Neil Gershenfeld directs a new lab at MIT called "The Center for Bits and Atoms". In this great interview, (via BoingBoing) he discusses their efforts to bring not just technology, but technological design to the developing world:
What [this project] finally led to, earlier this year, was a visit I made to the Himalayas with the Indian general who's in charge of Jammu and Kashmir, the on the Pakistani and Chinese borders. We were working on one of these field prototyping labs, where the interest was in low-cost incremental deployment of mesh wireless networks. The general is in charge of the world's current nuclear battlefield. He got there, his job was border security, and he came to the conclusion that the best way to provide border security is through human security, and the best way to provide human security is through human development, and the best way to provide human development is through information, and the best way to provide information is through the network, therefore Indian army soldiers should bring internet connections to Muslim girls!So, it's this amazing project where his soldiers are going in and bringing these net connections to little villages. And, in particular, the Muslim girls and Buddhist girls in these breeding-grounds of insurgency, who used to run when outsiders came, now they come running to these places. We were helping them with things like low-cost antennae and embedded controllers, so you can make incremental hubs of networks without any central control of the infrastructure. And what's amazing is the extent to which it flipped a community, from being a breeding-ground of insurgency, to having a tremendous sense of connection, a tremendous sense of belonging, transformed by these low-cost, distributed, locally developed technologies. And so, in a very real sense, I believe the deepest consequence of all of this stuff is not just making it easier to win wars, but preventing the need to fight wars in the first place.
This is truly amazing stuff, and it's very exciting to see technology reaching the developing world in a format that can immediately improve their quality of life, namely by giving the people on the ground control over the design process itself. This is how we are going to bring the other half of the world out of grinding poverty.
At the same time, in this age of assymetric warfare, this is also an ominous development. No matter how much of the world we pull out of poverty (and don't get me wrong - the more the better), no matter how many regional conflicts are satisfied via self-determination or otherwise (again, the more the better), there will always be crazy fanatics who want to destroy modern society. Already those fanatics have an incredible ability to wreak havoc on the larger society, and as these types of technologies spread, their capabilities will increase.
In no way do I advocate restricting the development or dissemination of empowering tools that could have such a dramatic impact on poverty reduction. It does require, however, that we push forward our own development of new technology as quickly as possible - we should not restrict promising avenues of research (such as stem cell or cloning research, for example) nor should we restrict new domestic or foreign technologies just because they threaten status quo of existing industry structures.
Ultimately we will likely make it through by becoming more interconnected than most people can now imagine (ala Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). The trick will be getting there from here.
Posted by Stephen Bronstein at February 13, 2003 06:43 PM