Sunday, November 6, 2011

Ben Goertzel

As we march merrily into the cyber-infused future, armed with our PDA’s, mobile phones and superpowerful laptops, increasingly aware of the next wave of biotech, nanotech and AI technology about to knock us off our feet and perhaps even transport us out of our bodies, it’s worth remembering what a small percentage of the world’s population the cyber-revolution is currently affecting in any direct way. Even in the US, there are huge urban and rural ghetto areas where computers are uncommon and street corner drug dealing is a far more common teenage occupation than computer hacking. And for the majority of people in third world countries, the technological revolution is mostly something one sees on TV or in American or European magazines.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The information revolution has the potential to benefit every human on Earth, not just those fortunate enough to be born into certain classes or certain countries. Slowly but surely, the tech revolution is finding its way into every corner of the planet, even into the most unlikely and economically disadvantaged places. On the large scale, this diffusion process may be viewed as an inevitable consequence of the advance of technology and the overall trend of globalization. But in practice, in terms of nitty-gritty human reality, the expansion of technology beyond the world’s economic elite is by no means an automatic process. Rather, it is the result of huge amounts of hard work and careful planning by dedicated people in the growing middle classes of developing countries. Vastly more work will be required to finish the process of disseminating technology across class barriers, including more cooperation from those of us in developed nations. There are technical problems involved here, but there are also major purely human problems, with tremendously complex political and cultural dimensions.

6 comments:

  1. The individuals who are working to improve the human condition by spreading advanced technology throughout the human population as a whole are just as deserving of “cyber-hero” status as the people who are working to add impressive new functionalities to our supercomputers or mobile networks.

    An excellent example of the kind of work that’s being done to spread the technological bounty throughout the world’s population is the recent initiative within Brazil to create a “cheap computer for the masses.” This project, initiated by the Brazilian government and executed by research scientists at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, has required no tremendous technological innovations, but it’s been a massive effort of coordination between government, the computer industry, and academia. Bringing computing to the masses is not something that any of these institutions were set up to do, and carrying out the project within this context was not an easy feat. But this is the reality within which such initiatives exist, and those who are willing and able to cope with the tedious combination of business, technical and political issues that such projects entail deserve our immense respect and admiration.

    The importance of this aspect of cyber-development should not be underestimated, not just in an ethical sense but in the context of the overall course of technical and human development. In fact, I’ll put forth a somewhat radical proposition in this regard. I believe that the nature of the next phase of the tech revolution will be very different, depending on whether it really is spread across the globe or just restricted to a small economic elite. Technology developed within a culture of inclusion and compassion is going to be very different from technology developed within a culture of elitism and ethical indifference, in thousands of obvious and subtle ways. If we want our advanced technology to be friendly and compassionate to us, we’d better develop it within a culture of friendliness and compassion. This is an issue that cuts at the very contradictory heart of modern cyberphilosophy, confronting our wildest dreams and futuristic visions with the grittiest aspects of human reality. And as we’ll see, it’s an issue on which different contemporary cyber-visionaries take very different views.

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  2. With a 1999 GDP of $555 billion, Brazil is the tenth largest economy in the world, and is also highly economically diverse, with huge variations in development level across industries. Its economy history is rocky, but the last decade has been a good one. In July 1994, led by President Fernando Enrique Cardoso, Brazil embarked on a successful economic stabilization program, the Plano Real (named for the new currency, the real). The success of the plan surprised even many of its supporters. Inflation had reached an annual level of nearly 5000% at the end of 1993, and under the Plano Real it dropped to a low of 2.5% in 1998, climbing slightly in the years since but remaining in single-digit range. In January 1999, the country successfully shifted from an essentially, fixed exchange rate regime to a floating regime. US direct foreign investment has more than doubled since 1994, and overall trade has more than doubled since 1990. All in all, finally, after many years of chaos, the economy seems to be working.

    In spite of this success story, however, economic inequality in Brazil remains just about the worst – if not the absolute worst in the world. The standard way of measuring inequality is the Gini coefficient, which ranges between 0 and 1: 0 if everyone in the country earns exactly the same amount; 1 if one person earns all the money and everyone else earns nothing. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, Brazil’s Gini coefficient has been around .60, compared to numbers in the .3-.4 range for Southeast Asian countries, and the .4-.5 range in Africa. Latin America as a whole tends to have more severe income inequity than most parts of the world, but even for Latin America, Brazil is extreme: the average Gini coefficient for Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama was 0.42 in the early 1990s.

    What impact has the Plano Real had on this situation? It has drastically decreased the amount of dire poverty in Brazil, by increasing the income level of all classes -- inarguably a very positive thing. Its impact on income distribution, however, has been vastly less dramatic, although also significant.

    There are serious human issues here, which cannot easily be addressed by economic adjustments alone, even extremely savvy ones as introduced by President Cardoso. The cultural divide between the Brazilian middle class and underclass could hardly be more severe. The Brazilian middle class lives essentially like the American or European middle class, and the Brazilian educational system, for this small segment of the population, is outstanding. Brazil’s top universities, attended almost entirely by middle and upper class youths, rank with the best institutions anywhere. On the other hand, Brazil's annual expenditure per primary school student is 12.8 times less than for its university students, compared to a mere three-fold difference in the United States. The money that is spent on primary education is far from equally distributed and ultimately contributes to social inequalities in a major way.

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  3. The drive to educate the Brazilian masses has been reasonably successful during the past few decades. Illiteracy, which tends to be disproportionately higher among women, runs at 9.4 percent among Brazilian women between 30 and 39 years, but drops to 4 percent for the 15 to 19 age group. For men in the same age groups, the rates are 11 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively. But these figures don’t tell the whole story. There is a large gap between basic functional literacy and having the educational background to fully participate in the emerging global economy. Graduating from a ghetto high school with no technical skills, no funds to pay for commercial training school and a slim chance of getting one of the few slots at the public universities, a typical Brazilian youth has vastly fewer career options than someone in a similar position in a developed country. One of the major challenges Brazil faces going forwards is to undertake reforms and initiatives addressing the structural causes of poverty and income inequality, and helping the country as a whole to move toward the future, as opposed to just a small minority of privileged individuals. This is a task requiring tremendous creativity as well as money, and one whose true dimensions will only become apparent as the work on it unfolds.

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  4. The Brazilian software industry is booming. The setting of the stage for the current boom was slow and gradual. In the early 1990s, before the Plano Real, there were 100,000 people engaged in information technology activities in Brazil. Including 30,000 with advanced degrees in computer-oriented fields, 10,000 engaged in R&D efforts, and 800 with Ph.Ds in computer science. Brazilian universities offered 210 undergraduate and 20 graduate computer science programs, producing a steady supply of technically trained individuals. Now, post-economic-stabilization, the software industry is several times this size, including firms in every aspect of computing and communications, with rapid growth in the Internet and wireless sectors.

    The Internet sector was energized in December 1999 when Bradesco, one of the nation’s largest commercial bank, started offering free Internet access in December 1999, finding it could save money with online transactions and tempt advertisers with a large captive audience. Other banks rushed in, as did heavyweights such as UOL and Terra Networks. This has led to a burgeoning e-commerce industry, driven more by traditional retailers than by dot-com start-ups, although there are plenty of the latter as well. Overall, Brazilian e-commerce is expected to jump from $2.47 billion in 2000 to nearly $40 billion in 2003. The government may lend another helping hand here, when in 2002 the deregulation of the telecommunications market kicks in, causing a decrease in Internet access prices and a commensurate increase in the number of Brazilians online.

    The Brazilian wireless sector is growing at a speed exceeding even that of Europe, let alone the relatively anemic North American wireless market. In many parts of Brazil, cell phones are a necessity rather than a luxury. While the situation is not as extreme nationwide as in Mexico and Venezuela, where there are more cell phones than traditional wall phones, there are large parts of Brazil where this may soon be the case. According to recent Yankee Group estimates, the number of mobile users in Brazil will increase 21 million in 2000 to 41.9 million by the end of 2003, while the number of desktop internet users will rise from 6.1 million to 27.4 million users over the same time span.

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  5. But how does all this fantastic development in the Brazilian software industry affect those who live on the wrong side of the economic divide?

    The growth of wireless technology is particularly interesting in that, more so than desktop computing, wireless bridges class divisions. Most of the wonderful recent growth in the Brazilian software industry affects the underclass only through very indirect trickling-down, since few members of the lower classes are computer users, let alone sufficiently professionally or technically trained to participate in the information economy in any significantly way. But, cell phones are affordable by a much larger segment of the population than desktop computers, and as the mobile Internet becomes a major force, wireless may be come the major means by which high technology spreads into the depths of the Amazon and into the sprawling, dangerous ghettos that surround every Brazilian city.

    The problem with the wireless Internet, though, is that it has very little educational value for the user, at least as currently deployed. It also doesn’t do much by way of expanding the user’s knowledge base, although it does enhance career possibilities. It is valuable in that it spreads tech-savvy thinking throughout a larger segment of the population. And it enables communication with populations that otherwise would have been basically inaccessible. But still, until vastly more flexibly usable wireless devices are available, the key to enabling impoverished individuals to participate in the tech revolution is going to be the humble and familiar desktop PC.

    This gives rise to an obvious question. In addition to “a chicken in every pot” (as was advertised by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the US during the Great Depression of the 1930’s), why not “a computer in every home”?

    One might argue that there are more critical things to do for the Brazilian masses. Bill Gates, after he established his $21 billion Gates Foundation, quickly abandoned his initial plans to focus on disseminating technology throughout the Third World when he realized that some of the computers he’d donated to African villages were useless due to the minimal availability of electricity there, and the lack of relevant education and training. Gates decided to focus on improving the dissemination of medicine to impoverished regions.

    But, Brazil is not the Sudan – there is very little actual starvation in Brazil at present, though there is surely some malnutrition. Medical care is decent by third world standards, and at its best is excellent by world standards, although the distribution of medicine into rural regions and urban ghettos could use much improvement, to be sure. The main problem in Brazil is not keeping people alive, but lifting them from the cultural and material conditions of poverty and enabling them to become full participants in the emerging global information economy. With an Internet-connected computer at home, a young Brazilian has the world at his fingertips, able to learn about every topic under the sun in a self-directed way. Skills like computer programming and word processing can also be practiced, providing the computer owner a real possibility of participating in the new economy in a serious way.

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  6. Still, though, Brazilian minimum wage is equivalent to roughly $90 a month, whereas a Compaq computer, for example, goes for $1,500. So the economic obstacle to “a computer in every home” in a Brazilian context is pretty clear.

    It was with this in mind that Joao Pimenta da Veiga Filha, Brazilian minister of communications, chose to organize the “Net PC” project. The idea here was to create a computer that members of the Brazilian underclass could genuinely afford. The Net PC will cost around $400 reiais (around US$ 200), and will be available by June 2001. Furthermore, in order to ensure affordability, and a 24-month payment plan will be offered.

    The task of creating this machine was turned over to the computer science department at one of Brazil’s leading universities, the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), in Belo Horizonte. The project was led by a number of expert computing researchers, including Sergio Vale Aguilar Campos, trained at Carnegie-Mellon University in the USA, and Wagner Meira, trained at the University of Rochester in the USA. These professors are accustomed to spending their time doing research and teaching on advanced topics like parallel computing (running programs on specialized computers) and automatic program verification (programs that check to be sure other programs are doing what they’re supposed to). But they and many of their colleagues and students were willing to take time out from this to work on the government-sponsored project of bringing much simpler aspects of computing to a much wider population.

    The Net PC itself will be a fairly standard one – a Pentium 500 MHz, with keyboard, mouse, 56 Kbps modem, 14" display, 64 Mb RAM and no hard disk (16 Mb flash RAM instead). According to those involved in the project, the technical aspects of designing the system were not particularly onerous – no major inventions or innovations were required. The hardest part was bargaining with the manufacturers of the various parts of the machine, who tended to be oriented toward making the most expensive and powerful machines possible rather than creating low-cost systems.

    http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/BrazilianComputers.htm

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