Nicholas Negroponte

Negroponte was a driving force behind the attitude that computers and new technology should empower people, and that people should not be slaves to the machines. In 1975, he wrote Soft Architecture Machines as part of the Architecture Machine group at MIT. As an example of empowering people, Negroponte wanted computers to be as responsive as possible to human inputs and commands, not just to be “number-crunchers.” One main example of what Negroponte meant by this had to do with his graphic user interface that was used for creating architecture and design.