Reach All People

The third step needed to make computers human-centered and help us finish the Information Revolution is to reach more people. Many more.

At the beginning of the 21st century there were some 300 million people interconnected over the Internet. That big number makes us feel pretty smug. Yet it represents only 5 percent of the world’s population. It’s scandalous to characterize the Web as “worldwide” when it spans such a tiny portion of humankind. The voices of billions of people in the developing world and the poor regions of the industrial world cannot be heard through anything other than television news tidbits and government information feeds.

If we do nothing, matters will get worse. The rich, who can afford to buy the new technologies, will use them to become increasingly more productive and therefore even richer. The poor will be left standing still. The outcome is inescapable: Left to its own devices, the Information Revolution will increase the gap between rich and poor nations, and between rich and poor people within nations.

This gap is already huge. In the U.S. economy, an average of $3,000 in hardware, software, and related services is spent each year per citizen. In Bangladesh it’s $1, according to that country’s embassy. I suspect that if I could find an “embassy” representing poor Americans, or the poor of any industrial nation, I would get an equally screeching dissonance between information technology expenditures in the ghetto and the suburbs.

Some people believe the gap will close by itself, because of the growing reach and potential benefits of the Internet. It can’t. The poor could have a crack at these benefits if, somehow, they were provided with the communications systems, hardware, software, training, and other help they need to join the club. Absent such help, they can’t even get started.

We cannot let this gap widen. It’s high time we begin closing it. Not just to be compassionate, but also to avoid the bloodshed that, historically, follows every widening rich-poor gap.

This may sound like a worthwhile social goal, but not something that will necessarily help the rest of us. Not so. First of all, if engineers begin to design computers so simple that they can be used easily by people with limited skills, the machines will be easier to use for everyone! The World Wide Web Consortium is already using this important principle in its Web Accessibility Initiative, which is creating technology to help peoplw with visual, auditory, and other impairments to use the Web. These improvements also make the Web easier to use for people without these limitations. The history of technology shows many more examples like this; whenever designers build utility for the least-skilled user, they enhance utility for all users.

Second, if we can increase the number of people who will benefit from the technologies of information, the productivity of the entire planet will rise. New technologies will not only help the poor become literate, learn how to plant, and take care of their health, but will also help them sell their goods and services over an expanding Information Marketplace. The potential is immense. Companies in developed economies could buy information work from people in less-developed countries at greatly reduced prices, as is now done with manufacturing. Entrepreneurs in developing countries could even help those in developed countries.

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We must not let this important objective (…call attention to the disparity) be forgotten, for it is essential to our broader quest. We must also persist because the Information Marketplace is huge and largely unexplored. If even a small number of Nepalese or a few inner city people found a way to become productively interconnected, they would serve as role models to their peers. A timid experiment could turn into a beneficial economic spiral.

Some people have an overarching fear about what computers may do to us. They believe that increased deployment of accessible machines will merely accelerate our becoming robotlike freaks who are driven by efficiency, instead of by the timeless pursuits and relationships that make us human. Other people are convinced that better use of information technology will free us from what is already an “inhuman” way of living and let us focus on what’s truly important to us. Is it possible for human-centric computing to enhance our humanity? Or does the horizon for “doing more by doing less” end at greater productivity?



Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael Dertouzos