February 2, 2005
WHY NOT HERE?:
Dreams grow for high tech in Third World: MIT icon hopes for $100 laptop (John Markoff, February 1, 2005, The New York Times)
Nicholas Negroponte, a technology expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, prowled the halls of the World Economic Forum holding the holy grail for crossing the digital divide: a mock-up of a $100 laptop computer.Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2005 9:02 AMThe machine is intriguing because Negroponte has hit upon a remarkably simple solution for cutting the price of the most costly part of a laptop - the display - to $25 or less.
He has been a passionate advocate of using digital technology to improve the quality of life and erase economic barriers in the developing world since the early 1980s, when he took Apple II computers to Senegal with a colleague, Seymour Papert. Now, in partnership with Joseph Jacobson, a physicist at MIT, he wants to persuade education officials in countries like China to use laptops to replace textbooks.
They're really missing the point. It's primarily a legal/government problem, not a technological problem. No amount of technology is going to help if it takes many years and lots of bribes to set up a business.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at February 2, 2005 10:11 AMYou can give anyone $10 and he will give you a computer that is sitting in his closet. But it is no different than giving someone a pencil and paper, hoping to receive a poem. Or a typewriter, hoping for a novel.
Modern technology is welfare for the well-off. It is food for the glutted mind. A noisemaker designed to drown out that still, quiet voice.
Posted by: Randall Voth at February 3, 2005 9:04 AMThere is something condescending in all these attempts to bring "cheap" technology to "third world" countries. I've come to the conclusion that the goal is to make people like Negroponte feel good about themselves, for whatever reason. If cheap computers were really needed inthose places, the people who live there would find ways (like the aforementioned closet computers) to meet those needs. Look at how transportation is handled in those places to see how that model would work. Why doesn't anyone talk about bringing cheap $100 trucks or boats to those places?
It would seem that India, for example, has developed a need for those machines, and hasn't needed some MIT academic to tell how to proceed and become successful in their own way.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at February 3, 2005 12:56 PM