From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2000 - 06:39:54 MST
(Diverting back from the lively debate on the Extropians list ...)
On Mon, Mar 27, 2000 at 05:55:28PM -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:
> One additional note. When all those old colonial powers left and went
> home, you think they abandoned all that they had gained? Yeah, right!
> Consider that they left in place all the legal structures which defined
> property ownership, specifically, who it was that owned anything,
> everything, of value. Then, though they had left, they maintained
> relationships with the "new owners", continuing at some remove the flow of
> benefits achieved through the earlier "colonial" conquest.
Yup.
One interesting explanation I heard: the history of Africa in the second
half of the 20th century can be summed up as an inter-collegiate competition
between Sandhurst and the London School of Economics. (Which were the two
colleges where most of the first-generation post-independence leaders were
educated.)
> Mike's right.. There's plenty of food. It's human decency that's in short
> supply.
Thinking my way around the box, what we want is an Equalizer.
No a destructive one: a constructive one. A social Equalizer, as opposed
to an anti-social one, equalizes people by giving them equal opportunities
to live a better life. (An anti-social one removes opportunities. Think of
a gun, pointed in your face by someone who wants all your money.)
A social Equalizer should be general-purpose. capable of training its
owner in its use. It should be portable. It should be self-maintaining
-- ideally it should be self-replicating -- certainly it must be very,
very cheap. It should not be dependent on infrastructure: it should be
able to go anywhere there are people, however destitute.
And it must provide opportunities.
Steering free of exotica like bush robots or utility clouds or personal
immortality, what can we do with technology available _today_?
Take a look at the Handspring Visor. A PAlm Pilot clone that retails
(the basic version) for about US $149. (www.handspring.com). Today, this
type of machine is basically a toy for rich yuppies and technology
addicts in the developed world. But it could be a whole lot more.
Imagine a Visor that cost $15. Fantasy? No -- Moore's law is on our
side, and if in five years there's still a reason to produce 'em, this
is what they'll cost.
Add wireless networking. Nothing flashy; it just needs to be able to do
peer-to-peer networking at fairly low speed (sub-one megaherz).
Add memory. RAM is cheap. Give it a chunk of extra RAM -- 64Mb, 256Mb --
preferably as non-volatile storage.
Did I say non-volatile? Yeah. Coat the back in photovoltaics. The thing
runs off 2 AAA cells and draws a peak of 70mA at 3V -- usually more like
20-30mA. Photovoltaics and NiMH cells will just about double the $15
price, but render it totally independent of external power sources.
Ruggedize the case a bit -- it's going to be used by ill-educated people
who have no prior experience of high-tech kit. People who think an income
of $100 a year is affluence.
Now the tough bit; software.
It needs some sort of network discovery and routing protocol that will let
a whole bunch of these things find out where each other are (within a
short range -- 500-1500 metres? 3Km?). It needs to be able to make sure
that information gets forwarded from one box to another until it gets
where it's needed. Not the web; more primitive text-based stuff will
do. Think gopher. Think e-mail. Think internet circa 1990 -- in places
where high-tech communication previously meant a runner with a piece of
paper in a cleft stick. Some of the stuff developed for packet radio over
the years would be directly applicable (I'm thinking of TCP/IP over
AX.25). Or it may be something more modern. Never mind ...
It needs lots of information services behind it. Not glossy subscription-
based magazines and animated graphics, but useful, relevent information
about everything you need to know to make life in a village that doesn't
have running water more bearable (such as how to _get_ running water).
And smart people who're going to add to the corpus over time and
respond ahead of schedule to the user's needs. Think in terms of the
equivalent of a well-stocked university library, but with content tailored
to people who don't yet have access to tools -- or any education beyond
basic literacy. (This is a tall order. How do you boostrap a literate
economy out of nothing?)
It also needs to be self-teaching. One assumption: the user must be
minimally literate before they start. But, given the very minimal ability
to read, the machine should be able to teach the user everything else
about how it's used -- not as a yuppie replacement for a filofax, but
as a communications tool and a way of learning. Send barefoot teachers
with a blackboard and chalk to teach reading, then give the students
an Equalizer. Some of 'em will get used as hearth-bricks -- and some of
them will be used as universities.
Now: what happens if you give everyone in Africa a cheap, rugged,
infrastructure- free, open-source net terminal?
I'm not sure, but it can't be any worse than what we've got today ...
-- Charlie Stross
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