Two decades ago the question largely had shifted to the problem of how to get computing into the hands of the next three billion people. There was some work around the notion of special devices optimized for rural villagers that would be low cost, perhaps $150 or so.
For many at the time, likely most knowledgeable observers, the prevailing thinking was that it couldn't really be done. And that remained true even as recently as the middle of the 2000 decade.
But as we stumbled upon a solution to the problem of getting communications to people at prices they could afford, we are about to solve the problem of getting computers to people, also at prices they can afford.
The notion, for some time, has been that in many parts of the world, the smart phone would be "the computer" most people used. That might turn out to be largely correct, for at least a time.
But it also now is possible that we know how to create and sell computers to people that cost no more than $150. Consider that the prototype "One Laptop Per Child" device had a screen of 7.5 inches diagonal and flash memory, with no keyboard.and used Wi-Fi for Internet connectivity.
Oh, that's right, we now call that a tablet, and it is made and sold commercially by the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and soon Google and likely Apple.
There is an important principle here. The communications and computer industries have solved a very hard problem that stumped global policy makers for decades. Smart people, working creatively, without any guidance or direct support from government entities, simply solved the problem of communications for people who never before had made a phone call.
Those people and firms are about to solve another really big problem, and they don't even know it, yet.
Though it is unpopular in some circles, the notion that really-big problems often can be solved by creative human beings themselves, entirely by market mechanisms, without the dead hand of government dicta or bloated programs that waste lots of money.
There are other lessons to be learned, for people honest enough to ponder them. For most of my life, it seems, government officials, policy makers and foundations have wrestled with the idea of how to jumpstart economic development in places such as Africa, spending, by probably conservative estimates, a trillion dollars, at the the rate of $50 billion to $150 billion a year.
The "aid establishment" won't like to hear it, but many believe the aid actually has harmed development in Africa. It isn't just that the aid largely has been ineffective, it has made things worse.
This is the argument made by Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist with a masters from Harvard, a doctorate from Oxford, and eight years experience as an economist for Goldman Sachs.
“You essentially have a problem whereby African governments are getting aid because they, the donors, are worried about the levels of poverty in those countries," Moyo says. "But that aid then tends to spew out a lot of corruption, it creates a lot of bureaucracy, it kills off entrepreneurship, and it disenfranchises voters in those countries,” she says.
Her solutions include the notion that we should first stop doing harm. In other words, the objective should be to "be good," not "feel good." We have to stop doing what is harmful, even if those actions make us feel virtuous, so we can actually be virtuous, which is to say provide real help.
The earlier success of the communications industry in solving the communications problem is about to be joined by the computing and applications industries solving the problem of computing for billions of users around the world. Nobody deliberately set out to solve those problems.
But the solutions have arisen because creativity was allowed to flourish, Moore's Law operates and market drivers and the rule of law have operated. We tend to take those things for granted in North America. We should not. Marvelous things are possible.
Without realizing it, Amazon and others have solved the problem of computers for the third world.
No comments:
Post a Comment