BigShinyThing

We’ve reported on the $100 laptop. We’ve flagged up Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: two innovations poised to set fire to the demographic tinder that’s the youth population of the Developing World. We see truly disruptive times ahead.

The $100 laptop (or its yet-to-be-developed relatives and descendants) will network millions of eager young people. Services like the Turk will give them the opportunity and motivation to take on work that’s too tricky for the best Artificial Intelligences the West can conjour, but too brain-numbingly repetitive and low-paid for most Westerners to bother with. That’s a whole lot of motivation, both supply-side and for the creation of demand. And that means business.

In fact, the one thing missing from the OLPC v1.0 seems to be a workable way to actually get micropayments safely in the hands of those for whom such income could be as life-changing as the educational opportunities which are the prime motivation for the project. If the initial rollout is at all successful, we expect free-enterprise, above-ground or not, to rapidly fill that gap.

The potential is enormous. Exploitation or opportunity? The stakes and possible rewards are too high — and the price of failure too terrible — for us to judge too early. Call it exploitunity, and hope it works out. Watch this space.