Humans Are Geniuses

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow shares an amazing experiment conducted by One Laptop Per Child. They gave young kids in two Ethiopian villages solar-powered laptops and used software monitoring to see what happened. The kids are from villages so remote that they had supposedly never seen a printed word, and the laptops came with no teacher and no instructions.

The kids taught themselves how to use them, are learning English through them (apparently they are singing the ABC’s), and even hacked them (the camera and desktop personalization had been disabled — kids figured how to fix that). There is nothing we cannot do! (There are a lot of things we cannot do, but being small and figuring out foreign technology isn’t one of them. Love these kids.)

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.