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.

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.

The problem with this line of thinking is that you are ignorant of the fact that we CAN say what is not thinking, and we've narrowed down the problem quite a bit.

It is generally agreed that chocolate bars do not think. Rocks do not think. Pocket calculators do not think. We know what thinking is not, even if we can't define it fully.

AI can think. The article is wrong.

AI hasn't been invented yet. LLMs are weak AI.

in America. You can chart a direct line from when smartphones and the internet got cheap and widely available and the decline of religious extremist churches in America. Specifically the hyper-political mega churches that were created and built up by billionaires in order to trick people out of their property and jobs.

That's a good example of something like a one laptop per child having a direct tangible effect in a positive direction. Albeit not as a charity case but just as a consequence of cheap electronics. You went from people having a single source of Truth in the form of a corrupt preacher to being able to Google everything the corrupt preacher tells them.

It also means that all the rape and pedophilia the churches have been actively hiding gets around really fast. I suspect social media has a impact there too.

It's India. No one planned anything.

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

You’re missing the entire point.

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.

It's almost as if we shouldn't have included "intelligence" in the actual fucking name. But once again our language has been co-opted by marketing BS and now here we are trying to set the record straight so people aren't confused or deceived.

Half of the human population doesn't think either, they just echo their favorite chamber.

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.