How can each child on this planet be given a laptop?

For a moment let us keep the question of whether we need to give each child a laptop aside and ask what does it cost to give each child a laptop. The world has between 6 and 7 billion people. Assuming that we declare all people b/w the ages of 5 and 21 as kids. It would not be too wrong to say that we need to give out about a billion laptops. Let us say each laptop costs about $100 by 2010. I think OLPC will be able achieve the $100 mark at the earliest. I guess even the competitors of the OLPC laptops like the eee PC , the classmate PC and so on will be able to achieve a similar price unless they unnecessarily get distracted by features. This would mean that we need about $100 billion.

Moore's law will halve the price thereafter. When I was in college I thought the cellphone would be just a dream. Today even my maid servants and auto rickshaw drivers have cellphones. In a few years I am sure that I will be able to talk to anyone anytime over my cell 24X7 and it would be free. We already have Skype, Google talk etc. With widespread Wifi and WiMax Deployments and their successors, shuttling voice over IP around would be trivial even from ur phone. The same would be the case with affordability of laptops but it may take just a little bit longer.

If you look at $100 billion. It will look insanely large from a layman perspective. But to get an idea of how big or small this amount is, you need to compare it to the size of similar things. For Eg look at Microsoft. It has a Market Capitalization of 319.49 Billion on 6th Dec 2007. Google had a Market Capitalization of 218.52 Billion on the same day. Of course, you cannot look at Market Cap and treat it like hard cash. If the CEOs sold all their shares on a single day, the market cap would vaporize in an instant. But hey still have huge piles of cash and immense power.

Google bought Youtube for a 1.6 billion dollars. They are giving away 300 Million dollars in the Google Lunar XPrize for the first privately funded lunar lander. That is 3 followed by eight zeros. All that just for showing off their geek pride ;-).

Have you ever wondered where all that money pours into google? No it is not their search engine!!! It is advertising!!! Google is the world's largest advertising company. Most of their money comes from the Google Ads. I am not making this up. Use Google itself to check whether I am saying the right thing. Each time you click on a Google Ad, they get at least 5 cents or Rs 3. Usually the amounts are much larger. Did you ever imagine that google could get something like Rs 10 just because someone just clicked on a Google Ad?? Fortunately or unfortunately this is TRUE.

Who pays that money?? The consumer pays that tax!!! Each time you buy a car or a wrist watch or a camera or a bubble gum, you are paying an absurd amount towards advertising. Ask an MBA, how much money the marketing department gets in comparison to their research labs or product development teams and you will get a stunning response. You think a few cents or rupees from ur wristwatch or camera are going towards advertising?? think again!!! Where do you think the Money for tycoons like Rupert Murdoch comes from??

Now let us ask ourselves this question... How much does a child need to pay per day, if he has to earn the laptop in 3 years. Let us say each year has 333 days. So we have 1000 days. So the kid needs to earn less than 10 cents per day or less than Rs 4!!! That is like clicking a single google ad per day. Of course pointlessly clicking a Google Ad is illegal. What I mean to say is that, the amount of advertising required to for a kid to earn the laptop is as low as the advertising needed to make a person spontaneously click a Google Ad.

If each student is given a laptop and all education happens through it, then you have a fixed channel, that has exclusive access to the kid, for about 8 to 10 hrs per day. Even a cable channel would feel envious at that.

It should be a no brainer to integrate advertising elegantly without compromising on the quality of educational content. Because such a SMALL amount of advertising is sufficient to keep the system going.

There would be plenty of students for whom $100 is small change. For them, completely ad free solutions can be provided. Another approach could be make students a part of networks such the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Earning 10 cents per day on Amazon Mechanical turk should be a no brainer. The class teacher in conjunction with Amazon can set an upper limit on the earnable amount, so that the school does not turn into a sweatshop and kids into zombies. The governments can pass rules forbidding the usage of the system beyond a certain threshold and classifying it as child labor if the limits are exceeded.

But 10 cents or Rs 4 is a very tiny amount per day. I think you can earn 10 cents by answering 10 CAPTCHAS at the rate of 1 CAPTCHA for each cent. Or maybe google could ask the kids to participate in the Google Image Labeller and so on. 1 cent for 5 Images labelled. The IQ of the kids would also improve by this.

What do you think? Is it impossible for a kid to earn back his laptop in 3 years?? Do you think that I am misrepresenting the situation? Don't think about what happens if each student has a laptop... That is a separate issue... Just because a your cable TV have Discovery channel or NGC or History channel, a student will not immediately switch to watching it. He would still choose Cartoon network or POGO. Dumping laptops onto the child wont solve problems. In no time it will turn into a gaming device and usually the preferred game would be a shootem up or a racing game. But let us keep all that aside for the moment. Let us just focus on the question "Is it even possible to make a child painlessly and effortlessly earn his own laptop??"

How hard would it be to bring about a system where each student manages to earn his own Laptop? Should one wait for the governments to do infinite time pass and slowly adopt the laptops as Nicholas Negroponte suggests? Let the governments focus on arranging food for the starving millions... One thing I can assure you is that no Indian Politician is capable of giving laptops to kids and win votes using that. They can give out televisions/jewelery/alcohol and win elections... But laptops to kids?? no chance!!! Nicholas Negroponte must be daydreaming.

Do we have to rely on charity like the G1G1 program for this to happen?? As a parent in the US, would I give a Lenovo or HP or Mac laptop to my kid for $500 plus some more... or would I donate to kids in an African country? I dont deny that there are nice parents who would do that. But how many? Is the G1G1 program sustainable after each geek has got an OLPC laptop for himself?

Can't capitalism and corporate greed be exploited constructively to give laptops to billions?? Is there something wrong in doing that?