[Gatac]

Yeah, adopt blind or deaf orphans! Not only do you not introduce another disabled child into the world, you're also giving love to a kid that's unlikely to be adopted otherwise.

My bad for the seriousness. I'm just a raging future-lover and can't help myself.

The laptop/humanitarian aid thing is tricky: we've made much of the third world dependant upon our charity. The red cross is totally undercutting local farmers with its food packages, while international business ripping off the locals encourages growing cash crops, which leads to more dependance on foreign aid. These are artifacts of colonialism that are very hard to undo. On the other hand, while I do approve of handing out laptops - *everybody* will need to learn how to use computers if they want to deal with the modern world -, this can't be at the expense of other, more pressing problems, such as the medical problems you mentioned.

The problem with getting rid of oil is that oil is handy. Energy density is high, and that energy can also easily be liberated and used. We need some sort of chemical energy storage for the near future; hydrogen works, but we need a better way of manufacturing it. Some developments in batteries look promising, too, as do ultracapacitators. Plastics without oil would be hard, but I'm sure we can replace plastics with other materials, like the various experimental configurations of carbon people are working on.

Intelligent is a difficult word; how intelligent are animals? Are they sentient/sapient? Psychology isn't nearly mature enough to deal with this. Maybe we should say what we do need: We need flexibility, ability to learn, complex pattern recognition and such, which looks like it could be done with fuzzy logic. Of course, fuzzy logic implies neural networks, which are modelled on how we think our brain works, so what comes out at the other end may emerge as intelligent even if we didn't design it to. That's what self-evolving machines are all about.

Gatac