Jul 29 2006
The Perils of the $100 Laptop
Published by Ivan Groznii at 10:18 am under Rants, Reflections |
Government is generally the home of bad ideas, but occasionally there is an exception. The much-touted One Laptop Per Child project falls into that category.
The idea is simple: in order to help developing nations to leap over the obvious economic and infrastructure barriers which prevent them joining the digital age, a project was initiated to build the cheapest laptop possible; the target price is $100 per PC. I recall reading an article at the start of this enterprise, written by its director Nicholas Negroponte; he said directly that in order to achieve the balance of cost and performance, they were going to have to use Linux.
Promising indeed. The result is apparently a perfectly serviceable little machine running Fedora Core with a specialised interface called Sugar. Already, the governments of China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand have expressed an interest. However, there are some hidden dangers within this project, and it’s unclear if the foundation’s management is working to address them: some of these countries have so many problems with corruption that it’s difficult to see how the project will benefit those it intends.
Nigeria is the easiest and most accessible example; they have placed the first order for 1 million of these laptops. However, it’s difficult to see what mechanisms are in place so that the laptops will reach their intended recipients. Nigeria has some of the worst ratings for perceptions of corruption according to Transparency International; they are ranked 152, along with Equatorial Guinea and the Ivory Coast. Furthermore, there is an existing digital culture in Nigeria which has a large, active criminal element. It’s rare to find someone who has not received an e-mail that involved what is known as “Advanced Fee Fraud”; namely, the scams that offer riches plundered from a dead West African official. A large part of this activity is run out of Nigeria; indeed, the leading anti-fraud website, Scamorama, refers to these criminals as “The Lads from Lagos”. In aid of this criminal endeavour, Nigerian hackers have left their markers all over the ‘Net; typing in “Mugu Guyman” (Nigerian slang for “idiot”) into Google yields loads of sites which these online fraudsters have used to harvest e-mail addresses.
Thus we should be concerned that the laptops are being sent not into the hands of children who deserve it, but those who will misuse this valuable tool. I emphasise the word “tool”; tools are value-neutral and can be used for good or malign purposes. A hammer can be used to build a house or to beat someone to death; similarly, a PC can educate and enlighten, or it can give the “Mugu Guymans” a cheap means (complete with wireless internet) by which they can perpetuate criminality.
The website for the One Laptop Per Child foundation has little information about how this issue is to be addressed; I suggest they should anticipate and ameliorate this risk before any of the laptops are shipped. Generally speaking, it is a brilliant initiative and an excellent means by which Linux usage is going to be extended. It would be a pity if this stellar idea was diminished by the mendacity of those in recipient countries who care more about themselves than the good of their nation’s children.
6 Responses to “The Perils of the $100 Laptop”
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What gets me about this whole thing is that there are large parts of Africa, say, where most people don’t have any access to electricity; there is no chance of maintenance and schools would not have a connection to the internet. The thought of WAPs being maintained is laughable - try getting the telephone lines maintained first! Where I worked, we used to have electricity, phone and ISP all working at the same time about 2-3 days per month! This is only a stellar idea in the few countries which sit somewhere between the third and first worlds, and then only parts of them. In large parts of India clean drinking water wouuld be a good start… IN much of Africa it’s just a dream.
People in Nigeria might benefit more by selling a $100 computer to a Lad from Lagos for a few bucks than trying to use it.
2 Things:
1) Negroponte has talked about the value of these devices to people other than the children they’re intended for. At http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2006/program/keynotes.php#negroponte you can read about his recent keynote at NECC, and if you search the iTunes music store for NECC, you can find a podcast of the event. In it, he stated that by saturating the market with these (volume is a large part of getting down to the $100 price point) he hoped they wouldn’t be of much interest to others. Also, by making them look very distinct it would be tough to hide the fact that you had received one of these illegally.
2) As for access to power and internet discussed in the previous comment, these devices will come with a unit designed to allow students to generate the power they need to run. Special pull string units will allow students to generate electricity and the battery will store it. See this slashdot article for more info: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/24/1645206
The laptops will also stay on at very low power to create mesh networks. The OLPC iniative is also creating some other support devices to help support the laptops. These will include cheap wirless antennas, storage units, etc. It is my understanding that the mesh network and accessories are being designed specifically to take into account the lack of services Sinai mentioned.
I think all of the things mentioned are legitimate problems, but in the writing I’ve seen the OLPC initiative is doing their best to address them.
I really don’t think that our ‘friends’ from Lagos need a computer which has limited capabilities (for them!) like the OLPC. Surely they are already using much more capable hardware. I like the idea of OLPC, sure there are challenges, but I whish Negroponte and his team a lot of success. You can give fish, or give a rod to do the fishing!
Hmmmm. It’s easy to tell that some folk have very little idea about the realities in some of these places. Let me try to expand a little on my previous comment. In a large part of Africa south of the Sahara there probably just isn’t the need for much IT at all. It’s about survival and perhaps a very basic education. Don’t get me wrong - I wish it were different. And I put my money where my mouth is - I’ll be heading back out to eastern Central Africa in mid 2008 for another five year stint. In numerous countries in that part of the world, businesses don’t have reliable IT infrastructure; even government departments can’t get their IT working in any way we’d recognise in the west.
So, please tell me how this whole thing is going to work. Who exactly is going to do the maintenance? Or every time one of these things breaks, we’re just going to give the kid a new one? What about printers? Or are we talking about an i/o free society here, beyond a hard disk anyways? Mesh networks? Who’s going to maintain those? Let me see, maintenance free networking… Last time I looked I didn’t see any maintenance-free networks in Europe or the USA. Where I’ve worked, kids don’t have pens - ball-points. Paper is restricted due to the cost. They share textbooks - one per class of maybe 40 pupils if they’re very, very luck. They build their toys out of scrap wire; they collect empty cans, plastic bags, and bottles for a living. There are places where at time millions of kids don’t get enough to eat for months on end… And we’re going to give them a ‘ken laptop.
In some ways I admire this. It’s just that the people who are advocating this don’t seem to have spent any time on the ground. Maybe it’s an initiative just for those places which don’t face the sort of problems I’m talking about. In which case I’d argue that those countries can probably look after themselves - perhpas India, I’m not familiar at all with the Indian sub-continent. Or maybe this is just for kids who’re going to form the new middle class in certain countries and bugger the rest. I just think we should get honest about this, because otherwise all it does is make us feel better without achieving any meaningful change. And, I guess, we all know where poverty leads to ultimately. So this is a very important thing to get right.
‘Kay, I’m ranted out.
I will admit that I’ve never been to any of these countries. I understand your concerns about the situations currently existing in these areas. As far as the laptops go, the OLPC projects is trying to break new ground in the areas of durability, maintenance, etc. The reason they’ll be so cheap is because of volume, so yes: if they break, the intention is to replace them. The goal is to not make them as difficult as possible to break. They’ll be ways to reset the software and the hardware is being stress tested to find it’s limits. In fact, the original prototype with the crank on the computer was modified merely because it wasn’t durable enough. As for the mesh networks and networks that are self sustaining, in the US we have no desire to create these types of things because it serves no business reason. Why put consultants, technicians, and others out of work?
Maintaining the status quo by giving people in difficult environments more of the same is not very innovative. This program is designed to provide students with access, both to each other and the rest of the world. It has nothing to do with countries taking care of themselves and everything to do with providing technology that people can afford. It’s hard to picture because we’ve never done it before, but I think it’s a worthwhile program and one that could be hugely successful.
[...] The result is apparently a perfectly serviceable little machine running Fedora Core with a specialised interface called Sugar. Already, the governments of China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand have expressed an interest. However, there are some hidden dangers within this project…read more | digg story [...]