There are a lot of “needs” above a laptop – like surviving to reach age 5. I really would love to see the basic needs of individuals met before this luxury item hits the streets.

I do agree with Rodney in some respects – hard to see how these children are going to keep their laptop for long when their families need food, water, medicines and have nothing to pay for them.

My daughter read about the $10 laptop a couple of months ago – I think the small netbook will hit the west in a big way before the wind-up/solar laptop reaches Africa…

Chris
Djembe Drums – all Fair trade products

Perhaps every child doesn’t really want a laptop. In truth, no child needs a laptop! Children need love and attention and food and shelter and clothing and generous counsel for their future. They don’t even need dollars or community pencils! In the end programs like the OLPC are not really about the child anyway. It’s about social development, governmental planning and the future of the world. Is it a good thing for a government to think about the future wellbeing of it’s citizens?

A country that knows how to program computers will be more likely to find ways to cope with it’s ecological, economic and health issues. When we give kids computers we allow them to transcribe their thinking processes to executable ideas. Is it a good thing for kid’s ideas to become executable?

We know that OLPC is a plot to take over the world with technology and cultures will change just like ours has changed with every new tech product from the bread knife to the Tivo! Is it wrong to purposefully impact a cultural shift? If you answered “yes” then the only thing left to do is sit back and let it go wherever. Otherwise most of us will understand that we have a responsibility and privilege to impact our world in some small way and we must do it for the good of the world.

Suppose parents sell a laptop to procure the kid’s dinner. Is there anything really wrong about that? It may be sad but let’s get real! I’m sure there will be true abuses of the machines. Drunks might liquidate their child’s laptop to feed their addiction. This changes the paradigm of problems like these but it doesn’t really cause them or even make them worse. If you want to solve the problems of child abuse a computer will not help people need to change.

A more grave concern is the easier access to pornography. We’re seeing the affects of internet porn here in India. It is ripping and destroying cultures. But these same computers and technology are employing new people so quickly it has American’s wondering when India is gonna take their job. It’s balanced the world job market considerably at the expense of the west. I expect the same things to happen when you’ve got children doing network programing from age five in Africa, Mongolia and Iran.

Look at what OLPC group is producing! A child-hackable device with complete source code to all it’s software, and open specs to all hardware. This is a complete departure from the sealed kid-safe world that we lived in! These laptops are intended to be taken apart and reconfigured. I’m sure that they will be hacked up and used in all sorts of ways from distance education to smart bombs. Yes, this technology is dangerous! That’s why it needs to be in everyone’s hands: so the dictators of this world don’t have a monopoly on the worlds best technology…!

And religion is all really the same thing. Don’t you think the pope in Rome needs to loose a little more power? But allowing them the freedom to choose a religion of their choice doesn’t mean that the will all see eye to eye. A Muslim’s biggest death threat today is their own people. Zeal is dangerous? Does that mean we should outlaw the existence of passion? I think I saw a Star Trek episode on that. It pretty much came to the same conclusion I’m coming to: We are free people who have the right to choice. Even at the point of a gun nobody can take that away from us!

In recent history we learned about this from Hitler and the Jews. The only way Hitler could have won was to wipe the memory of the Jew out of the minds of his own troops. Extermination wasn’t enough! In modern times the “Got Mit Uns” belt buckle leaves an impression that to-this-day angers Jews against Christians. And it should! The German Christians behaved barbarically…

Perhaps giving children the right to make informed choices is the only way to prevent such tyranny in the future. I’m a Christian who practices Judaism. That’s an informed choice I’ve made. I’d love to see more people turn to the religion that Jesus lived. But each person has to know and choose his life. Not because I say so but because they can see the facts line up. I’m a firm believer in facts lining up. And while there is a lot of possibility for problem there is a good dose of balance that has been put into the program to make sure that nobody can control it. I’ve not seen any effort whether corporate, private, or religious which has successfully undertaken to give so much power to it’s consumers. Perhaps some would like to stay in the age of tyranny but I’m all for giving freedom a go. If OLPC will aid us in getting that choice out to the world I’m interested in it…

Here are couple recent articles:

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3596426

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=112805D

~james

And yet… I can’t help but feel that this utopian vision (like all utopian visions) doesn’t quite ring true. The hype raises expectations – and as you know, managing expectations in relief or development projects is critical to their success.

Mobile phones have improved many people’s lives, but it isn’t a given that they’ve necessarily helped poor people. I haven’t seen much research into actual impact (as opposed to penetration) except for last year’s report on telecommunications by the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation,
the Econonic Impact of Telecommunications on Rural Livelihoods and Poverty Reduction.

The main findings of that report concluded that telephones “valued more by richer and better educated people than by the poorer, less educated or more marginal members of society.”

Finally, access to computing power relies on a lot more than the availability of cheap hardware. In particular, regulatory frameworks govern a lot of access questions, particularly when it comes to the internet, and those frameworks reflect the attitude of governments – who don’t always have the best interests of their citizens in mind. Yet the $100 laptop will be distributed through deals with those governments.

It’s also worth remembering that the rapid uptake of mobile phones was the not the result of a (semi-)philanthropic venture such as OLPC. It was the combination of a lack of existing infrastructure and rapid uptake under market conditions – and it took the telecommunications industry completely by surprise.

But why trash the idea of producing a computer so cheap that it will be affordable in the poorest of countries, even if it is not the intervention for the poorest of the poor? It may not do much for Darfur, but one laptop per child in Lesotho could revolutionize the ability of youth to participate in a global economy that is currently leaving them behind.

Computers have been a tremendous boon to the rich world, so why criticize an attempt to make them accessible to the poor? Your arguments could have been made about the prospect of introducing mobile phone to Sub-Saharan African 10 years ago – after all, poor people don’t need mobile phones, they need food and water! But look how mobile phones have bypassed the plodding land-based state-owned telecoms, and what a fundamental part of business and life they now play in SSA!

Some of Negroponte’s quotes are a little bit absurd, but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.