / lunar mining
• Clean power / alternative energy production
• Genetic editing & life extension technologies
• Implantable tech / human augmentation
• Hyper-connected devices / wearable fitness / sensor tech / IoT
• Precision medicine
• Neural networks
• Quantum computing
• Nanotechnology / synthetic biology
• Immersive technology (AT & VR)

This is just a partial list of the type of technologies that experts mention when discussing “moonshots,” deep tech,” and other “disruptive” or “transformative innovations.” What unifies them more than anything else is the potential for major improvements in human well-being. Significant advancements in these areas could lead to substantial jumps in human welfare, health, and longevity.

Definitional Limitations

These terms have some problems and limitations, however. For example,“moonshots” conjures up thoughts of large, expensive government programs that are centrally-directed in a top-down fashion. Writing in The New Atlantis last year, Mark P. Mills argued that the notion of “ technological miracles ” can be taken to unrealistic extremes and he specifically cautioned against getting caught up in “moonshot fallacies” as well as “Moore’s Law fallacy.”

The “moonshot fallacy” is commonly heard in policy discussions whenever a policymaker or pundit insists that, “If we can put a man on the moon, then we can…” fill in the blank with your prefered aspirational goal du jour . But as Mills points out, this sort of talk often represents highly unrealistic, wishful thinking. “It is true that engineers have achieved amazing feats when tasked with particular, practical goals. But not all goals are equally achievable,” he correctly argues.  

“Moore’s Law fallacy” refers to the fact that innovation in the physical world of atoms is usually much harder and more costly than innovation in the digital world of bits. “If energy technology had followed a Moore’s Law trajectory, today’s car engine would have shrunk to the size of an ant while producing a thousandfold more horsepower,” Mills observes. The time horizons for big change are almost always going to be significantly longer in the physical world even with the increasing digitization in society and “ software eating the world .”

“Disruptive technology” is also a problematic term because its common use is quite different from Clayton M. Christensen’s original explanation of the term in his widely-cited Harvard Business Review articles from 1995 and then 2015 . “The original notion of disruption aimed to describe why great firms can fail,” Josh Gans explained in his recent book, The Disruption Dilemma . “Today, use of the term has gotten out of control,” he says. “As a concept, disruption has become so persuasive this it is at risk of becoming useless.”

Gans makes a good point. Not everything can be disruptive. Moreover, some techno-evangelists get carried away with such rhetoric regarding the “disruptive,” “transformative,” and “miracle”-working” potential of various technologies.  

But Sometimes Dreams Come True

Despite these definitional controversies or rhetorical excesses from some overly-exuberant tech boosters, these terms retain real meaning and significance.  

It is easy to ridicule dreamers, but quite a bit of life-changing innovation begins as a dream of some sort. Without a doubt, a great many “moonshots” will never get off the ground, and many “deep” technologies will end up sinking into the ocean of irrelevant or failed technologies. But that’s OK! It is in the process of risk-taking, experimentation, and failure that wisdom is generated and meaningful improvements in social and economic well-being come about.

It’s easy to talk about “trial-and-error” without thinking much about the “error” part of the process. It is only through constant experimentation and failure that we learn how to do things more efficiently and create or improve goods and services.

Perhaps the most straightforward definition of “technology” is Ian Barbour’s: “the application of organized knowledge to practical tasks by ordered systems of people and machines.” But organized knowledge requires lots of trials and lots of errors–by both people and machines–in order to find workable solutions to the tasks we hope to accomplish.

To the extent that we would like to see more technological improvements, we need more “dreamers” who hope to change the world. Entrepreneurs are the key to this process because, by their very nature, they refuse to settle for the status quo. They dream of a world that can work differently; one in which they can improve their own lot and (whether intentionally or not) improve the lot of humanity simultaneously. “What entrepreneurs do,” venture capitalist Vinod Khosla argues , “is they imagine what feels impossible to most people, and take it all the way from impossible, to improbable, to possible but unlikely, to plausible, to probable, to real!”  

That is why entrepreneurialism is so important , and it is also why shouldn’t roll our eyes when people dream about “moonshots” and the ways in which “deep technology” might “disrupt” and “transform” society for the better.  

While we should always keep both feet firmly rooted on the ground, there is nothing wrong with looking skyward and dreaming of a better future. Indeed, as a society, we should seek to foster a culture of innovation that rewards entrepreneurial dreaming and daring, because in seeking to make the world a better place, progress and prosperity become reality.  

Additional Reading

Donald J. Boudreaux, “What’s Your Moonshot?” Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Mercatus Original Video , November 16, 2017, https://www.mercatus.org/videos/whats-your-moonshot .

Joseph L. Bower & Clayton M. Christensen, “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” Harvard Business Review , January-February 1995,   https://hbr.org/1995/01/disruptive-technologies-catching-the-wave .

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor & Rory McDonald, “What Is Disruptive Innovation?”  Harvard Business Review,December 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation.

Tyler Cowen, “Is Innovation Over? The Case against Pessimism,” Foreign Affairs , March/April 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2016-02-15/innovation-over .

Swati Chaturvedi, “So What Exactly is ‘Deep Technology’?” LinkedIn , July 28, 2015, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/so-what-exactly-deep-technology-swati-chaturvedi .

Mike Cushing, “Moonshot Projects – Innovation or Wishful Thinking?” Enterprise Innovation , http://www.enterpriseinnovation.com/articles/moonshot-projects-innovation-or-wishful-thinking .

Vinod Khosla, “We Need Large Innovations,” Medium , January 1, 2018, https://medium.com/@vkhosla/we-need-large-innovations-58e3eaaf8138 .

Josh Gans, The Disruption Dilemma (MIT Press, 2016), https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/disruption-dilemma .

Mark P. Mills, “Making Technological Miracles,” The New Atlantis , (Spring 2017): 37-55, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/making-technological-miracles .

Albert H. Segars, “Seven Technologies Remaking the World,” MIT Sloan Management Review, March 9, 2018, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/seven-technologies-remaking-the-world .  

Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom , (Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016),   https://www.mercatus.org/publication/permissionless-innovation-continuing-case-comprehensive-technological-freedom

Adam Thierer and Trace Mitchell, “The Many Forms of Entrepreneurialism,” The Bridge , August 30, 2018, https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/many-forms-entrepreneurialism  

Adam Thierer, “Making the World Safe for More Moonshots,” The Bridge , February 5, 2018, https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/making-world-safe-more-moonshots

World Economic Forum , Deep Shift: Technology Tipping Points and Societal Impact (Geneva, Switzerland: September 2015), 3, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GAC15_Technological_Tipping_Points_report_2015.pdf .

Today, it was my great privilege to guest lecture at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Under the leadership of Ed Felten, who also runs the excellent “Freedom to Tinker” blog, the CITP has quickly become one of America’s premier institutions in the field of IT policy matters. David Robinson, who some of you will remember from his days as an editor at The American, serves as associate director of the CITP program and was kind enough to invite me to speak.  And our own Tim Lee is currently studying there as well.  I wish I was smart enough to get into that program!

The topic of my talk was “The Future of the First Amendment in an Age of Technological Convergence” and I used the opportunity to create a narrated video of this presentation, which I have made to several other groups through the years. In this presentation, I talk about “America’s First Amendment Twilight Zone,” which refers to the fact that identical words and images are being regulated in completely different ways today depending on the mode of transmission. This illogical and unfair situation could eventually threaten the Internet, video games, and all new media with many of the misguided regulations that have long been imposed on broadcast television and radio operators. In my presentation, which you can watch below, I make the case for changing our First Amendment regime to ensure “bit equality”; all speech and media platforms should be accorded the gold standard of First Amendment protection.

The presentation is based upon several other essays, court filings, and law review articles I have written on the topic, including:

• “Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age,” by Adam Thierer, 7/10/07.
• “FCC v. Fox and the Future of the First Amendment in the Information Age,” by Adam Thierer, 1/20/09.
• Joint Amicus Brief of The Center for Democracy & Technology and The Progress & Freedom Foundation, U.S. Supreme Court in the matter of FCC v. Fox Television Stations, by Adam Thierer, John B. Morris, Jr., and Sophia Cope, August 8, 2008

I’ve just finished reading Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, and it’s another title worth adding to your tech policy reading list. The authors survey a broad swath of tech policy territory — privacy, search, encryption, free speech, copyright, spectrum policy — and provide the reader with a wonderful history and technology primer on each topic.

I like the approach and tone they use throughout the book. It is certainly something more than “Internet Policy for Dummies.” It’s more like “Internet Policy for the Educated Layman”: a nice mix of background, policy, and advice. I think Ray Lodato’s Slashdot review gets it generally right in noting that, “Each chapter will alternatively interest you and leave you appalled (and perhaps a little frightened). You will be given the insight to protect yourself a little better, and it provides background for intelligent discussions about the legalities that impact our use of technology.”

Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis aren’t really seeking to be polemical in this book by advancing a single thesis or worldview. To the extent the book’s chapters are guided by any central theme, it comes in the form of the “two basic morals about technology” they outline in Chapter 1:

The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad — it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities. All of us, and all of our public agencies and private institutions, have a say in whether technology will be used for good or ill and whether we will fall prey to its risks or prosper from the opportunities it creates. (p. 14)

Mostly, what they aim to show is that digital technology is reshaping society and, whether we like or it not, we better get used to it — and quick!  “The digital explosion is changing the world as much as printing once did — and some of the changes are catching us unaware, blowing to bits our assumptions about the way the world works… The explosion, and the social disruption that it will create, have barely begun.” (p 3)

In that sense, most chapters discuss how technology and technological change can be both a blessing and a curse, but the authors are generally more optimistic than pessimistic about the impact of the Net and digital technology on our society. What follows is a quick summary of some of the major issues covered in Blown to Bits.

Privacy: In the chapter on privacy, the authors conclude that it is increasingly difficult to bottle up our personal information and protect it and ourselves entirely from the outside world. “Despite the very best efforts, and the most sophisticated technologies, we can not control the spread of our private information. And we often want information to be made public to serve our own, or society’s purposes.” (p. 70) They argue that there still may be some ways to deal with the misuse of information and that some new technologies might be able to help protect our privacy at the margins. Generally speaking, however, this is a losing battle, and, more importantly, there is an increasing tension between privacy and freedom of speech:

A continuing border war is likely to be waged, however, along an existing free speech front: the line separating my right to tell the truth about you from your right not to have that information used against you. In the realm of privacy, the digital explosion has left matters deeply unsettled. (p. 70)

These are issues I discussed in more detail in my recent review of Daniel Solove’s important new book, Understanding Privacy. Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis are right to point out that these tensions are only going to increase in coming years and their chapter outlines many of the new fault lines in the debate over online privacy.

Encryption: Having followed the “crypto wars” closely in the mid-1990s, I also found their chapter on cryptography intriguing. The authors note that encryption has gone mainstream. “Keys are cheap. Secret messages are everywhere on the Internet. We are all cryptographers now.” Despite that, the authors note that “very little email is encrypted today.” With the exception of some human rights groups and some particularly privacy-sensitive users, most of us are perfectly content to send our e-mails unencrypted. They argue that there are three reasons most people are unconcerned about their e-mail privacy:

First, there is still little awareness of how easily our e-mail can be captured as the packets flow through the Internet. […] Second, there is little concern because most ordinary citizens feel they have little to hide, so why would anyone bother looking? […] Finally, encrypted email is not built into the Internet infrastructure in the way encrypted web browsing is. (p. 191-92)

They continue and conclude:

Overall, the public seems unconcerned about privacy of communication today, and that privacy fervor that permeated the crypto wars a decade ago is nowhere to be seen. In a very real sense, the dystopian predictions of both sides of that debate are being realized: On the one hand, encryption technology is readily available around the world, and people can hide the contents of their messages, just as law-enforcement feared… At the same time, the spread of the Internet has been accompanied by an increase in surveillance, just as the opponents of encryption regulation feared. (p. 193)

Actually, I’m not sure there really was a “privacy fervor that permeated the crypto wars a decade ago.” Many of us who argued passionately for crypto-freedom back then knew it was unlikely that the masses were going to rush right out and start encrypting all their mail the minute the policy battle ended. In reality, most of us live pretty mundane lives and just don’t care enough to go through the hassle of encrypting the random chatter of e-mail. But it was the principle of the matter that counted — the government should never be given the keys to unlock all private communications. That is what we were fighting about in the crypto wars — not the necessity of everyone encyrpting every e-mail they sent.

Importantly, however, the authors correctly note how the truly beneficial result of the fight for crypto-freedom was an explosion of online commerce, facilitated by behind-the-scenes crypto protecting our transactions. Amazon, eBay, and many other e-commerce vendors, both big and small, have prospered because of strong crypto. That was the security blanket many of us needed before we were willing to take the plunge and begin doing most of our shopping and financial transactions online. This is a great public policy success story, and Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis do a wonderful job relaying it to the reader.

Online Free Speech / Age Verification: As a passionate First Amendment advocate, the chapter on free speech issues was also of great interest to me. The authors run through the early history of efforts to censor online speech, including the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA), and bring us right up to speed with congressional efforts such as the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which would ban social networking sites and services in publicly funded schools and libraries. “DOPA, which has not passed into law, is the latest battle in a long war between conflicting values,” note the authors. “On the one hand, society has an interest in keeping unwanted information away from children. On the other hand, society as a whole has an interest in maximizing open communication.” (p. 231)

Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis go on to outline the dangers of online censorship and the importance of defending the First Amendment from new legislative and regulatory attacks, but they would have done well to cite the growing diversity of parental control tools and methods that are now on the market. I share their passion for defending free speech values, but it is equally important we work hard to show parents and policymakers how many effective self-help tools and strategies are out there on the market today to help them guide — or even control — their child’s media and Internet experiences. Not everyone is equally excited about what a world of media abundance offers us, or out children. If we hope to continue to fend off attacks on the First Amendment, we have to make sure parents are empowered to mentor their kids and limit access to content they find objectionable so they don’t expect Uncle Sam to play the role of national nanny.

I was glad to see the authors spend some time focusing on online age verification / identity authentication since that is probably the most important free speech debate raging today. [I’ve written quite a bit here about the battle over online age verification for social networking sites and other online sites.] The authors point out Congress already attempted to impose age verification on the Internet when they passed the Child Online Protection Act in 1998. “The big problem,” the authors note, “was that these methods either didn’t work or didn’t even exist.” (p. 248) Indeed, the effort in COPA to require “adult personal identification numbers” or a “digital certificate that verifies age” was in their words, “basically a plea from Congress for the industry to come up with some technical magic for determining age at a distance.” (p. 248)  And things really haven’t advanced much since then, they argue:

In the state-of-the-art, however, computers can’t reliably tell the if party on the other end of the communications link is a human or is another computer. For a computer to tell whether a human is over or under the age of 17, even imperfectly, would be very hard indeed. Mischievous 15-year-olds could get around any simple screening system that could be used in the home. The Internet just isn’t like a magazine store. (p. 249)

I hope policymakers are listening — especially the many stubborn state attorneys general who continue to push age verification as a silver-bullet solution to online child safety concerns.

Spectrum Policy: The authors point out how the death of media scarcity has profound implications for the future of speech regulation and spectrum policy alike. “As a society,” they argue, “we simply have to confront the reality that our mindset about radio and television is wrong. It has been shaped by decades of the scarcity argument.” (p. 292)  Regarding what it means for speech controls, they note:

If almost anyone can now send information that many people can receive, perhaps the government’s interest in restricting transmissions should be less than what it once was, not greater. In the absence of scarcity, perhaps the government should have no more authority over what gets said on radio and TV than it does over what gets printed in newspapers. (p. 261)

I couldn’t agree more, and I’ve written voluminously on the topic of creating a “consistent First Amendment standard for the Information Age.” Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis seem to agree with what I said there when they argue:

Other regulation of broadcast words and images should end. Its legal foundation survives no longer in the newly engineered world of information. There are too many ways for the information to reach us. We need to take responsibility for what we see, and what our children are allowed to see. And they must be educated to live in a world of information plenty. (p. 293)

The death of the scarcity doctrine should also have a profound impact on the future spectrum policy decisions, they say. Perhaps scarcity-based rationales for regulation made (some) sense in the past, but:

These were facts of the technology of the time. They were true, but they were contingent truths of engineering. They were never universal laws of physics, and are no longer limitations of technology. Because of engineering innovations over the past 20 years, there is no practically significant “natural limitation” on the number of broadcast stations. Arguments from inevitable scarcity can no longer justify U.S. government denials of the use of the airwaves. The vast regulatory infrastructure, built to rationalize use of the spectrum but much more limited radio technology, has adjusted slowly — as it almost inevitably must: Bureaucracies don’t move as quickly as technological innovators. The FCC tries to anticipate resource needs centrally and far in advance. But technology can cause abrupt changes in supply, and market forces can cause abrupt changes in demand. Central planning works no better for the FCC than it did for the Soviet Union. (p. 272)

I completely agree, although challenging questions remain about how to get us out of the current mess. Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis argue that “commons-based” approaches make the most sense. I am certainly open to the idea of treating certain swaths of spectrum as a commons, but it’s important to recognize that this does not necessarily get the regulators completely out of the picture. In fact, as my TLF colleague Jerry Brito has persuasively argued, there is the real potential that the FCC could become an aggressive device regulator if we switch to this approach. “A ‘commons’ model is not a third way between regulation and property, it is just another kind of regulation,” Brito concludes. That’s why I continue to believe that a property rights-based approach for most spectrum allocation makes the most sense and will get the spectrum deployed for its most highly-valued use. Commons-based approaches should supplement, not supplant, that model.

Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis also fail to sweat the details about how to handle the issue of incumbent spectrum users in the transition to their preferred commons-based model. That strikes me as a pretty big problem. They repeatedly mention how incumbents often seek to block beneficial spectrum reforms — which is no doubt true on some occasions — but that doesn’t mean incumbent spectrum holders don’t have legitimate rights in their existing allocations that should be honored. I would hope that, even if they wanted to go with a pure commons approach going forward, the authors would at least be willing to grandfather-in existing spectrum users. If the goal is to encourage them to vacate what they currently have, incentivize them with flexible use and resale rights. For example, for the right price, a lot of broadcast spectrum holders might be willing to give up their current allotment. Alternatively, if flexible use was allowed, they might deploy their spectrum for a different purpose. Unfortunately, both of these options are currently prohibited by the FCC’s command-and-control regulatory system.

Overall, however, I enjoyed the spectrum chapter and found the history and technology primer in this chapter to be the best in the book.

Copyright: The authors have a strongly-worded chapter on copyright that generally argues for relaxing copyright protections. Interestingly, however, (unless I am missing something) I notice they don’t offer their book for free download on their site.  I’m always intrigued by copyright critics who refuse to put their own content online. Apparently, it’s another case of ‘copying is good for me, but not for thee.’ Regardless, in their copyright chapter, they argue that:

The war over copyright and the Internet has been escalating for more than 15 years. It is a spiral of more and more technology that makes it ever easier for more and more people to share more and more information. This explosion is countered by a legislative response that brings more and more acts within the scope of copyright enforcement, subject to punishments that grow ever more severe. Regulation tries to keep pace by banning technology, sometimes even before the technology exists… If we cannot slow the arms race, tomorrow’s casualties may come to include the open Internet and dynamic of innovation that fuels the information revolution. (p. 199)

The authors make a fair point about the perils of banning technologies to protect copyright. That’s never the right answer. Regrettably, however, they pay less attention to what I regard as the legitimate concerns of copyright holders about how to protect their creative works and expressive endeavors going forward. And it’s not just about protecting large-scale industries, as they and other copyright critics are often prone to claim. It’s about whether or not we want a workable copyright system going forward. Of course, some critics wouldn’t mind seeing copyright law fade into the sunset altogether. But Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis don’t really make it clear how far they’d be willing to go. They do have a brief discussion about collective licensing approaches as a possible solution, which may be coming sooner than we think for the Net. Unfortunately, they don’t spend much time developing the details. I remain skeptical about the sensibility of that approach — especially since it will likely end up being compulsory in nature and fraught with fairness problems (i.e. Who pays in? How much? On the other end, who gets paid how much when their content appears online? etc.) Nonetheless, I think that’s where we’ll end up before the copyright wars are over, so it would have been nice to see the authors spend more time on collective licensing issues.

They also spend a lot of time discussing DRM. I was surprised by their comment that, “Developers of DRM and trusted platforms may be creating effective technologies to control the use of information, but no one has yet devised effective methods to circumscribe the limits of that control.” (p. 212) I must say, that does not seem to match up with the reality of the market we see around us today in which DRM systems are rapidly crumbling and being abandoned left and right.

Conclusion

I didn’t agree with everything in Blown to Bits, such as their unfortunate call for Net neutrality regulation. Overall, however, I enjoyed the book and recommend it. The narrative can be a little disjointed at times, almost sounding like a series of e-mail exchanges between friends (which may have been the case since the book had three authors). But the text is very accessible and contains a great deal of useful information to bring you up to speed on the hottest tech policy debates under the sun. If the authors are smart, they’ll throw the book online and update it periodically to keep it fresh. As I have found with my parental controls and Media Metrics reports, that’s the only way to keep up with the frantic pace of change in the tech policy arena — version your books like software and release periodic updates.

This book will definitely appear on my big, end-of-year “Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008” list, which I should have wrapped up shortly. Also, I think this book makes a nice complement to Palfrey and Gasser’s Born Digital, which I reviewed here last month. And, if you are interested in another title that takes an approach similar to what Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis have taken here, you might want to check out Bruce Owen’s outstanding 1999 book “The Internet Challenge to Television.” It’s an oldy but a goodie, as I noted here.

Finally, given the title of the book and the countless times in the text that Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis talk about the “bits revolution,” how “bits are bits,” and how “bits behave strangely,” shockingly, they never seem to get around to crediting Nicholas Negroponte for his pioneering work on this front in Being Digital. Long before anybody else gave a damn about how the movement from a world of atoms to a world bits would change our entire existence, Nicholas Negroponte was preaching that gospel to the unconverted. And considering he was saying all that back in the dark (dial-up) ages of 1995, the man deserves some credit, as I have noted here before.