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This confused thinking about technology reaches its zenith with the OLPC or One Laptop per Child scheme which is based on the ideas of Nicholas Negraponte, who is also Chairman of the project. It is working to develop laptops that cost $100 that it can supply to the governments of China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand, which will then distribute the laptops to the children of those countries. The idea is that OLPC will start production when ‘…5 to 10 million machines have been ordered and paid for in advance.’

The aim is to reach 100 million laptops in time. The cost will be kept low thanks to the use of ‘Linux … a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbour’s, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.’

This week it was announced that the first 1,000 laptops have gone into production and once this testing phase is over, production units will be manufactured for school children in Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand. OLPC is backed by AMD, Brightstar, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat.

That’s AMD, the processor company which recently canned its PIC (Personal Internet Communicator) device as a sop to the analysts after its acquisition of ATI with all the attendant costs because the analysts didn’t think that a budget Internet Communication device made sense. Google is a very practical, successful, young company but we all know it is quite prepared to censor itself to gain access to new markets such as China.
As for News Corporation, well, all I can say is ‘O.J. Simpson’ and we’ll leave it there.
The burning question is, surely, what will the school kids do with a laptop. Happily OLPC has answered the question, complete with italic emphasis.

‘Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to learn learning through independent interaction and exploration.’

I have enough trouble connecting to an 802.11g router when there’s a brick wall in the way so I simply cannot begin to imagine how much trouble a Nigerian village will have constructing and maintaining a wireless mesh with a bunch of Linux laptops that rely on hand cranked power. I can’t help but wonder whether the educational needs of the kids wouldn’t be better served by a trained teacher in every village armed with nothing more technical than a blackboard and a stick of chalk.

This project looks horribly like the application of technology for the sake of technology and I was unsure whether I should laugh or cry when I saw the screenshot of one of these laptops that showed the language choices include Danish, German, French, Spanish and Esperanto. Esperanto? Which genius thinks that Esperanto will be of benefit to the underclass of China, India and Brazil?

It seems that woolly thinking is a curse that spreads far and wide, and that’s true in both analogue and digital.

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