Last week I held that low-cost computer in my hands. It was built by Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the One Laptop Per Child project in Cambridge, Mass. It hasn’t hit the $100 price tag just yet – the cost is about $140 now, but is still coming down – and you won’t be able to buy it in any store, but millions of kids around the world will be getting one for free.
Last week I held that low-cost computer in my hands. It was built by Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project in Cambridge, Mass. It hasn’t hit the $100 price tag just yet – the cost is about $140 now, but is still coming down – and you won’t be able to buy it in any store, but millions of kids around the world will be getting one for free.
Today there are about 1 billion children in the world – 220 million in China alone. Half the world’s children live in remote locations where electrical power is intermittent or nonexistent and teachers are diligent but undertrained, and their chances of success decrease each year.
The OLPC laptop is as cool as an iPod. Its display is backlit and works in normal daylight. It uses a mesh network, so that all users within a community can communicate with one another. This means 200 to 500 students could share one landline back link. It can do Skype, and it has a mechanism that lets it work even without external power or battery – crank it for one minute, use it for 10.
But the real benefit isn’t that it’s a cool computer – the benefit is what it will do for the 500 million kids in the developing world. Think about downloading books, building communities, providing Internet access to the world. And then there will be the benefits we don’t even know about yet: the law of unintended consequences. Let me give you two examples.
In the late 1960s, a fledgling Japanese calculator manufacturer asked Intel to develop a chip that would have five or six transistors on it. Intel went a step further. Ted Hoff, the chip’s inventor, hypothesized that if the company was going that far, why not make the chip industrial strength, and the first computer-on-a-chip microprocessor was developed. The calculator manufacturer’s requirements had forced Intel to think well beyond its first perception. Once the chip was built, it jump-started the personal computer and consumer electronics industries.
Also in the late 1960s, the Department of Defense wanted to save on computers and build a fail-safe network. That desire ultimately lead to the creation of the Internet. The Internet has done more to open communication than any device since the printing press, yet was brought to us by the necessities of war. Vint Cerf and the other Internet pioneers deserve a Nobel Prize – not for technology, but for peace.
And what will be the effect in 40 years of bringing laptops to the world’s children? Certainly, you will see great content and open source. But beyond that, what are the unintended consequences? What happens when everyone is connected? When there is less difference between First World and Third World? When every child has access to open source software and content such as Wikipedia? When countries no longer have to buy, warehouse and try to distribute out-of-date textbooks? I don’t know what the unintended consequences will be and neither do you, but I know the status quo will change forever.
Tom Friedman is wrong, by the way: The world isn’t flat; it’s spiky. Those with education and resources (United States, Europe, Japan) form one world, those without, form another. Someday, however, we may see a Nobel Prize given to the machine that changed the world – and it may be that cool $100 laptop I held in my hands last week.
