The Information Revolution Inches Toward the World’s Poorest People

Thanks to the confluence of wiki-based content, Moore’s Law, and virtually free bandwidth, the information explosion promises to transform the lives of the two billion people in the world who still live in extreme poverty. The business implications are huge, but the social and human implications are even bigger.

Nicholas Negroponte founded the MIT Media Laboratory in 1985. As its director, he conceived of an idea to get computers into the hands of the world’s poorest children and began designing a fully fun.....