Nobel Prize Winner Argues Tech Companies Should Be Changing The World (qz.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Tech companies are competing to serve the wealthy, argues the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, complaining there's no "global vision," with big innovations instead "designed and dedicated mostly for commercial successes... while trillions of dollars are invested in developing robotics and artificial intelligence for military and commercial purposes, there is little interest in applying technology to overcome the massive human problems of the world." A genius in the tech industry "can dedicate his work to creating a medical breakthrough that will save thousands of lives -- or he can develop an app that will let people amuse themselves."

As an exception, he cites the low-cost Endless computer, which runs Linux and has 50,000 Wikipedia articles pre-installed to enable offline research -- plus more than 100 applications -- for a price of just $79. "One part of Endless's business is operated like a conventional, profit-seeking company, while the other part is a social business that provides underserved populations with educational, health, and creative services they were once denied. Endless is already being shipped around the globe by four of the five largest computer manufacturers. It has become the leading PC platform in Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia. It has also been selected as the standard operating system for the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and in coming months it will be adopted as the primary platform by a number of other Latin American countries."
The article is by Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance, and is taken from his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.

Comments

Definitely deserving of the Nobel Prize

[Okian Warrior]

There's been a lot of controversy over the Peace prize of late.

Note that Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank which has reduced worldwide poverty by some insane amount - something like 40% of all poverty in the world has been eliminated by this one idea(*).

This guy deserves his medal, and perhaps his stature and accomplishments should be taken into account before people start dissing his opinions.

He's not just a random blogger that got an article in BuzzFeed.

(*) With significant follow-on benefits, such as increasing childrens' dietary protein, leading to better health.

Re:Definitely deserving of the Nobel Prize

[lucm]

G I V E M E A B R E A K

A bank which requires debt to be paid of reduced world hunger by 40%? Absolutely laughable.

it's not just his bank directly, it's the concept he invented (microcredit).

And it does work. Let's say someone is very poor and tries to make a living selling bottles of water on the street. They buy 10 every day from a grocery store and make a profit of a few cents; it's difficult to sell more because people don't buy warm water and the constant trips to the grocey store to restock is taking a long time. Getting that business to the next level, which would be to sell 50 bottles a day, would require a small plastic cooler. From our perspective it's cheap, maybe $15, but for someone who makes a few cents a day, it could take a long time to save $15. That's where microcredit comes in. The person can now buy a cooler and quintuple their income, which allows them to repay the debt much faster. And then after a while maybe they're ready for a second cooler, or an employee.

There are other forms of microcredit that work too, like "microcredit unions", where a bunch of poor people pool their money and each member of the pool can borrow a larger sum in a round-robin fashion.

It all comes down to leverage. There's a ceiling (or more accurately a chasm) but this kind of financing works.

Nope, it was before

[Okian Warrior]

No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.

  The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.

No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
  The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.

The Grameen Bank was written up in the November 1999 issue of Scientific American.

NAFTA came into force in 1994, so most of the benefits from Grameen happened *before* the push towards globalization.

And for the record, bringing people out of poverty through globalism is temporary, because the root cause of poverty is corruption and globalism doesn't change that.

Most of the wealth to China went first to the people, then to the government. The government now has all the money, and the people would return to poverty in a heartbeat if the global demand dried up.

Not so much with the Grameen bank.

China is throwing tons of money at worthless projects: cities with no residents, massive investment in research with no accountability for quality, and huge state-sponsored projects that regularly fail - such as bridges and dams.

All that wealth coming from the US has gone to waste.

What's worse is that globalism is pulling us down into poverty. Highly trained Chinese can come to this country and get jobs, but highly trained Americans can't similarly go to China. You can't become a Chinese citizen even if you marry a Chinese citizen.

Globalism is one-sided, and makes our country weaker in every possible way. The wealth flows from the richer country to the poorer, where it is wasted.

At any rate, the Grameen bank was an idea that actually worked.

Even if you are philosophically opposed to capitalism, you have to admit that the Grameen Bank, as an idea, works.

Leading PC platform?

[PixetaledPikachu]

As much as I enjoy using linux as a daily driver, aside from a flurry of publication on popular tech sites between July to August 2017 for their launch in Indonesia, I haven't heard a single thing about Endless being a leading PC platform on any field of computing.