collision detection: Does Africa really need the $100 laptop?

November 17, 2005

Does Africa really need the $100 laptop?

There's been a lot of buzz lately about the "$100 laptop" being developed by a consortium of visionary geeks. The idea is to produce a computer so cheap -- and powered by a hand crank -- that it can be distributed affordably to impoverished African kids.

Every time this subject comes up, though, critics tend to ask: Laptops? Isn't this a kind of ass-backwards priority? Poor African countries need clean water and basic medicine before they need freakin' laptops, don't they?

Well, yes and no. As the creators of this initiative explain in the online FAQ for their project:

Why is it important for each child to have a computer? What's wrong with community-access centers?
One does not think of community pencils -- kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful.

Precisely the point: A computer is a tool that creates new modes of thought -- just like a paintbrush or a new language. As the seminal education thinker Seymour Papert argued in his superb book Mindstorms, one of the reasons people don't learn math is that it is a language that requires immersion in "mathland," much as learning French requires living amongst those who speak French. If you try and learn French in an English-speaking country, with no one and no place to practise it, you'll fail. Same goes for math. Papert argued that computers -- most specifically, basic computer programming -- formed a virtual "mathland".

These days, of course, computers have become pure consumer items. Since no one needs to know how to program to use them, they're no longer really a "mathland", I'm afraid. Nonetheless, computers do instil other useful modes of thought, such as the recombinatorial nature of cutting and pasting. Cutting and pasting began life as an avante-garde artistic technique, because the idea of semirandomly juxtaposing images and words seemed like such a neat way to stimulate new ideas. But now it's a regular part of every kid's intellectual toolbox, and a crucial one. (All the more reason today's copyright battles are so important, by the way: By limiting our ability to aggressively remix the digital stuff around us, Hollywood and the recording industry are tamping down on an explosively cool mode of thinking. Imagine if you told academics they weren't allowed to write down quotes from books on index cards and rearrange them on their desks to help think through a problem!)

Anyway, that's the real reason to get computers and the Internet to impoverished Africa. If you want to think in a fully modern way, you need computers.

(Thanks to Scott McGowan for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at November 17, 2005 11:57 AM

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Comments

The critics of the computer is stupid because these guys from MIT are actually focusing on another problem. The people that are focusing on the other problem in africa is obviously not doing very well, and the critics expects these guys at MIT to scrap their idea and pursue the one that they think needs to be dealt with? These MIT guys got a new IDEA to help, that is why they're doing it, or else they wouldn't have done anything, but now that they're doing something that gets lots of attention, the critics want them to switch. That's totally IDIOTIC.

Posted by: nova9 at November 17, 2005 9:50 PM

Well, yes, that is the problem with the "why aren't you solving this other problem argument". However, I also think that plenty of people are quite supportive of the MIT guys, though -- from what I can tell, they've been getting a ton of positive coverage for this!

Posted by: Clive at November 18, 2005 8:30 AM

This reminds me of the saying, "Give a person a fish and they will eat for a day. Teach them how to fish, and they will eat for a lifetime."

True, a person who is hungry today might prefer the fish to the laptop, but in my opinion, there is nothing better you can do to help with the inequalities of this world than to educate. Anyone who says otherwise should go an read Paulo Freire's _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ (http://tinyurl.com/7dv8u).

Posted by: Pork Chop at November 18, 2005 9:24 AM

I just hope these laptops have builtin WiFi. I agree with Papert, the right ratio is 1:1. But having a laptop for each child is not enough - they need to be able to do something useful with it. And doing something socaily useful means participating on social media. Africa is all ready sounding its voice, but again - the ratio we should look for is 1:1.

Posted by: yish at November 18, 2005 10:15 AM

Pork Chop, great point! Yish, yes, they do in fact have built-in Wifi -- and even cooler, they're designed to automatically form a mesh with one another. Even if there's no Net access, the kids in a village can use the mesh to communicate amongst one another, even via VOIP since each laptop has a microphone and headphone jack. Of course, VOIP in a small village is sort of pointless, but the concept is interesting, and I'd be intrigued to find out how a really big mesh -- like, say, 1,000 of these things in a single Indian village -- would perform.

Posted by: Clive at November 18, 2005 10:47 PM

I'd like to know how they solve the power drainage on the WiFi.

Posted by: nova9 at November 23, 2005 11:34 AM

It seems to me that a device allowing unobserved communication between young persons of different sexes (and classes and religions) is going to cause some social resistance. I approve of free communication, but I'd expect some really unpleasant (up to murderous) backlash.

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