Story: The $100 laptop - don't get carried away

Posted by: Anonymous (Sunday 20 November 2005, 11:51 AM)

This is classic 'make way please, gadget to the rescue'. Whenever there is a problem engineers sit around scribbling out solutions, they come up with some ingenious designs...

...for problems that they fail to understand.

I have worked in Africa drilling boreholes for countries in dire need to clean water supplys. You don't have to walk far before you come across a defunct borehole which was probably on the cover of some charities glossy brochure surrounded by smiling brown faces a few years before.

Before you flame me, I am not anti development, I am not anti low technology design, it just needs people to go out to where the problem is and come up with some solutions. They'll get it wrong first time out but with ITERATION, we could see some useful results.

Getting back to the laptop, what will it be used for? Can the people it is aimed at read? Do you think, having never seen spam they'll fall for the first Nigerian prince needing them to transfer money? Of course they will.

Richard Feyman was involved in a technology transfer program in S America. His comment was that it was useless trying to teach people what a pump was and transfer the technology to them. They already had it, only it was just the rich that had the pumps.

The technology may be difficult to produce at the price quoted but even more important is the human side of things. Don't stop inventing and persuing good causes, just get out there and see what works.