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Bridging the Digital Divide With PCtvt?
maddu writes "Dr. Raj Reddy, a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence and a
professor at Carnegie Mellon University, plans to unveil his new project, called the PCtvt, later this year - it's a $250 wirelessly
networked personal computer intended for the four billion people around
the world who live on less than $2,000 a year, according to the NYT (free reg. req.) He says his device can find a market in developing countries,
particularly those with large populations of people who cannot read,
because it can be controlled by a simple TV remote control and can
function as a television, telephone and videophone." We've previously covered the somewhat conceptually related Simputer.
Admittedly, my salary is much more, but let's say you make $40,000 a year. Would you be willing to spend $5000 on a computer?
... maybe they should spend their money on food and birth control? I mean, what good is the 'net when you have 8 kids hungry at home? Seriously, the net is a wonderful tool but it's not going to magically transform a shantytown into a utopia.
It should be noted that in the eightees, a lot of people did, and those were a lot less useful then those we have now.
Note that a loan for $40,000 at 5% interest is about $170 per month. Would I pay that for a computer if I had to today on a $40K salary? The answer is probably yes.
Don't talk rubbish... there is no way anyone who lives on less than $2000/year would even consider spending that kind of money on that kind of thing. There are more important things: food, clothing, housing, heating, health, education, transport... if you can afford to drop $250 on a 'luxury' like this, then you certainly aren't in that salary band.
Geeks maybe, but most average people did not buy $5000 computers. You didn't see a wider adoption under they started to fall under $2000.
Great. Now we only need to find a cheap way to bring power to everybody's hut...
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
It should be noted that in the eightees, a lot of people did, and those were a lot less useful then those we have now.
Note that a loan for $5,000 at 5% interest is about $20 per month. Would I pay that for a computer if I had to today on a $40K salary? The answer is HELL yes.
(Sorry screwed up the numbers in my first post. Should have realized they didn't make sense. Mod it down.)
No, but split that among 50 families in the village, and it becomes MUCH more palatable.
One challenge Mr. Reddy faced was in persuading Microsoft to offer a version of its Windows software for the project for far less than its commercial price. But Mr. Reddy said he eventually won the support of Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer and a senior strategist at Microsoft.
Strange that they wouldn't consider one of the free alternative OSs instead of going begging. Maybe Microsoft kicked in some research funds or something.
Considering cost is a *major* factor in this project, and every dollar counts, why the hell did he put Windows on it? Granted, he seems to have worked out a deal with Microsoft for a "reduced price, stripped" copy of Windows, still... $0 is always less than Windows.
In this case -- a controlled hardware environment -- Linux would have been perfect. And free (as in beer).
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
If the computer is perceived as a means to get ahead in the highly competative education market, many families will sacrifice then. I dont want to sound stereotypical, but many of the Asian cultures value education much more than Americans. People will pay a considewrable amount for private schools, Saturday schools, summer camps, etc.
Good grief, how long are you amortizing these loans? Even without interest, it takes 20 years to pay off $5000 at $20 month. Unless you meant $200/month which is closer to 2-3 years and more likely for a product with a 4 year useful life. 20 years on a car would be like financing a car over 40 years or more. It'd be completely destroyed and useless by the time you finished paying for it.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
A large part of the reason why the internet has been such a big and fast-growing success is because the propensity to get online has been linked to education and sophistication in the user base. If you put 500 million cavemen and -women in front of these nifty terminals, I think the best you could hope for is some kind of "infinite monkeys" outcome.
But maybe I'm wrong--if you put halfway intelligent people online, even if they're not all totally literate at the beginning, they will probably get a lot more opportunities and incentives to climb the education curve. I guess that must be where all of these "cheap terminals for the 3rd world" are going.
And now that I think about it, one of big concentrations of unleashed education, intellect, and technical sophistication on the Internet is Slashdot. You can make up your own punchline on that.
So, a person who makes less than $2,000 per year and may be illiterate is going to spend the equivalent of six weeks income on a wireless network PC. I don't think so. Or, is the plan to get governments and NGO's to buy it for people with the expectation that they will be motivated to learn how to use it. What's wrong with encouraging the spread of 'Internet cafes' in third world countries? That seems to be a model that is actually working. This sounds like the 'simputer' part II.
[Insert pithy quote here]
And increasing incomes is going to help just how?
If we increase incomes, product prices go up (they have to - or the DVD manufacturers won't make their dollar a piece anymore), and these products will still be out of range.
You can only change the balance by doing something about the distribution of the money. If the product is manufactured in China for one fourth of the price it's being sold in the west, you know that a lot of money is being made on the way, and that it's not the Chinese who get it. That's where it goes wrong, not in the prices themselves.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's not 1/8 of your salary unless you make $2000 a year. Four billion people may live on less than $2000 a year, but that doesn't mean that all those four billion have $1999 in yearly income. I'm sure that for many people, it's not an 1/8 of a year's salary, but 1/4, 1/2, or even more.
Umm...there's something seriously wrong here...
We start with:
Then, later on in the article:
Maybe it's just me, but $250 sounds like a lot more than 5% of $2000. I might be willing to pay 5 percent of my annual income to own something cool -- but 12.5%? I don't think so.
>It's a nice idea and it should be done, but he's not the one that's going to do it.
Yes, its all so clear.
Attention all good natured people. Please stop what you are doing. You will become utter and complete failures unless you are a Certified Professional Engineer. Forget about your hard work, lobbying and dedicating your life to helping others. Your lack the skills and specialized university-level degree to help others in any sort of worthwhile way.
Please, just give up. You are just embarssing the rest of us.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
They really only need two things in developing countries - education and opportunity. Everything else will follow. There are many groups trying to feed and provide medicine for these countries but they have barely made a dent. I am not saying that this device will provide either education of opportunity but not all efforts have to be as simplistic as sending food.
Stupid People + Information = Dangerous Stupid People
Stupid People + Education = Normal People
Stupid People + Education + Information = Exceptional People.
Information without understanding is like a gun with no ammo. These "unwashed masses" as they are called don't need information, they lack the skills to evaluate and understand information. They need education not an interactive TV to placate them....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
If I made under $2,000/year there is no way I could aford $250 for a computer. That's 12.5% of their yearly income on a PC. I barely make 50K/year and there's no way I could afford to spend $6,250 on a PC. The price seems a little steep.
And what exactly is the benefit of birth control to the head of a third world family? Remember, we're talking about subsistence farming here. So when you peddle birth control you're trying to sell someone on greater economic prosperity by denying him the only real way in his environment to materially increase his prosperity, more children.
In such an environment children are a resource, not an expense. Birth control is only attractive to a culture where children are an expense, not a resource. Until you materially bring up the overall level of prosperity in these cultures you cannot escape that simple economic reality.
So one is really as useless as the other, the only advantage to the internet appliance is it gives the illusion of greater prosperity, and a view to the wider world. But neither offering materially affects the root problem, until the fundamental inequities in the global distribution of wealth are addressed there is little hope to ending this situation.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Don't think Tech Support. Think 4 billion more PCs to 0wn and turn into spam-sending zombies. My inbox thanks you.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The solution to poverty and hunger isn't universal.
The poor guy you're speaking of, trying to make sand soup, needs a whole different level of help.
Not all "poor and hungry" are at that level. A few years ago, I had ocassion to ride my bike through Turkey a lot. Off in the hills near Adana. Came across many, many small villages. These guys had nothing BUT their farms. Little tiny village, one general store/meeting place/local bar. Usually, the only telephone in the village as well. Were they 'poor'? By local Turkish standards, yes. Hungry? Not really. But they were working like dogs, just trying to get their crop in and get a decent price for it.
These are the guys who could seriously benefit from this type of tool. Better disease protection for his crops. Better crop rotation. Better fertilization techniques. Better tractor maintenance. Better price for his crops. Bingo...more food left over to give to the guy who can't grow his own avocado.
Hell...I'm not a farmer. But give them more information, and let THEM figure out how to implement it.
Slashdot has covered a number of stories that demonstrated the impact of good communications infrastructure in the "third world". Finding out what the real market rates are for your cash crop (instead of blindly trusting middlemen), getting your land title (instead of going through corrupt notaries), diagnosing diseases in your farm animals, communicating with relatives that are far away, education... the list goes on.
It's not up to this guy that came up with a cool idea to decide between giving people clean water or cheap TV/computers. If we are to treat third-world people as equals, we'll have to trust them to decide whether they want to spend money on this tool or on something else that's more important to them. To decide for them is rather paternalistic, no?
One last point - your pen1s enlArgement emails... we need help runnning this network, cause we're obviously overwhelmed. By inviting more people in, hopefully we'll find talented people- perhaps another Srinivasa Ramanujan?
Let's assume these people can handle most of their problems if we're not fucking with them, and that they may actually help us solve some of our problems.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I wonder how many of those 4 billion people even have access to electricity in their homes.