Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The Tragic $100 Laptop
"In case you haven't heard, Nicholas Negroponte, the founding chairman of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, is pushing ahead with his
plan to make a $100 laptop that will be distributed to millions of young people
in poor countries around the world."
The intial thought of a laptop that only costs a $100 dollars is WOW, I want one! However, when you look into the logic of the people who oppose this idea, it is not hard to agree with them. The plan of producing this laptop that will sell for $100 is genius but when you think of the "hows" and "to whos" it kind of changes that.
"Many people in those poor countries -- the vast majority, I suspect -- would
not be willing to spend even close to $100 on laptop. What that means is that
they would prefer to spend $100 on other items -- food, iodine pills for water,
DDT to protect them from malaria, basic generic drugs, maybe even a sewing
machine."
It is common knowlegde that not everyone can afford a computer. It would be amazing if that were possible. However, the idea of trying to produce a PC that will be affordable is more than that. The technicalities are challenging such as, who is poor enough for this $100 laptop, how will you distribute this to the "poor" and who is actually going to value the true worth of affordable computer access? And if the goverment chooses to hand them out for free, the value of the laptop is gone because in reality, not everyone really cares about computer access and when you are more concerned about your health issues than your educational issues a laptop is not going to matter to you.
"So what started off as a completely innocent, let's-help-the-poor-in-poor-countries proposal will end up, with government involved, as just one more way of government using force against its own people to buy goods for them that they regard as luxuries, preventing them from buying the goods that they need to make it to next year. That's a tragedy"
