Lesson 5

Twc session 5

Brief Overview/Summary

Session 5 is about ICT and how we can use ICTs to change the world, be it in achieving Millennium Development Goals like eradicating poverty and achieving 100% primary education among children or the way forward from today, as we foray into new ways of computing such as cloud computing. It is a truly engaging class with 3 presentations and 6 readings, including a video of Project Natal.

Interesting Observations and Ideas

To start off the lesson, Prof showed us the video of Project Natal. It was about virtual reality and artificial intelligence brought to a whole different level. Milo, the boy in the program, was actually able to interact with the user in a way that was both intuitive, unscripted and very human. With such a high intelligence and being so human-like, it gives us a new avenue to explore the many different uses that these A.I. can bring. For example, they can be companions for the lonely who seek company or simply someone to talk to. These avatars are able to accompany people 24/7, 365 days a year and give mental support to people who feel neglected and outcast by society in general. This technology shows, as Prof mentioned, that we tend to humanize things and create avatars that are extensions of ourselves. E.g. when we use a racquet during games, it is actually an extension of ourselves.

Key Takeaways

We watched another video on web 3.0. While everyone knows what Web 2.0 is about, i.e. uploading information and broadcasting the individual’s views throughout the entire globe via websites such as Facebook and Youtube, and focused on interactions between users, 3.0 is actually focused on developing a smart network that remembers users’ preferences and choices. Prominent examples include last.fm and Amazon and Google. These websites are able to give users search results based on past searches as well as the books that were bought by the user. Google also reads the mails of all users to provide better and more relevant advertisements in Gmail. This heralds in the age of the omnipresent Internet. It learns the preferences of the users and provides users possibilities that they may choose, based on past history and activities. Data from different sources can be linked and made available everywhere. Online websites becomes our personal assistant. They can use information from LinkedIn, Facebook etc. to plan our timetable and our to-do lists. For example, if we key in our decision to fly to KL tomorrow, decisions and options will be provided by the net, whether it is the choice of airlines, which restaurants to eat or even which hotels we can stay in. A possible benefit will be that users will be able to sift through all unwanted and irrelevant information very easily by relying on the cloud systems, yet a possible disadvantage is that privacy may be at stake here, since companies will have so much information on consumers that can be hacked away or even sold to other organizations for a fee. In the age of ICT, it is inevitable that privacy of individuals continue to be chipped away bit by bit from ever-improving technology.

Issues for Further Discussion

As seen in reading 3, the paper aimed to achieve MDGs through ICT, but as I argued in class, it is not feasible without the proper infrastructure in place as well as the lack of good governance. Below is a summary of the things I have researched on the reading, which I hope the class will be able to see and perhaps ponder on where one stands on this issue.

Goal 1: eradicate hunger and poverty
Ethiopia opened its first commodities exchange in Addis Ababa in 2008, ostensibly to allow farmers to have more control in prices, more knowledge in prices, so that they can plan when to grow which crop to maximize profits. Currently half of the harvest is lost through decay in warehouses because there is no market for the produce or because there is oversupply leading to prices that the farmers can’t even make a profit from. But the exchange is not effective because of corruption and bureaucracy, and now the commodities exchange is merely a place for coffee prices.

Goal 2: provide e-learning. Is it feasible? Lack of infrastructure even for mobile phones in some countries, much less internet infrastructure. Most expensive place to access the internet: Central African Republic, where it costs 3891% of annual income. No wonder less than 0.1% of the population uses the internet. Change is not going to happen overnight. $100 laptops, good governance is crucial to the success of the program. Infrastructure must be in place. Perhaps there can be a leapfrog of technology infrastructure that can be put into place, such that there is satellite infrastructure instead of local infrastructure, since it is excessively costly to put in place land infrastructure over the vast African continent. Instead, these countries can rely on existing satellite bandwidth to broadcast broadband coverage.

Personal Ratings
I would rate the lesson a 9.3/10 because of the lively debate over methods that can be employed to tackle poverty and raise rural levels of primary education, which I personally have an interest in.