From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 11:30:19 MST
Billy Brown wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > The primary appeal of the scheme, to me, is the idea of dropping
> > billions of easily concealable ringtop computers onto oppressed
> > countries, as Marc Stiegler proposed in _Earthweb_.
>
> I can understand that, but I'm a little skeptical about it. Most of the
> people in the most urgent need of help can't read, let alone use a
> computer - and they don't speak English, Japanese or any European language,
> either, so there isn't a lot of content they could use anyway.
I believe that Marc Stiegler's scheme was a bit beyond modern 'tech -
note that I say "ringtop" rather than "palmtop", for example - and aside
from additional miniaturization and solar power, I think some form of
primitive Teacher AI was involved. The ringtops taught Third World
villages how to read, how to use the ringtop to communicate with others,
access the 'Net, and so on.
(FYI, the appeal of this scheme, to me, never revolved around
"cheapness", so I'll defend it no more; I'm just saying that a
nonprofit, which thinks of fixed costs as being sunk rather than as an
investment to be amortized, only has to worry about the marginal cost of
further production.)
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
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