Digital divide

Steven Ballmer sees the day when he can instruct his computer, "Get me ready for my trip," and the machine will do his bidding, making his flight arrangements, booking his hotel and scheduling his business meetings with even more efficiency than a topnotch secretary.

Ballmer sees computers processing high-level instructions within as little as five years. You don’t dismiss that as science fiction when it’s coming from the chief executive officer of software giant Microsoft Corp.

In a talk with me and three other journalists from Southeast Asia this week in Singapore, Ballmer was undeterred by skepticism about projected innovations in information and communication technology.

He continues to see a future in voice-recognition technology despite the current serious glitches. He says he does about 80 percent of his reading on computers and predicts the demise of news on paper. When I strongly contradict him, he says I have a point only because the technology isn’t perfect yet.

And he’s confident that computers will one day soon become interactive enough to run households like butlers on permanent call. Ballmer is probably unaware that this can put millions of Filipino maids out of work, with tens of thousands of them employed in Singapore.

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Filipino maids will just have to reinvent themselves so they can continue to have marketable skills in a global economy in the age of ICT.

This can be a major problem here. While Ballmer is already seeing computers that can recognize user intent and act on it, many Filipinos see the mere use of a computer as science fiction. Poverty, substandard school facilities, the deteriorating quality of education and the continuing decline in Filipino proficiency in English, lingua franca of the Information Age, have made the digital divide a serious concern in the Philippines.

ICT companies recognize the problem and are doing their part to narrow that divide. Microsoft, whose chairman Bill Gates has donated billions to health care programs worldwide, has a global "Unlimited Potential" program that seeks to provide ICT skills to the underprivileged in coordination with governments.

Microsoft launched the training program last year for overseas Filipino workers in Singapore and their immediate families in the Philippines in cooperation with the Department of Labor and Employment.

Volunteers, many of them Filipino professionals in Singapore, provide the training. A year ago 110 OFWs graduated from the program, aptly called "Tulay" or bridge. Last Sunday 179 more graduated in ceremonies held at the Neptune Theater at the Overseas Union House on Collyer Quay.

Following the encouraging response to the program last year, Microsoft launched similar programs for OFWs in Taiwan, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Last month the program had 74 graduates in Hong Kong. Ballmer said they are exploring the possibility of expanding the program to Saudi Arabia, home to the biggest number of OFWs.

"We will not grow roots in the countries where we serve," said Encar Morales, president of the Filipino Overseas Workers in Singapore during the graduation rites last Sunday. "One day we will all have to go back to our own country where we have to show our families, our countrymen what it is that we gained from our stay abroad. So I always tell our fellow OFWs to continue their studies, improve themselves and prepare for tomorrow."

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That tomorrow will see ICT becoming even more ubiquitous and indispensable in everyday life. Filipinos who work overseas are at least exposed to the advantages that ICT brings, and there are strong incentives to become computer literate.

But what about the millions of other Filipinos living below the poverty line who don’t even know how to type, and who can’t understand computer instructions either in English or Tagalog because they can barely read?

Bill Gates built Microsoft with the aim of putting "a computer on every desk." For the Third World, access to a computer is problem enough.

In a public school that is touted by the government as a model in Metro Manila, teachers keep the few computers in a locked room, giving students only a limited period every week to use the machines. The malls in Metro Manila have Internet zones where access costs as little as P35 an hour. That’s still a lot of money for students who can’t even afford to buy notebooks and textbooks.

The problem is worse outside urban centers. It is not uncommon for many students in this country to finish high school without ever learning how to use a computer.

Apart from education, bridging the digital divide involves making ICT hardware affordable. There are efforts to develop no-frills tablet computers, but like voice-recognition software, there are still too many kinks that need to be ironed out.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and brother of US Director of Intelligence John Negroponte, announced earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland an initiative to develop a $100 laptop. Media Lab’s non-profit "One Laptop Per Child" program aims to give children in developing countries access to the Internet through inexpensive laptops.

Ballmer admires Negroponte’s initiative but concedes that even $100 is still beyond the reach of millions of families in the developing world. That $100 price tag, Ballmer emphasizes, is possible only if governments buy the laptops wholesale for distribution to schoolchildren.

"I still think it’s a heroic challenge," Ballmer told us.

Filipinos thank private companies such as Microsoft for doing their part in bridging the digital divide. The government, however, will need to do more if it wants all Filipinos to be computer-literate and remain competitive in the Information Age.

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FREELOADER: A former STAR colleague, Gianna Maniego, asked me to warn her friends that her cell phone was stolen last Thursday in a mall, and the thief has been texting the contacts listed in her phone for a pre-paid load transfer. The thief does not answer calls. Gianna’s lost phone’s number is 0917-426-2743.