Knowledge Needs to Flow to the Poor

This morning, I watched a video of the commencement speech at Harvard by a student from China.

Chinese Student Commencement Speech

Coincidence or synchronicity, the main point of that speech was along the same line as the first idea I listed in my last Blog --

Global Wealth Disparity Came from Concentration of Power

1) Knowledge needs to flow to the poor (long term by education/learning; short term by Internet)

This is heartening to me because the speaker is of the next generation and in particular, he is from China and educated in the US. His main point, as my take from his speech, is that everyone of us should do something to help spread scientific knowledge to the poor people in the underdeveloped countries, so as to help them.

As a motivational speech, he did a good job. He pinpointed the need for us to look inside ourselves. Again, it is good to see that it is also my first point in the post on

What Has Happened to this World in Barely Eight Years?

1) The problem is inside each one of us.

Both are good ideas, of course. But, they are already practiced. Motivating more people to make use of existing channels of education at best will increase the speed of education equalization slightly. To be more effective, we need greater motivation and more effective and new channels or infrastructures to increase the flow of knowledge to the poor, globally.

How do we generate stronger motivation?

A crazy idea is to scientifically influence our temperament towards philanthropy. Is that possible? Probably yes, when science reaches a level of advancement and humanity can agree on a safe and acceptable way to use that technology. But we need to solve the problem now.

A mundane way is to provide greater incentives for people to benefit themselves when they engage in philanthropy. I had dreamed in the past to award people financially and reputation-wise by tracking their philanthropic actions. With the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data being on us already, making such tracking of people (if voluntary) can be done. Credit score is already a widely applied measure. Location information on individuals is already widely accepted when fear of privacy is overcome by the benefits of convenience. I imagine that Big Brother is imminently on us and we may voluntarily accept more and more of it. Therefore, an international and NGO-controlled monitoring of our philanthropic activities may be a way for people to intensify their motivation to do good to others, Money reward as well as reputation could make a difference in people's motivation.

What new channels or infrastructures to increase the flow of knowledge?

Ideas that are already being used, which came to my mind, include the websites which provide free online Internet learning, from universities and volunteers. What is missing in the poor countries is the communication infrastructure for the poor people to connect to the Internet. Efforts by Facebook and Google to deploy free Internet communication to remote countries are highly laudable! The world needs more of these large enterprises to do similar things and to donate low-cost smartphones and laptops, etc. to the poor people. If free wifi can be made available to these countries, it will save them a lot of capital to build up data communication infrastructures for fixed line phones, cellular phones, cable TV, or DSL and leapfrog into wireless communication. That will really speed up their economic development and reduce their capital requirements.