For the last couple of years, I’ve been following the progress of Nicholas Negroponte’s efforts to provide citizens — especially children — of developing nations with a low-cost $100 computer to help eliminate the “digital divide” that exists today. It’s an important part of a megatrend that I hope will occur during my lifetime: ubiquitous computing, where every human on the planet has access to computing power and the Internet (actually, Mark Weiser, who coined the term, defines ubiquitous computing as “one person, many computers.” For more discussion of ubiquitous computing see Adam Greenfield’s new book, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Greenfield has very nicely provided the bibliography for his book online, here). I’m not sure what will happen when we reach that point, though “social computing” will undoubtedly play a large role; in any case, I’ll reserve my thoughts on that point for some future blog posting.

A recent article, “The Lessons of the $100 Laptop,” reported that Negroponte and his colleagues are focusing on an interesting aspect of their low-cost computer: they want it to be low-power, too, because they’ve observed that 35% of the world’s population doesn’t have electricity. Earlier prototypes included a hand-crank so that users could provide their own power; the current prototype has moved that crank into the AC-adaptor “brick,” to avoid stressing the laptop chassis. The first version of “production” machines will have a 7-inch, 640-by-480-pixel screen; 128 megabytes of RAM, and 512 megabytes of flash-disk storage; a simple version of Linux; and Wi-Fi access to the Internet. Obviously, it’s not as powerful as what most of us have on our desktop today, but it’s vastly more powerful than the computers I used even a decade ago. And it has access to Google, in whatever censored form the world’s citizens can access.

In early 2007, initial versions of the low-cost computer will be delivered to people in Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt and the Middle East, India, Nigeria, and Thailand. That’s great, but I was dismayed to read that only 5-10 million units will be delivered to these seven countries. Ten million is obviously a very large number, and I suppose I shouldn’t criticize such a noble effort by Negroponte and the various governments and private-sector companies that he has enlisted in this effort; but at the rate of 10 million units per year, it would take 600 years to supply one to every human on the planet — and that assumes zero population growth beyond the current level of roughly 6 billion people.

But perhaps the distribution effort will scale up; this seems somewhat more feasible when one reads that the price of these computers is expected to drop to $50 by 2010. And we have a couple of examples that we can use as benchmarks: how many computers already exist, and (more interesting) how many cell phones are currently in use? To find answers to these questions, I merely chanted “Google is God” as I typed the query “How many PC’s are there in the world?” into the search-box in my web browser. It took only a moment to find an interesting Web site called GeoHive that estimates, as of 2004, there were 772,357,000 computers sprinkled around the world. So that suggests there is currently approximately one computer for every ten people on the planet.

More interesting was the estimate of cell phones, especially since that’s a phenomenon that has occurred almost entirely within the past decade. According to a February 2006 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, entitled “The world’s a cell-phone stage: the device is upending social rules and creating a new culture,” there are now some two billion cell phones in use around the world. Think about it: in the space of a decade, a third of the human race has not only decided that it wants a cell phone, but has also discovered that it can get a cell phone … and meanwhile, according to Negroponte, another third of the human race still doesn’t have electricity. (By the way, the San Francisco Chronicle article cites Howard Rheingold as the source of the two-billion statistic. Rheingold is the author of an intriguing book, Smart Mobs, which I recommended on my web site a couple years ago; I had the pleasure of hearing him speak at the 2003 PopTech conference, which will take place again this year on October 18-21, in Camden, Maine.)

So what are those two billion people doing with their cell phones? Presumably, some of it is work-related; but from what I see in my local neighborhood, in airports and hotels, and in cities around the world, they spend most of their time just yakking at one another. And I’ve noticed another odd phenomenon, at least here in New York City: a lot of people will ride for 10-15 minutes on a bus, or will walk for several blocks along the street, just listening to their cell phone … and it seems hard to imagine that the person at the other end of the phone could manage to talk, non-stop, for such a long period of time.

In any case, this might give us some idea of what will happen if Negroponte and his colleagues actually succeed in placing a laptop in the hands of every person on the planet. All those people are not going to spend their time manipulating spreadsheets or doing other forms of serious work; they’re going to spend their time sending e-mail, writing blog entries, and just yakking with one another. But I suppose that’s a good thing: the more time people spend yakking at each other, the less time they spend starting wars with each other.