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by At the World Summit on the Information Society, a United Nations sponsored event, Secretary General Kofi Annan and MIT's Nicholas Negroponte officially unveiled the $100 laptop aimed at boosting educational development in impoverished areas of the world. Unfortunately, not only did the electrical charging handle break off in Annan's hand, this first version also crashed during a graphics demonstration.
The project, with energy efficient specifications and design, is sponsored by Google, AMD and Red Hat. A version of x86 OS X was offered by Apple to power the hardware, but turned down in favor of open source Linux solutions. A nation must put forward a $100 million buy-in ticket to receive the low budget computers for the One Laptop Per Child program.
Will providing automations to impoverished nations enable them to narrow the educational and digital divide? Are computer skills the competitive edge children need in order to make a generational transition from poverty?
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I have to agree with Bortnyk that providing these tools will bring these children nowhere. All of these resources do seem more like an altruistic gesture that is more suitable for a corporation to feel good about doing their part for the world. This leads to a discussion I once had with my wife who expressed a desire to establish non-profit schools for children around the world.
What will the schools / technology actually give these kids? Playing the devil\'s advocate, I have to say it only leads them to a bitter disgust of first world countries. Prior to external influence, the child probably did not really have an idea of what was out there. The dreams for a better life were likely more realistic, a few steps up from their present situation. Now, you have a first world influence talking about computers, industrial revolution, the power of math, being able to read and write, history as a stepping block forward, etc. Great, what does the kid do with this education at \'graduation.\' Back to subsistence farming. Back to laboring for hours to make a pittance for food & clothes. They don\'t need this. They need either pure vocational skills or resources with which to manufacture a product. $100 million dollars would better be spent constructing factories or other employment centers for people to actually get legitimately paying jobs whereupon a basis for an economy can be founded.
They say give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Teach him to fish and then take all the raw materials for making fishing possible away and you have one pissed off man that still cannot eat.
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This is not a solution to third world poverty. This is a placebo for undindustrialized nations that may have short term benefit of making a few kids smart on computers and giving some other kids something to smash and gnaw on, but will not give any of these nations the ability to develop and produce their own trechnologies. I don't think you can force industrialization.