Bender said the corporate share of the Media Lab's budget is likely to fall to about 60 percent in the com-ing years. Still, many of the lab's sponsors are strongly committed to its mission. Companies like BT, the former British Telecom, and Motor-ola, both of which donate more than US$1 million annually to the lab, view it as both a window into new business opportunities and an insurance policy against getting blindsided by technology developments they did not anticipate.
Critics have long said that so much of the lab's research is fanciful and impractical that investing in it is foolish. Basic membership costs US$100,000 annually for a minimum of three years. And there is no ques-tion that the lab has provided grist for the critics since it opened.
Negroponte, a charismatic professor from the Department of Architecture, recruited a diverse collection of free thinkers in setting up the lab, including Marvin Minsky, a specialist in machine intelligence, and Seymour Pappert, a well-known learning theorist. The graduate students they brought came from design, computer programming and sociology backgrounds to receive degrees in a new discipline they called "media arts and science."
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