Seven Questions: Wiring the World’s Poor

CHINA PHOTOS/Getty Images NewsDigital uniter: As head of the United Nations Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Intels Barrett has been at the center of efforts to bring the Internet to the developing world.

FOREIGN POLICY: Last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of One Laptop per Child, accused Intel and you personally of approaching Third World development from a market perspective. How do you respond?

Craig Barrett: Well, I think that was only a characterization put forward by Mr. Negroponte. Let me provide some factual background, which may allow you to judge our actions on their merits. Weve been involved in supporting education as a philanthropic activity since the company started, 38 years ago. Weve put well over $1 billion dollars into supporting education in the last decade. Weve trained over 4 million teachers around the world in the last five years, and weve committed to train another 10 million over the next five years. So, I took Negropontes comment with a grain of salt. If there was anybody making a marketing comment in the room, I think perhaps it was Mr. Negroponte himself.

FP: Theres a school of thought that says, just give computers to children in poor countries and they will start a revolution. Whats lost in that approach to technology and development?

CB: What you potentially lose is: You spend a lot of money to give kids laptops that might be more intelligently spent on creating the infrastructuretraining teachers and creating the environment for education. In all fairness, if you listen to Nick [Negroponte] and the constructionist approach to life, they take the attitude that most teachers in the emerging economies have a fourth- or sixth-grade education, that theyre only competent to lead students in song and dance. And if you give kids computers, they will set up their own communities, their own content; theyll learn collectively. That is what drives Negroponte and the One Laptop per Child approach. That is not the unanimous position of educators around the world. It has not been the position of companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco, who recognize that technology is just a tool, and who suggest that you need not only the tool, but the connectivity, the content, the teacher training to make it all work.

FP: In many places where people talk about bridging the digital divide, theres still no electricity or access to clean drinking water. Why not spend money on bridging those basic services first?

CB: We operate off of the philosophy that every child ought to have a generically equal opportunity. And you could argue that means every child should have clean drinking water, three square meals a day, and a roof to sleep under. And there are lots and lots of people working on clean drinking water. We also think that if you give the kids in the Third World clean drinking water, food, something to sleep under, they also need to be able to have a productive adult life. Theyre going to need to earn a living, and they need some education. So our focus has been on education, because we look around and we see lots of people working on those other topics.

FP: Fifty years from now, will we look back and see the Internet as the most transformative technology in a place like Africa, or will it be something more mundane, maybe the cell phone?

CB: Voice communication, cell phones, and some of the light digital stuff are important. No question about it. And I think most people recognize that the information access you get with a small-screen cell phone is kind of limited and, therefore, you need a bigger screen. That kind of implies PCs and the Internet. But at least theyll tend to go in tandem. Its not one or the other. The argument over whether the cell phone dominates or the PC dominates has been going on in the developed world for the last 15 or 20 years. In reality, weve found that ours is a society of three screen sizes. Theres your small screenBlackBerry or cell phone. Theres your interactive screenthats your PC. And theres your couch potato screenyour TV. Those three will coexist in the developing world just as they coexist in the developed world.

FP: How will the next 1 billion Internet users, most of whom will be from China and India, change the focus of companies such as Intel in terms of research and development and other priorities?

CB: Well, you start to look at the design of the technology with their environment in mind. You dont design PCs like [the one] Im sitting in front of at my desktop right now. They have to be dustproof. They run off batteries. They have to be inexpensive. There are lots of different aspects you have when you start to worry about product design and creation. Theres some good points to this, from the local level, too. Because its not just the outsider company coming in to sell stuff to the Third World. PCs can be assembled and made by local entrepreneurs. Secondly, the content is important. Typically, content is created locally; its not created by an outside third party. So it creates economic opportunity in the delivery as well as economic development in the use.

FP: Are Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube and MySpace the revolution that the media makes them out to be?

CB: I think theres a huge excitement about Second Life and MySpace, and what I call reality software. Its kind of aligned with reality TV as we see it today. I think it remains to be seen whether there is a place for reality software in the enterprise, or whether it just stays as a form of entertainment. You know, Im not sure that the majority of the world is going to want to spend four hours a day in another space because they dont like the space theyre living in physically. We have to see if there are enterprise applications that can use that [technology] to see whether its just a fad today like Survivor, Lost, or The Apprentice are on television.

FP: What will Intel look like 50 or 100 years from now?

CB: Anybody who makes any projection [about] what their companys going to look like in 100 years has to be crazy. Ten years ago the Internet was essentially nothing. Today its kind of everything in our industry. So in the space of a decade everything can change. If you ask me what our company looks like in a decade, I think its still somewhat similar to what it is todayproducing computing solutions. Were still following Moores Law, so were still a happy inflationary industry, providing more for less; so I dont see it changing too much in 10 years. But dont ask me to say what its going to look like in 50 or 100 years.