Green Machine

18 November 2005



Negroponte’s $100 Laptop for Developing Countries Unveiled

MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte showed off his $100 laptop at the World Summit on the Information Society earlier this week. It’s bright lime. It has a hand-crank to charge its own battery. While there are the usual complaints that a major step forward hasn’t solved every imaginable problem, this device just might change the lives of millions.

At $100 a pop, this machine is not necessarily going to help the poorest of the poor. For that portion of the human race that tries to survive on $1 a day, the price tag is still too big. Moreover, internet access doesn’t mean much to people who don’t have enough to eat. Professor Negroponte didn’t set out to fix those problems, and it is unfair and counterproductive to denigrate the innovation because those difficulties persist.

However, there is a vast segment of the world’s population for whom $100 works, especially if paid for by governmental bodies out of general taxes and royalties from the extractive industries. What do they get for the money? The machine comes with a 500 MHz processor and a flash memory (which overcomes the mechanical difficulties of hard drives) and open source software (meaning that hefty royalties don’t drive up the cost and making local language content and support easier).

The purpose is no different than giving school books to kids, blackboards and chalk to teachers. Professor Negroponte told the press, “Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education. So when we make this available, it is an education project, not a laptop project. The digital divide is a learning divide - digital is the means through which children learn leaning. This is, we believe, the way to do it.”

There was also a brilliant idea suggested on the BBC website in one of the news fora from Francesco Gianni in Birmingham, England. For $200, vast numbers of people in the rich world would buy one of these. Why not sell them at Circuit City at that price and give the things away to children in the countries that can’t afford anything more?

Thirty years ago, no one in the wealthiest countries in the world had their own computer. “Why would anyone need one?” was the question. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs answered it with the Apple. What will a kid in a favela in Rio, or a farm in Thailand or a township in South Africa do with a computer? Put one in those children’s hands and stand back.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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