

Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of both the MIT Media Lab and the non-profit One Laptop Per Child, delivered the last keynote speech of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting tonight.

The talk focused on the groundbreaking work of the OLPC, which has managed to deliver thousands of $187 laptops to children in the developing world. Negroponte ran through a list of the organization's accomplishments, noting that they had half a million machines in their pipeline and that production had reached 110,000 units per month. The big key to large-scale adoption remains price going forward, and the former WIRED Magazine contributor promised big price drops in the coming years.

"The target has been $100… And we'll get there before the end of 2009," Negroponte said. "(The price) will get down to $50 in 2011."

Negroponte, a long-time MIT professor, provided a warm and fuzzy last lecture to the largest gathering of scientists in the world, complete with pictures of hundreds of children with the iconic green OLPC

machine. In return, he got a mostly standing ovation from the several hundred audience members. The annual AAAS

conference is a mix of workshops and lectures that emphasize the boundaries between science and society. This year, the theme was

"Science and Technology from A Global Perspective" with dozens of speeches and symposia dedicated to development, sustainability, and climate change.

Negroponte explained that the basic idea of the OLPC computer was to use

Moore's Law to cut the price of the machine, instead of continually adding new features the way that electronics manufacturers in developed countries do.

"If you make anything electronic today, you know that eighteen months from today, it will cost you half of what it does today," he said. "But if you make (electronics), you have no interest in that product being half price in eighteen months."

So, as we all know, electronics manufacturers fatten up cell phones with cameras and MP3 players, etc. Negroponte termed this problem, "a general obesity in the electronics industry." He went on to say, "Most laptops are like SUVs. You're using most of the energy to move the car, not the person."

He concluded his speech with a brief overview of the rollout of the machines, noting that Peru, Uruguay and Nigeria would see the first big rollouts in the coming months. Then, rather mysteriously, he said the following:

Over the next few weeks… there'll be partnerships and changes with companies that can start rolling this out. What becomes pretty clear pretty quickly, you need people to copy it and do it at a larger scale.

No matter what we do as OLPC or laptop.org, you're not going to be able to do the whole world. You want to be able to influence efficiently enough to have other people do it.

He didn't really note what "this" referred to and I'm not familiar enough with Negropontese to parse what he was trying to say, but one suspects that he's trying to turn his ultracheap laptop competitors, like Asus with their $399 eee, into allies.