The War to End Illiteracy - Operations Suspended

I was going to be positive today. No, really, I was! But it’s not to be, thanks to my good friends at Microsoft. According to an Associated Press article, Microsoft is working to answer the question “Can someone who doesn’t even know how to read or write use a computer.”

This is an example of research that Microsoft should have contracted out. Because if they had, they could have gotten the answer (Everyone together now, 1----2----3----NO!!!) for cheap. I might have even done it for free. But that obviously didn’t happen. Let’s learn a bit more.

Microsoft has something called “Microsoft Research TechFest,” a gathering of the company’s R&D employees from around the world. This event, fueled solely by tank wagons full of Starbucks coffee, normally discusses the progress on solving difficult computer problems, like if a computer can construct a tongue twister more difficult than “The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.” However, this year, the Indian team, otherwise known as the “Unintelligible Technical Support Team,” developed a prototype of a system designed to connect illiterate domestic workers with families seeking their services.

At first, this sounds pretty good idea – a system designed to match job seekers with employers. But it’s not quite that simple. It won’t work, and here’s why:

1. Let’s start with the obvious. Illiterate domestic workers don’t have computers in their homes. A goodly number of them don’t have homes.
2. People looking to hire illiterate domestic workers want to hire cheap illiterate domestic workers, not expensive and uppity illiterate domestic workers who are going to spend their work time surfing the internet for a better paying job opportunity.
3. There is no toll-free tech support. If you dial the toll number, you’re put on hold for what seems like a cow’s lifetime and then you have to talk to someone with an American accent.
4. Illiterate people won’t be able to read well enough to know how to find the Ctrl/Alt/Delete keys every time the system crashes.
5. There is no culturally meaningful translation of “Blue Screen of Death” in Hindi.

In a “Duh” moment (or what should have been a “Duh” moment) the women who tested the technology revealed a surprising fact – they had trouble seeing why a computerized system for finding work was better than the traditional word-of-mouth way.

This hasn’t stopped Microsoft and others, like Raj Reddy, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who is also working on ways for illiterate people to use computers. Says Reddy, “…if you go to them and say ‘I’ll give you a PC,’ they have no clue what the hell you are talking about.” Undaunted, Mr. Reddy thinks people in rural India with few literacy skills might want to talk to their family via computer-based videoconferencing or use the computer to watch a video.

“There are many paths to nirvana,” said Reddy, a member of Microsoft’s technology advisory board. “There are many ways that one can attack these problems.”

Apparently, none of them involve the revolutionary idea of increasing the literacy rate.