Negroponte is proposing that governments supply people with $100 laptops of his design in order to help educate people & increase economic possibilities. The idea is comparable (the article writers say) to Carnegie's first public libraries.
The full article is
here.
Part TwoPart ThreeA
criticism of the idea.
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The powersource is really fascinating:
"it can be powered by means of a foot pedal (or pull string, depending on the final decision) that will generate 10 minutes of power for every minute of exertion. Out of the box, the laptops will connect with one another to form a mesh network that will make each computer a transmission node, allowing the laptops to talk to each other and greatly magnifying the range of any Internet connection."
The business model is also interesting--Negroponte wants governments to commit to ordering 5 million before he'll start making them:
". No matter how well things go in the next few months, Negroponte can almost certainly count on continuing to spend a great deal of time negotiating with government ministers around the globe. In that sense, just as we're waiting to see whether OLPC's laptop will work, we're waiting to see whether its "business" model will work, too. If it doesn't, the project will be remembered as an interesting side note in the history of computing. If it does, OLPC will become integral to one of the more remarkable narratives of the past decade: the revolution in philanthropy."
Of course, there's also the question of "is it worth it"?:
"The simplest and strongest argument against the $100 laptop, though, is that even if it can be built, and even if it will work approximately as well as Negroponte promises it will, it's still a waste of money. In an ideal world with unlimited government budgets, the argument goes, putting a laptop in the hands of every child would be a marvelous and valuable feat. But in the far-from-ideal worlds of developing countries, which generally have limited budgets and pervasive social problems, millions or billions of dollars' worth of computers are a luxury that governments can ill afford. Brazil, for instance, which seems likely to buy a million laptops from OLPC as soon as they become available, has around 45 million school-age children: equipping all of them would cost something like $6.3 billion. Given the desperate poverty of many Brazilians, are laptops the best use for that kind of money?. . . The reality is that in most countries, towns don't even have libraries. Are we really better off spending money on computers instead?"
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Do you think it's possible to make such a laptop? Would a wider distribution of laptops encourage education? Economic growth?
Is access to the internet the equivalent of access to a good library? Is it necessary? Will a cheap laptop also necessarily mean cheap internet access?
What do you think?
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