One generally overlooked thing that it did was launch thousands of children on careers that didn't entail plowing with the chakitaqu'lla to plant potatoes or spending interminable days herding sheep. My brother-in-law knows an accountant who was the first in his town to use a computer, lured off the farm by the realization that they were just a tool and even people like him could learn to use them.

This was the situation at least as far back as the '70s, when I was generally the only under-30s person in the adults section of the library except for college students.

IIRC Farcebook didn't run on the OLPC, the Sugar OS wasn't designed with interactive image-heavy web apps in mind.

This was much of the problem, lack of connectivity. In Paruro where my brother-in-law lives when they distributed the OLPCs the only option for Internet connectivity was an expensive ISDN line, and later an extremely congested 3G tower. In Paucartambo, where our niece taught, there was no connection for the first couple of years.

Another was that teachers were not provided with OLTPs, only students. I got a couple on Buy One/Get One and gave one to our niece, and my sister-in-law used the ancient creaking Win95 laptop we gave her until 2010.

So a good first effort, and lessons were learned. Today I can't help but think it would be much more successful.

Funny, today I was forced to deal with a phone tree system that wanted to hang up on me at any whiff of a plausible path to hang up.

Point being that even without LLM magic, they have already been making it supremely hard to get things done. The old standby of hitting zero or saying representative over and over again would not budge this system. I thought for sure when I got it to prompt for payment information and if I screwed that up, *surely* that would escalate to a human, surely they want my money. Nope, hung up when I failed to provide the payment info in a timely fashion either.

In the 1970s Indira Gandhi convinced India's government to spend millions on secondary education, and especially computers. The portion of the world which didn't laugh at the effort was condemning it for not using that money to provide arable land, seeds and clean water (as if governments are unable to do more than one thing at a time). The investment has paid off many, many times.

It's India. No one planned anything.

Did you know that the heavily contaminated neighborhood next to the Bhopol plant is still occupied?

No such thing. I've worked on Jassey's and Bezos' offices (and Bill Gate's as well). Their offices are only marginally better than other managers' offices in the company (although they do have much more extensive security precautions). You're probably thinking of Oracle.

Our corporate executives already sold them the rope as well as the nails and lumber for the scaffold decades ago.

US crash tests are deliberately engineered to favor our overweight road tanks.

Yup, ain't our 'Free Trade' system great?

They sell for that price in countries where there is no existing automotive industry to try to overwhelm, they sell at that price (or lower) in China. There really is no evidence of dumping, just specious claims from Detroit.

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

Glyphosate (plants are also pests).

Or actually invite reporters to secret chats.