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Simon Morris wrote:
My question (most probably a rhetorical question) is from a technology point of view how can we break this cycle, where people don't have access to affordable technology (or healthcare, social support) because of their poverty which in turn drags them further behind the rest of the world and deeper into poverty?
There appears to be only one way to break this cycle, and that is to create sustainable infrastructure in developing nations. Aid, either in the form of money or food, has tended to be an ineffective and short-term comfort for nations in crisis.
The provision of sustainable infrastructure is tricky. Developing nations often lack the facilities to developing base infrastructure on their own, and creating infrastructure for them does not address the issue of sustainability. The developing nation must be able to self-maintain the infrastructure elements it inherits or implements. It could be argued therefore that two things are key when it comes to helping out developing nations: willing infrastructure donors, and methods of ensuring the developing nation can provide the people and resources to maintain the infrastructure.
When we address technology this gets very complex. Many developed nations have difficulty dealing with technology infrastructure, let alone developing nations. Spare parts, future development and support infrastructure are dependent on relatively few manufacturing companies. The gadgets tend to cost a lot of money both to purchase and maintain.
I would suggest that there is no easy way to provide sustainable technological infrastructure to nations that inherently cannot afford it. We cannot solve the problem in a neat way. On the other hand, there is no reason we should expect to.
The problems that developing nations face are not problems we will solve this generation. Our commitment - as developed nations - must take this into account. We need to provide education, resources, tools and experts. Technology is essential to helping develop effective logistics and providing modern education, but it's a far out part of the overall infrastructure picture. We're going to have to pour a massive amount of resources into initial provision, training and support in political, social and technological arenas before any developing nations are going to reach the point of technological infrastructure sustainability.
Perhaps the question is not really *how* we can do that, so much as *will* we do that. Our commitment to developing nations has been patchy at best, and genuine infrastructure provision is a massive operation.
However the output interface you describe you have to be either a) developed and implemented by device vendors specifically for the idea that consumers will donate the phone or b) the output to TV interface will have a useful function for the original owner. Not only would the interface have to be useful to the original owner I suspect the phone vendor will have to be able to sell services based around people wanting to watch their phone via the TV set. Seeing people watching movies on their PSPs riding the London Underground this may be a reality someday, but I think that is a barrier there.
Correct. However, there are several reasons that manufacturers could use as justification for the inclusion of the additional hardware support.
1) The video output would allow slide shows and videos for consumers in developing nations. This is something that might prove 'sellable' to people. Apple managed it with their iPod photo, and this could be considered in the same way.
2) The addition of two relatively low-cost hardware extensions would provide tools for developing nations. Perhaps these future functions could be sold as human eco-system additions. I guess it would depend o selling the idea that we need to recycle phones into developing nations, and asking consumers in developing nations to shoulder the additional 50 pence or a pound the extra hardware would cost to include.
If we look at the functionality of phones today and the technology available I can see a "version 1.0" to your plan that you described in the paper. Phones today have the following characteristics
- They can output the full ASCII alphabet (or at least common
alphanumeric characters and a host of commas, semi colons etc etc)
- Predictive texting
- They have SMS functionality
- They have network access over GSM and possibly GPRS
- They have voice capability
Could governments in developing countries provide a telephony interface to services using commands sent by SMS, or possibly voice recognition software.
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As a user of a Blackberry (which admittedly is a richer interface than a standard phone) I regularly access a bash session over MobileSSH and GPRS. I'm not suggesting we teach the entire developing world /bin/bash but you could develop any text based system you wanted and allow people to access it over a thin SSH client
The voice command software does depend on rather expensive systems at the other end of the line, but then again...such systems can serve a lot of people in relatively little time, and they can do so 24 hours a day. For certain aspect of technological infrastructure such a system could be useful.
Using a think SSH client over mobile networks could provide some basic text services. Perhaps word processing, simple spreadsheets or databases. Bandwidth would be a problem with any form of rich sorting or data input, so it would be limited by that...but could be an extension of what people have right now. It would be an incremental improvement, providing another step down the path of technological infrastructure.
I believe that technology could be brought to the people you described in your article based on todays technology, but the methods you described would be the next generation of the concept.
You may well be right there. What I suggested depended on two things: hardware extensions (a relatively minor issue) and significant development of software tools. I imagine that the development of these tools could be on-going, but is still likely to consume time. It might be possible to make a word processor and basic web browser today, but before a true mobile office suite could be realised a lot of work would have to be done. It's not as simple as cutting and pasting Openoffice.org code :) Based on the proposed methodology of the article, the software is provided by very light-weight services that can call each other as needed. It's about really modular design on top of an exceptionally light framework, with the whole design intended to reduce processor and memory overhead. It works on the assumption that most of the time people don't really use their CPU.
What you suggest is pushing forward today's technology - without modification and with minor edtension - while casting our eye towards more elaborate developments in the future. I could certainly nod my head at that. If we can extend the utility people get out of existing hardware, and introduce useful and timely new technology in a realistic timescale, I think we're doing something very useful.
Shane
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