Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

There is frequent talk of computers and cellphones converging and becoming readily available for use in the developing world. Let’s analyze that statement with regard to time, financial incentives of companies such as Nokia, and the economic prospectus for the developing world as it is.

Currently two billion people have access to cellphones, which are providing a severe jump in infrastructure all over the place. It is expected that within the next five to ten years every human on earth will have access to a cell phone. This is based on direct trend analysis without much regard to means, but let’s take it as a given.

If this is the case, then most likely what will happen in the short term is that older phones used in the west will trickle down the line to be sold or given away second hand in developing countries - now I’m not talking about places like urban areas in India, where almost everybody already has a cellphone, but rather places like the Indian province of Kerala, or perhaps Burma or rural Thailand, or even Malawi. So second-hands filter down, infrastructure is raised, all the while in the west our cell phones become like 1990’s level supercomputers, with big screens, fast uplinks and high levels of interactivity.

This is not a bad way of doing it, and what’s probably going to happen is that the cell phone emergence in the developing world will cause a massive positive feedback loop of innovation and economic growth. Couple that with appropriate technology and you’ll see numerous other trends:

• Decreased fatalities due to smoke from open fires, malnutrition, simple bacterial or viral infections, and that kind of poverty related death.
• Decreased birth rate, connected to higher quality of life, availability of contraceptives, and lower infant mortality rate.
• Increased global food output
• Increased levels of organic farming on a global scale
• Far higher average GDP globally, and less scedasticity overall

But this is all grounded on the added functionality expected of cellphones during this inevitable convergence, e.g. built-in global positioning, fast internet access, high resolution screens, USB host inputs on devices, all of which could provide for things like:

• Location specific agricultural instrumentation and satellite based fertility analysis provided directly to farmers on the land, so they can get specific recommendations for plantation.
• SmartAID - cell phone based expert system for first aid and disaster response; essentially a simple AI strapped onto a Wiki, channeled through a cellphone.
• Cellphone based microcredit/mutual credit banking systems.
• Identity management, voting registration and direct democracy.
• Public safety announcements, etc.

For some of these any modern cellphone, dating back to 1998, will do. But for many of these services you need to be far further along the convergence pathway.

Which is why rebooting tech is a smart idea.

With $10 in parts today you can build a 20 MHz network-capable computer that’s roughly equivalent to a cheap home computer of the early 1980’s. Connect it to either a TV or a cheap LCD screen, for example a Nokia 3310 screen (pictured), and a keyboard, and you’ve got yourself a really simple teletype terminal.

So, instead of waiting patiently for the convergence to reach developing rural areas, which is 10-20 years from now at current rate, you use what exists to push general computing into 1980’s level tech. Make it available to people, and you’ll have an emergent hacker culture.

Now, for text only teletype terminals to interface with the best resources of the day, we’re going to need a few things:

• BBSWikipedia - a small C application that runs natively on AVR microcontrollers, for example, that can download Wikitext directly from Wikipedia or other Wikis, parse it, and display it on a 80×25 type display (or less!), with links active but images omitted and tables severely simplified. This could be just a port of Links, but then it would have to have significantly improved offline caching support, because
• we really need stable Internet connections; and while this could mean waiting for proper broadband penetration in rural areas, it more likely means backing up a bit and using cellphones as dial up modems for a while. At any rate, we can’t assume the existence of persistent network connectivity for a while, so people must have a way to back their shit up while offline so that they can schedule downloads and stuff.

Essentially, what I’m talking about doing is making a cheap platform for 1980’s style tech and use technological paradigms of the era as a migratory step until there’s something better. Something better will arrive a lot faster than it did the first time round, that’s almost certain, but having something workable really fast is definitely a win.

How insane is this idea?