According to the founder of Playpower.org, more people in India have TVs at home than tap water. And there are $12 computers everywhere that uses the TVs as monitors, like so many of the personal computers of old.
Now consider that these hardwares based off older 8bit chip designs and the softwares that run on them are more or less in public domain. We are looking at a significant portion of the entire human population just poised on the verge to hackerdom. It’s not just typing education and language training. We could build entirely new framework for education in 3rd world urban area using existing tools of education and science. Imagine being able to design an 8bit program for those machines (some of them can actually do internet) that pulls data from research institutions of all kinds (BLAST, Wolfram Alpha, and etc etc) and scale it down to a form those machines and people using those machines can understand. We already have beta versions of synthetic biology CAD program that undergraduates regularly use for their school assignments and private projects, so it’s not that far away in the future.
Will a child capable of programming computers and pull data on SNP variations to do his/her own genotyping using soon-to-be widely available opensource PCR machines still languish in poverty and despair? I don’t know. I’d sure like to find out though.
Consider Bookhling 