Curing Poverty with Computing

"...The information revolution has the potential to benefit every human on Earth, not just those fortunate enough to be born into certain classes or certain countries. Slowly but surely, the tech revolution is finding its way into every corner of the planet, even into the most unlikely and economically disadvantaged places. On the large scale, this diffusion process may be viewed as an inevitable consequence of the advance of technology and the overall trend of globalization. But in practice, in terms of nitty-gritty human reality, the expansion of technology beyond the world's economic elite is by no means an automatic process. Rather, it is the result of huge amounts of hard work and careful planning by dedicated people in the growing middle classes of developing countries. Vastly more work will be required to finish the process of disseminating technology across class barriers, including more cooperation from those of us in developed nations. There are technical problems involved here, but there are also major purely human problems, with tremendously complex political and cultural dimensions.

The individuals who are working to improve the human condition by spreading advanced technology throughout the human population as a whole are just as deserving of "cyber-hero" status as the people who are working to add impressive new functionalities to our supercomputers or mobile networks.

An excellent example of the kind of work that's being done to spread the technological bounty throughout the world's population is the recent initiative within Brazil to create a "cheap computer for the masses.: This project, initiated by the Brazilian government and executed by research scientists at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, has required no tremendous technological innovations, but it's been a massive effort of coordination between government, the computer industry, and academia. Bringing computing to the masses is not something that any of these institutions were set up to do, and carrying out the project within this context was not an easy feat. But this is the reality within which such initiatives exist, and those who are willing and able to cope with the tedious combination of business, technical and political issues that such projects entail deserve our immense respect and admiration.

The importance of this aspect of cyber-development should not be underestimated, not just in an ethical sense but in the context of the overall course of technical and human development. In fact, I'll put forth a somewhat radical proposition in this regard. I believe that the nature of the next phase of the tech revolution will be very different, depending on whether it really is spread across the globe or just restricted to a small economic elite. Technology developed within a culture of inclusion and compassion is going to be very different from technology developed within a culture of elitism and ethical indifference, in thousands of obvious and subtle ways. If we want our advanced technology to be friendly and compassionate to us, we'd better develop it within a culture of friendliness and compassion. This is an issue that cuts at the very contradictory heart of modern cyberphilosophy, confronting our wildest dreams and futuristic visions with the grittiest aspects of human reality. And as we'll see, it's an issue on which different contemporary cyber-visionaries take very different views....

...The idea here was to create a computer that members of the Brazilian underclass could genuinely afford.  The Net PC will cost around $400 reiais (around US$ 200), and will be available by June 2001.   Furthermore, in order to ensure affordability,  and a 24-month payment plan will be offered.

The task of creating this machine was turned over to the computer science department at one of Brazil's leading universities, the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), in Belo Horizonte.  The project was led by a number of expert computing researchers, including Sergio Vale Aguilar Campos, trained at Carnegie-Mellon University in the USA, and Wagner Meira, trained at the University of Rochester in the USA. These professors are accustomed to spending their time doing research and teaching on advanced topics like parallel computing (running programs on specialized computers) and automatic program verification (programs that check to be sure other programs are doing what they're supposed to).  But they and many of their colleagues and students were willing to take time out from this to work on the government-sponsored project of bringing much simpler aspects of computing to a much wider population.

The Net PC itself will be a fairly standard one . a Pentium 500 MHz, with keyboard, mouse, 56 Kbps modem, 14" display, 64 Mb RAM and no hard disk (16 Mb flash RAM instead).  According to those involved in the project, the technical aspects of designing the system were not particularly onerous ? no major inventions or innovations were required.  The hardest part was bargaining with the manufacturers of the various parts of the machine, who tended to be oriented toward making the most expensive and powerful machines possible rather than creating low-cost systems.

Early on in the project it was realized that the Microsoft Windows OS was not an option, due to its high cost.  Instead, the system was built around the freeware Linux OS, the favorite of hackers everywhere.  This is a very interesting aspect of the project.  In the US and Western Europe, Linux is a minority OS, used by hackers, programmers and computer scientists only.

Standard tools like browsers and word processors exist for Linux, but aren't quite as polished or user-friendly as on the Windows OS.  On the other hand, advanced tasks are much easier to carry out in Linux than in Windows, and there are other major advantages, such as Linux's increased stability (machines running Linux can go for years without 'crashing', whereas the typical time between crashes for Windows systems is more like days).

And Linux, unlike Windows, is an open-source software system, meaning that anyone around the world can edit the computer code that determines how the system runs, and make it run differently.  By its very nature, it invites participation from users, whether those users are in the Brazilian ghetto or in the heart of Silicon Valley.  In the same spirit as the choice of the open-source Linux architecture, the UFMG computer scientists decided to make the main-board architecture for the machine open as well, meaning that any company will be able to make it, and that computer-savvy users will easily be able to modify it or add onto it as they wish.

In fact, this is just one example of the international move toward open-source software, which does not yet pose a huge short-term threat to Microsoft's hegemony in the OS market, but may well do so in a few years time.  For instance, the government of Argentina is considering passing a new law mandating that, after an adjustment period government offices can only use Open Source software.  And, less extremely, the French government currently dictates that no computer files can be used in government business unless they can be read and edited by Open Source software...."