In a message dated 2/28/00 11:35:53 AM Central Standard Time,
bbrown@transcient.com writes:
> Why do you think it is possible to make such a thing cheaply? I ask,
> because you're talking about a setup that would normally cost several
> thousand dollars to build (and making it cheap is already a major design
> goal in the electronics industry).
I think we actually share the expectation that the device I describe can be
made very cheaply - just not now. Note that I identified my idea as a
"pie-eyed goal". I don't see the utility of the idea (if it has any at all)
as being the notion that people should actually set about trying to build
such a thing now, but rather that defining the spec could serve as a spur to
for-profit activity. It already pretty much is, so I think something like
this will likely happen eventually. I think modest philanthropic funding for
a group of engineers to sketch out the hardware spec and the network
architecture for the over-all system might achieve two things, though. One,
it could serve to define a goal toward which a number of diverse areas of
development could aim and, two, it could infuse the overall telecomputing
industry with a very large-scale humanitarian purpose.
> Why should we expect this to work better than simply giving them the money
> we would have spent on the gadgets? I think the appeal hinges entirely on
> the assumption that you can make the system for far less than normal market
> cost, and then pass on the savings.
The idea behind distributing the devices instead of money would be for the
people funding the project to get to exercise a little choice in selecting
large-scale social policy goals, raising the horizon of philanthropy from
simple food-distribution and emergency-response aid, to a longer-term goal of
raising the cognitive level of the most disadvantaged one-third of humanity.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:31 MDT