Much to the disappointment of one of those starving kids i saw on late night TV, i will not be taking part in the One Laptop per Child program. Mostly because i'm not really sure i get what the idea is.
i mean, i get the sales pitch. "Send inexpensive PCs to children in developing countries so that they can use them to learn… i dunno… how to program for insurance companies or something." To me, that's like walking into Darfur and handing out TI-99 calculators. It's kinda missing the bigger problem.
See, the deal is that those folks in poor, "undeveloped" countries generally lack a great many things other than laptops for the kids. They're kinda shy on infrastructure (or to put it in Geek terms, "net access" for water, roads, and electricity), political stability, natural resources and a whole host of other stuff that getting a glorified light bulb that plays MP3s isn't really going to solve.
Plus, it's kinda silly. Ok, so all the kids in the classroom can send notes wirelessly to each other, but without a reliable connection to the internet (see above), the dream of being able to pull down the latest and greatest copy of Prof. Hawking's theorems ain't exactly gonna happen tomorrow.
So let's say that the kids do manage to scrape up a few thousand Pringle's cans and manage to get on a reliable web, then what? Ask any teacher what it's like to have a bunch of kids who have access to computers what it's like to carry on a class when one discovers a disney ad.
Mind you, the deeply pragmatic and slightly less politically correct part of my brain points out that it's not like these kids are going to be on the fast path to Harvard either. The worst case is that they're doing the same sort of dirt farming and scavenge living that their parents are doing. The best case is that they're hired as part of some programmer sweat shop doing customer support for significantly less money than other previously developing markets. (i wonder if OLPC comes with a request that in 16 years you get a World of Warcraft account so that the kids of today can become the gold farmers of tomorrow?)
i'd rather see the $400 i spend on two "$100" laptops go for things like improving that countries infrastructure to provide clean water for agriculture, or providing incentive to fair trade business to come in and provide jobs and income and kinda solve the core problem. Let them get to the point where life expectancy crosses 40, families don't need to pull their kids out of school to work on the farm, and the local para-military gangs aren't wondering how many AK-47s a school full of laptops brings.
Then i'll happily pony up.
I suppose, but I still have problems shipping off a $200 toy (seriously, go grab the ISO and try using it for a few hours) will really provide the sort of breakthrough that having a bunch of other more core fixups would solve.
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I'm not sure the OLPC project was really focused on getting the "kids with flies on their faces" (not my term) wired up. There are many countries where the people aren't strictly subsistence-living that would probably really benefit - in 10-15 years - from this kind of investment.
In absolute terms of do-gooding, helping the life-threateningly needy is probably the dunk-shot. But let's say you're the government of, oh, Uruguay? (I have no idea on their current state of affairs, actually, they may already have flying cars) That kind of thing could really be your launching pad for the Great Leap Forward.
Ah, maybe that's a bad example. But you get my drift. The sooner those countries move forward, the sooner they'll be able to buy crap off eBay and Amazon.
Ah, maybe that's a bad example.