Techdirt doesn’t get the Children’s Machine (aka the $100 laptop)

2 January 2007

I’ve been reading Techdirt for a few months and usually find the entries there to be thoughtful and insightful, but I wouldn’t use those words to describe this post about the Children’s Machine. The post and many of the comments make me sad.

If you’re not familiar with it, you can read about the Children’s Machine at Wikipedia and at the One Laptop per Child homepage. The goal is to make a rugged laptop, suitable for use in remote environments, and to get the cost down in the $100 per laptop range. OLPC is a charitable organization and is raising money to manufacture and give these laptops to poor children.

One line of disagreement in the Techdirt post and comments is that there are more pressing needs for children in poor countries, such as food and clean water, but that seems like a narrow viewpoint. If we have to solve all existing problems before moving ahead with other technologies, we’d never invent the technologies that help solve existing problems. We should never have invested money in creating computers in the first place, I guess, because poverty and hunger existed then also.

Computers are the key to the future. Putting them in to the hands of as many people as possible all over the world, especially children, seems to me to be a Very Good Thing. Young minds will use them to do amazing things. It’s exciting to think about the things they will create that defy our current limitations and narrow thinking. How can people argue that money would be better spent on schools and teaching when these machines can be an integral part of that education? Providing access to a river of knowledge and information and the ability to participate in new communities.

Another strange idea that came out in the comments is that not having MS Office application was some kind of limitation that OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte is making excuses for. To me, one of the best parts about this project is that these machines will be running free software. These children will have freedom with their computers and will grow up to value that freedom. It might be too late for the people of the United Stated and other “advanced” countries to enjoy software freedom, but I will be happy if at least some countries reap the benefits, even if it is at our expense.

The post also touched on the falling price of “real” laptops. Techdirt previously commented on how the price of regular laptops is coming down fast enough that we could just wait and have $100 laptops by the miracle of the market. This ignores the needs of the project. The machines need to be rugged and stand up in remote environments. Tech support and Best Buy service centers may not be near at hand. They need to be safe, for which an innovative display has been created. I’m not sure about battery safety, but we probably don’t want to give them exploding laptop batteries. I imagine some thought has gone in to that. (Techdirt at least gave credit to the idea of the crank that is supplied to allow the battery to be charged in areas where electricity is scarce.) The laptops automatically form a mesh network so that only one Internet connection is needed for a village. Even when the machine is powered down, it is still acting as a node on the network. There’s a lot to the design of this thing from the hardware to the software, and from what I’ve read, they’re making great choices.

Finally, the Techdirt article criticizes Negroponte for promoting abstract benefits like “making things, communicating, exploring, sharing” instead of important things like learning to use word processors and spreadsheets. I think that’s a non-issue. Yes, creating documents and spreadsheets is a useful function of a computer, and I’m sure that will be taught with one of the excellent free office programs out there. But come on, let’s rejoice in those abstract benefits! That’s what gets me charged up about this project. Computers and the Internet are tools and playgrounds for the mind, and if we can get millions of children around the world using them… well, doesn’t that suggest great opportunity and hope? Let’s tout the promise of this project instead of tearing it down. Poor children may need many material things, but they also need nourishment for their minds. This project is seeking to provide more of that. Isn’t that a worthy goal?

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 2 January 2007 at 9:30 pm
filed under freedom, society

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Comments

“even if it is at our expense.”

That seems to hark to the IP maximalist notion that it would be unfair for the 3rd world to enjoy the fruits of the west’s intellectual property without paying for it.

For those who have already achieved equity in publishing their work, no further expense can be considered, even beyond a nation’s borders.

The ‘public’ encompasses all mankind in its global village. There is no ‘US public’ vs ‘3rd world public’ - the latter does not enjoy benefit at the expense of the former.

When you publish free software you deliver it to all mankind, not just to your fellow countrymen to facilitate your own nation’s technological advantage.

So, there is no ‘at our expense’, and in case you were wondering, the truth value of your “even if” is thus ‘false’. :-)

Otherwise, yup, with you in all other respects of the article. It’s the old ‘give a man a fish’ vs ‘give a man a fish farm and a canning factory’ dichotomy.

Posted by Crosbie Fitch on 3 January 2007 at 7:05 am

I agree. What I meant by “at our expense” is that while we may make the mistake of curtailing our freedoms for the sake of a few small and well-connected copyright industries and for monopolists like Microsoft, other countries may eventually surpass us by using free software and enjoying its benefits.

It’s not really at our expense, I guess; more like us shooting ourselves in the foot. I’m still probably not expressing myself very well. I’m thinking that I’m happy to help people in poorer countries lift themselves up even if in the first world we’re intent on handing out shackles to everyone.

(BTW, Crosbie, I wasn’t able to post a comment to your new post last night. I was planning on trying again tonight after work. I could get the preview but couldn’t submit it. The browser would just spin its wheels for a while and then return a blank page.)

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 3 January 2007 at 7:40 am

Yep. Tie our own hands and plead with the rest of the world to tie their hands too. Brain-dead. :-(

Thanks very much for the tip on my blog. It does seem busted.

Posted by Crosbie Fitch on 3 January 2007 at 7:45 am

A long term impact may actually be to increase their material wealth. The computers are up front an educational opportunity, and education correlates with greater material success down the road. But to top it off, computers are a form of *capital wealth*. A computer is actually *means of production*. I think that while Karl Marx got a lot of things wrong, his recognizing the importance of the means of production and its ownership or control was one thing he got right.

Societies themselves are shaped by their means of production and how that means is controlled. When the production means to go catch or hunt or gather something, then skilled able-bodied hunters, spears, and baskets are the means of production. Hunter-gatherer societies thus emphasize becoming good at one of these things, and tend to focus on the best hunters as the “model citizens” and choose good hunters and ex-hunters as chiefs. Wars focus on destroying or capturing an opponent’s means of production, and so in hunter-gatherer societies tend to involve killing one another’s able-bodied men. Of course, killing or capturing the women too, since women produce (by birth) the next generation of men.

Agriculture makes able-bodied people and land the primary means of production, so that you get feudal societies whose politics is bound up with land ownership and whose wars focus on seizing land violently. Then you get the first cases of palace coups and wars to take and occupy territory, as well as to deplete opposing nations of able-bodied men and capture their women.

Agricultural societies need enough specialized tools that crafts-and-trade-specialized societies arise in the world with them, and these tend to depend on trading fleets and trade routes as well as access to raw materials. Their wars are naval wars or land wars for control of overland trade routes, and for control of quarries or mines.

Industrial production via factories makes owning factories important, as well as mining and quarrying, and leads to private business rising in political power. The relationship of business to government becomes the major issue for society (and results in the variations of communism, capitalism, fascism played out in the 20th century, as well as dooming feudalism). Wars then focus on the capture and control of cities, and therefore factories and factory labor, or on damaging or destroying those, as well as infrastructure like roads and pipelines.

Ultimately though, better standards of living have correlated with greater technology, while better freedom and equality have correlated with decentralized ownership of more diverse means of production. Hunter-gatherers had more freedom (but a poorer standard of living) than people in many later societies. Industrial nations have more freedom still, because of the diversity of labor and widespread ownership of capital.

Now, increasingly, information technologies are powerful means of production, and they are increasingly cheap and ubiquitous. This shift to broad-based ownership and control of capital has importance that cannot be overstated. Even owning stock isn’t as significant, since it’s ownership of a tiny piece with little or no real control. Computer ownership (barring Treacherous Computing at least) is direct ownership and control of a powerful productive tool, increasingly available to any random individual. The effects this will have, though not immediate, will surely be profound. This will include political effects and deeper social effects, possibly transforming society in ways as great as the industrial revolution did before, or the agricultural before that. Already, there are signs that connectivity and computers make communism and fascism as obsolescent as industry did feudalism.

The major problem with the present industrialized nations, as I see it, has nothing to do with oil, energy policy, or tons of other “big issues” and everything to do with IP law and the rent-seeking of certain large cartels. Their success would institute a new feudalism, taking our computers away from us with TC and renting them back to us — as tenants with very few rights where once we were lords. It’s the biggest attempted landgrab in history, and it’s completely under the radar of traditional news and the bulk of the process of politics. If it succeeds, the West will have jumped the proverbial shark and pass the torch of civilization on, as has always happened when an empire has become outmoded and calcified and too beholden to some special interests. The same fate led to the British empire fading, and to the fall of the Roman empire long before that. In the latter case, a lengthy Dark Ages ensued because they failed to even pass the torch.

Presently, I think three things can happen. The West might recover from the land grab attempt. It might succumb but it’s likely parts of what we used to call the third world will pick up the torch and rapidly leapfrog us — there are indications of this from the recent rapid maturing of nations in the far east, in eastern Europe, in South America, and even in the middle east and Latin America. (Check out Brazil, Estonia, and even India and China.) All are poised to rapidly overtake the US in particular; China’s flagrant disregard for Western IP law and its rapid advancement of space travel is particularly worth keeping an eye on. They might be doing all that stuff in 2015 that sci-fi authors assumed the US would be: colonizing the moon, for example. (Anyone who thinks the Shenzhou program isn’t an Apollo analogue with the Moon a fairly near-term goal is dreaming — the design that has a crew module and a separate service module is very much geared toward eventual lunar missions, as is the capacity of booster being developed. They basically took the old Soviet moon program plans, threw out the unworkable N-1 booster, dusted off the rest, and set about implementing them with substantial improvements in many areas including liberal cribbing from Apollo.)

Even if those nations fail (China’s old guard freedom-suppressing might win out and doom it to the same fate as the US might meet, and the rest are in grave danger of not surviving infection by US IP law) the give-everyone-computers thing might enable someone else to rise up instead. That, I think, is especially important.

The big danger is that the US fails and its death throes wreck the world. The US and Russia or China torching off WWIII is the most likely such scenario, either over diminishing oil reserves or over more nebulous issues.

Posted by Nemo on 3 January 2007 at 4:43 pm

Hi, Nemo. I agree that “IP” law is a major issue for our time. Barring some kind of civilizational reverse or collapse, it will gradually become apparent to people how important this is, and hopefully when a majority understands what is at stake that it won’t be too late.

With free software and culture, we have the opportunity for huge advances via creative destruction in the next 50 years versus incremental improvements that are easier to control and profit from by existing… power brokers? You know what I mean: “The Man.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to write “entrenched interests,” but that might have worked also.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 3 January 2007 at 5:48 pm

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