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Nancy Hafkin’s Internet Hall of Fame 2012 Induction Speech

About 1988, I was run­ning a region­al devel­op­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tem at the United Nations eco­nom­ic com­mis­sion for Africa in Addis Ababa. It was based on exchange of infor­ma­tion with nodes in vir­tu­al­ly every African coun­try, and it was to be based on satel­lites for the exchange of that infor­ma­tion. Unfortunately the satel­lites weren’t there.

Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin

I think the obvi­ous thing to do with one com­put­er per plan­et is fix cli­mate change before it destroys agri­cul­ture and leaves bil­lions of peo­ple to starve. That seems like a fair­ly rea­son­able kind of an objec­tive. You know, there are all kinds of lit­tle opti­miza­tions you could do with these things, but fun­da­men­tal­ly the big unsolved chal­lenges that human­i­ty faces are cli­mate change and resource scarcity.