Intermediate Technology and the OLPC

I wonder if Nicholas Negroponte, or any of the other people involved with the OLPC, have ever read E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, as one of the central ideas in the book epitomises the approach to design that is represented in this little laptop.

Schumacher argues that trying to aid the economy of a third-world nation by implanting all of the latest, greatest, and most expensive technologies directly into an economy that is not capable of sustaining this kind of development long term is doomed to failure. Instead he advocates the use of intermediate technologies: technologies that apply modern knowledge to design systems suitable for a country’s current state of development and use minimal capital - in this way they help to push a country further up the ladder of development (to borrow a phrase from Jeffrey Sachs) in a sustainable manner.

I’m no economist, and my current grasp of the material in this book is limited - despite its very readable nature - but it seems to me this is exactly what the OLPC delivers: modern technology in a form designed from the ground up to be applicable and useful in the particular set of circumstances developing nations find themselves in.

What’s even more relevant to the discussion of the OLPC and Small Is Beautiful is that Schumacher talks about three factors which are vital with respect to the sustainability of development: education, organisation and discipline. The OLPC’s explicit goal of furthering education in developing nations is noble and I believe (this is based purely on belief, I have no real evidence to back this up) that it can make a significant impact due to the way it provides access to such a wealth of material, and the way in which it encourages and enables co-operation - all of which is of course founded in the free/open source ideas that formed the basis for much of its development.

This book, and several others that I have read lately, all fall under my loose definition of free culture: to me it goes beyond licensing and extends to a whole way of living and thinking - am I the only one that thinks like this? I’ll blog more about the other books I’ve read lately that are along a similar track.