Institute For The Future

The Problem With Cheap Laptops

Those of you who also are members of IFTF's Ten Year Forecast program may have read our exclusive interview with Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte's left MIT but his new One Laptop Per Child project aims to manufacture millions of sub-$100 laptops for the developing world, each equipped with with a hand-cranked generator, daylight readable screen, built-in mesh wireless networking, and a suite of open source software.

 

Now Intel and Microsoft are trying to get into the game with a sub-$400 laptop platform announced May 1.

 

I think I speak for a lot of civic-minded techheads here in Silicon Valley when I say I'm really excited about these projects. They are long overdue, and are a great fork off of the Moore's Law/code bloat product cycle that has driven the PC industry for the last 2 decades. Faster isn't always better, and different strokes for different folks shows the I.T. industry is growing up. A child in Burundi doesn't need to play World of Warcraft, but she could certainly benefit from a laptop and a Wikipedia DVD and some basic Internet access.

 

However, I'm growing increasingly disturbed by the hubris that a lot of these projects are showing. Intel, who is a Technology Horizons subscriber, has pioneered over the last few years a deeper, more culturally-aware approach to product development that is to be applauded... and it's technology has certainly enabled a lot of economic growth and social development over the last quarter-century.

 

But these projects really seem to be the latest in a long line of technological silver bullets for lifting the developing world out of poverty and I think that's really the wrong way to position them, and inevitably setting them up for failure. In a way, they seem to be framing the problem as "the poor don't have enough computers" rather than "the poor don't have enough money". The idea that computer access or ownership inevitably leads to economic development, to me, seems so ridiculous as to be self-evident. What's going on in the developing world now with cell phones is a good example - there are some interesting, though still largely marginal, improvements in the flow of price information in markets and the ability to coordinate political action but there are also counter-examples of technologies being used to reinforce the position of corrupt governments, monopolies, etc. The cell phone may be speeding some places along good trajectories that they were already on, but to say it's fundamentally changing them for the better is a vast overstatement.

 

I also worry that this kind of technological utopianism is rapidly being attached to lightweight infrastructure of all sorts. Just read Confessions of an Economic Hitman, a recent book that talks about all the false promises made by the World Bank and others about the economic prospects of -heavy- infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s. We need to avoid making the same kind of promises with light infrastructure.

 

Still, it will be interesting to watch what happens.

COMMENT:Mani PandeEMAIL: [email protected]: 10.10.13.104URL: "