Closing out an episode on One Laptop Per Child's XO-1, the $100 machine that was going to educate the world's children and instead wound down around 2014. Pierce is naming the belief he thinks doomed it: that technology is good by definition, and that handing people computers lets them solve their own problems. Adi Robertson pushes back in the next turn, arguing OLPC's version of that belief at least wasn't a commercial land grab.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is kind of where the OLPC story, for our purposes, ends. The foundation disbands. It ends up being sold. The existence of one laptop per child is still sort of around. But the thing that this set out to do ends in about 2014. And David, my question to you, knowing all of this, did this ever even have a shot? Like, should someone have pulled Nicholas Negroponte aside in 2005 and been like, buddy, this isn't good? I feel like it could have. Okay. I mean, there's a lot of those geopolitical questions on how much you should give America the power to just go into other countries and tell them how they want to advance education is a question that I think we've been kind of struggling with for a long time. Facebook and Google. I remember growing up and thinking, wow, it's so cool that Google is sending blimps over under underprivileged areas in Africa and trying to get them internet or Meta is doing the same thing. And after a long time had passed, I realized that maybe that's not the best way to actually educate large populations of people or to force, like not really ask the countries if that's what they want. Like that quote about we don't even have chairs. A lot of the time, just giving people money or like getting people to be able to make their own decisions, but with more resources is better than we're shoving our techno-futurism down your throat.
I mean, that said, I do think I'd draw a distinction between these and later projects, which is the Chromebook is kind of the great example. Is you look at this or the Chromebook and you imagine, okay, so do you want the machine that even if it was even at the time criticized for being imperialist, it's a thing that's not trying to shove ads in your face all the time. It does not exist to siphon all of your data off. It does not exist to like sell you a different computer when you grow up. It does not exist to do all of these things that are for commercial purposes, even if it turned out a bunch of people just wanted to access YouTube on them. So so it goes. That is true. But like, I think this is just in a lot of ways a far more value, less pernicious product than a lot of the companies that we're talking about would end up being. That's
so true. I think the middle of those two things that I think I have found myself in is that sort of inherent belief that technology is universally, unilaterally by definition, a good thing. And there was just this sense that if we just give them all computers, they'll solve all their own problems for them. And I think that is, that's just the part of like the that particular ethos of Silicon Valley, particularly at that time. And frankly, like we're going through this right now with AI too. Like there, there's a set of people who believe that we are one, everyone on earth is one chat GPT login away from being the best versions of themselves. And it's like, buddies, like that's not how this works. And it wasn't how it worked then either, but there was a real earnest belief that it was. And I think. I got to say,
I don't know. I think at least the belief that the belief wasn't at the starting point, we are going to give a giant company control over your life, which is basically what Chat GPT is. Like, it cannot be overstated that while you can think it's really dumb, the idea was we're going to teach kids how to code. We're going to teach them how to really build things. We're going to teach them how to have ownership over a thing. And that is, I think, an idea that in a lot of ways really, really failed, but it's not an idea that feels corrupt from the outset.
Yeah, I think that's fair. But I think you're right. And I hadn't really thought about that until you say it. But there is really nothing evil inside of this little device. Like, I think, I think Nicholas Negroponte was out over his skis in incredible ways. I think he both sold and doomed the project simultaneously. But in a lot of research, and I know you've done this over the years too, there is not a lot of evidence that there was anything malicious happening underneath. Like I think they earnestly wanted to do the thing they earnestly believed was going to be good for the world.
Yeah, I think kind of the worst thing you can say about this is that they failed or that they were in some ways fundamentally misguided about education is an argument that a lot of people made. But I think that, yeah, I feel like this was not malicious. Yeah,