Ethan Zuckerman has been in touch with the One Laptop per Child program since its inception, and he reviewed it in January. Tonight I was privileged to meet Ethan and to hear Nicholas Negroponte speak about the current status and future plans for the program. Negroponte is a big thinker. He wants to equip each of the 1.2 billion primary and middle-school age children on the planet with a networked laptop at a price of around $100 each. To do this, he intends to limit orders to one million units. Today the price point on the laptop is about $176 and — as Ethan pointed out to me — there is a networking cost that kicks up the buy-in to about a quarter of a billion dollars if your country wants to be an early adopter.
There are no orders in the pipeline right now, but by the end of the year, the progam will be producing about 20% of ALL the world’s laptops, or 1 million per month. After Negroponte’s talk there was some discussion of gettin these for native peoples, here in the US and in Canada. It seems possible, but the million unit order minimum makes eliminates incrementalism and pilot programs, so it would take a national policy mandate to make it happen.
Just think what would be possible if we weren’t burning money in the bonfires of the Bush wars.
[UPDATE: ISABEL JACOBSON, THE LAST GIRL STANDING IN THE SCRIPPS NATIONAL SPELLING BEE JUST CORRECTLY SPELLED "HELODES." KEEP IT UP, ISABEL!!!]
Professor Negroponte doesn’t have any million unit orders yet, but he has a list of national prospects including nations as diverse as Nigeria, Argentina, and Vietnam. I noticed Venezuela wasn’t on his list. It seems like the kind of natinal betterment project they are equipped to undertake. (Ethan pointed out to me that there can be great enthusiasm at the classroom level, and at the national policy making level, but the school administrators also must buy in).
4 Comments
Other than a vague familiarity with Negroponte from his Wired coumns, I really knew nothing of him until reading his book Being Digital a few years ago. Extremely impressive, a tower of intellect and intelligence. However, there’s something about the $100 laptop project that always felt wrong. I’ve never been able to pinpoint it. I don’t think it is political, but it could be. Probably not technical, because it probably is doable. But somehwere around the notion that if a person (child or adult) is intelligent enough to use an internet connected computer, they are probably not going to be happy for more than a day with the limitations imposed by the $100 model. But maybe I’m dead wrong…
I think you may not have all the information you need for an informed judgment, Winston. Professor Negroponte pointed out the fact that hardware prices are halved every eighteen months or so, and that retailers add features and functions to address issues like unit prices and margins. I didn’t transcribe specs completely, but I think the current unit is an 800MHz AMD processor with 256MB RAM abd a 1GB FLASH drive. It runs on less than 2 Watts of power, it has 3 USB ports, and WiFi capability. There are a lot of issues about the laptop. For example, I heard a woman talking about accessibility, and font displays. This is a one size fits all, and it obviously won’t fit all. But it looks like a good start with a lot of issues addressed, like ruggedizement (I made that word up), graymarket protections, high volume manufacturing by pre-eminent manufacturers, all that good stuff.
No offense intended here, but when I heard the woman talking about accessibility I was reminded of this post by Paul Ford. A lot of us wish we had been there when the design decisions were being made! But we weren’t. If I heard Professor Negroponte correctly, they spent a one time engineering budget of US$25 million to get the design right. They seem to have covered all the engineering bases, providing an intuitively useful laptop for kids. It has multimedia functionality and one of the first things the Cambodian kids learned to do oiutside of class was Skype each other… It’s less environmentaly unfriendly by a factor of ten than it’s closest comparator. I was very impressed. I hope that the project moves forward in great leaps worldwide so they can begin to put these things into poor school systems in the US.
It’s a nice idea, however gifts of that kind are useless without the infrastructure to maintain them, locally, and useless for their intended purpose if the other needs — often much more pressing — of the recipients can be better met by selling them. Ghoul tourists are hot for things like that and there’s a big market demand from vanity survivalists right here at home. If the country where they’re to be given has a nascent industry in the manufacture of comparable items, a flood of them will crush it.
The poverty of access to info and the tech to process it is most often the result of a corrupt local elite in cahoots with a corrupt foreign elite. Devices intended or useful for communications revolutions are easily coopted and twisted into their service, once they see the utility. There’s not going to be any major cure for social ills coming from the effort. The “gifted and graceful few” will certainly take good advantage. So there’s that and as you pointed out, Frank, the money that could be used for their benefit is currently being sucked into the unholy apertures of cretin capitalists. I’d sooner see that money spent on things that are completely and irredeemably frivolous, which this is not.
FWIW, the nobility of the intentions is solid and I expect many of the caveats I raised have been or will be considered.
You can follow the OLPC project in detail over at OLPC News – we’re discussing it daily. http://www.olpcnews.com