[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] everybody, welcome to this amazing talk. My im a ph. D student in the humanities group, doing research and a fellow of the center for ethics. So today we have kentaro, who is a professor at the university of Michigan School of information. He also founded Microsoft Research india, where he created a group that did technology for emerging markets. His talk today will be on the law of am mixification. A very amplification, a very interesting talk. And its kind of a heresy in some ways to have this talk, and the talk is aptly named geek heresy rescuing culture change from technology. It provokes important conversations because i think technology is important, but also important to think about what is the impact of the technology and how we design the technology in the best we way can. So without further adieu. Like to introduce kentaro here. [applause] thank you for that introduction, and id like to thank the center and m. I. T. For hosting this and all of you for coming. Also, when you have a book title geek heresy i feel like i need establish my effect credentials, and in an m. I. T. Audience that it particularly different. I want to talk about policy issues. So, over the last four decades or so the United States as not seen a dramatic change in it rate of poverty inch america the poverty rate declined from 1940 to 1970, then since it hovered around 12, 13, 14 , and meanwhile inequal was hissen and social mobility has stagnated. During that same period of time, we have witnessed an explosion of Digital Technologies so everything from the intermet to personal commuter, from mobile phones to facebook, all appeared on the scene and these are alling at the knowledges we thinking transformational, changed the world in a dramatic way. But you combine these two facts together it should be claire that any narrative that suggests that the tools of sill cob valley automatically address social ills like poverty, inequality, and social mobility, is somehow flawed and what im going to try to do for the first half of the talk is explain why i think that is, and it will become clear a little bit later on why. So, let me start off first by acknowledging that technology is in fact transformational in certain ways. Certainly changes a lot of things. In this audience, raise your hand if you send or receive over 100 Text Messages or other kinds of messages on your smartphone every day. Okay. If you look around, for me most part, with some exception you fine the people who do this are somewhere around age 30 or less. And those of you who are not have done a great job of catching up win technology. In the span of five of term years we have gone from a society which believes dog this day is a little strange to other society where people think that it this dominant form of conversation. I teach undergrads at the university of michigan and they have a difficult time leaving even for an hour without their smartphone because thats the primary way they commune kit with a friends and family, so Technology Changes and causes dramatic changes in society, and if you believe that the same technology causes significant social channelings, then youre certainly not alone. Muck sucker boring, the sow ceo on the facebook, says that the worlds 500 million richest people have way more wealth than the remaining 6 billion you combined. You solve that by getting everyone online. So his claim is inequality can be dressed through spreading more of the internet. You might say, hes a tech tycoon, obviously going to say that about tech until but other serious leaders like Hillary Clinton think that the technology will change the world. So in 2011, while she was secretary of state, she announced a Foreign Policy called water . Freedom, and the basis of the policy was that by spreading the internet throughout the world and making sure it was free to communicate, that allowed citizens to keep their governments accountable and that been a strong policy as part of the state department ever since then. All considered, our secretary of education, arne duncan, who is also on the record saying that technology is a gamechanger in the field of education, a gamechanger we desperately need to both improve achievement for all and increase equity. So these are all claims made by very prominent leaders and theyre harlingly up contested. They make close claims casually and the general population doesnt think they need to be contested. But i suggest they da and ill draw on my personal experience itch used to work at microsoft. I was there for 12 years, and the last five years or so i went to india to help start a new research lab for the company, and when i moved there, i switched from research that was prim pairly technical in a subarea of Artificial Intelligence called Computer Vision to one in which i look for different ways to use Digital Technology for Poverty Alleviation of various kinds. India is a very unique player, on the one hand a thriving i. T. Sector. Many of the much of the software we use every day has at least some portion represent in india and so forth. But at the same time the country is still extremely poor by our own by the standards of the United States. So probably about 800 million pipe still live on Something Like two u. S. Dollars per day, and they get their livelihood in some way connected to agriculture, subsistence agriculture. So a country of extreme contrasts and what i found that working in that kind of environment actually helped me see the situation with technology and society here in the United States as well. So, ill give you an example of the kind of projected we were engaged in. At one point we work with a sugar cane cooperative that had set up through a government Grant Network of computers that were initially meant to be internet connected and they wanted to providing a Cultural Information to the farmers, health care through telemedicine and Distance Learning but when we got there several years after the project started we found that most of the computers were in disaway and the primary use of the existing computers was for farmers to basically queriry how much of their sugar cane was harvested and sent to the cooperative, how much weighed and how much they received. We thought it would be a simple fix. Computer maintenance costs were rising so we replaced the Computer Network with a system of mobile phones and farmers could send text message, inquire about their harvest and then get the results back. We did a pilot in seven villages and found the farmers really enjoyed the interaction and liked the fact they could do it privately on their own. We logged queriries as early as 3 00 a. M. In the morning when farmers get up. We estimated if the cooperative where were to use the system in all 54 villages it operated in, it could conceivably save them Something Like 25,000 a year, which is not dramatically significant but enough it would change the way that it operates, possibly contribute back back be farmers. Ultimately we were not able to get the pilot to run in the remaining victims because there was some political rivalry between the people we work with in the cooperative and managing direct er. The felt some kind of threat with this technology being promote bid the i. D. Tent. You might think thats an exception, situation where technology solved the problem but there were some institutional dysfunctions that did not allow the technology to work. There are in other projects i found, for example, with education, where we had, again, Interesting Technology projects but as we tried to roll them out beyond the research pilot, we ran into very, very common and stub been problems of things like administrators not really being caring about additional instruct for the students, teachers being undertrained, techers being afraid of the technology, often times not theyre not being sufficient budget to provide any kind of i. T. Maintenance. So heres another context where the technology that we devised worked very well but did not actually have much impact larger rollout. Similarly we had project where we tried to provide a kind of kiosk for women to search for jobs where they were employed as domestic laborers in private households. We set up a terminal in which the system was design teed be without any text so that thewoman who were operating it could navigate in the ie and we were able to show that the women could navigate, find jobs and so for in research project, but we evenly foment that actually getting the employers to sign up on this system and then providing the kind of training that the women needed to qualify for the jobs, was ultimately a much, much bigger task. So here again we had a working technology that addressed a particular type of problem but didnt handle the endtoend issues and we found the technology solved at most ten percent of the larger issues. A little over five years i worked on 50 or more projects in and a quarter all of which were about apply something kind of Digital Technology to the problems of health care, government, education, microcredit, agriculture and so forth, and very, very often the situation was exactly like i described, where we would design a technology exclusion that worked in a Research Contest but as soon as we tried to take it to larger scale the technology failed to have an impact because of either institutional deficiencies and capacity or because individuals were unable to make use of the technology on their own. So, im a scientist by training, and so i wanted to find out why this was the case. Why was it that things we had spent a lot of time trying to design well and where research showed there was some positive impact, did not actually have impact larger scale, and the ultimate conclusion i came to was a very simple premise, which is that technology in and of itself only amplifies underlying human forces. What that mean is is wherever the human forces are positive and capable, you can use technology and things get petitioner. Where the human fors are either indifferent or possibly corrupt, or fundamentally unable to take advantage of technology, then no amount of Technology Turns things around. This goes in direct contradiction to some of the earlier quote is mentioned where people believed that technology causes the kind of social change were looking for. So, to say that Technology Amplifies underlying human forces is obvious. People say its obvious. Technology is a tool and it had direct corollaries that go against i think more deepseeded intuitions that maybe of us have. So what im going to do in three different questions is basically try to drive that intuition home. So first question is the following imagine that you are the ceo of a company that has a very good product, but for whatever reason the sales team ills not able to meet its sales goals. By which of the following several options do you think is most likely to turn things around . A. , replace the leadership team. B. , set up a new strategy. C. , provide extensive training for the sales team, or, d. , buy a new ipad for all the employees. So im guessing from your laughter you dont believe that d. , buying an ipad for everybody, makes a difference. Nor will e. , setting up a planned new data center, or, f. , buying Software Productivity tools for all the employees, and the fact that you have that intuition is terrific because you should immediately understand that any idea we can take technology, put it into a school that is not meeting its academic goals and believe thats going to be the thing that turns around a school is itself flaw. Basically in our country we have a situation in which there are plenty of well to do kids who manage to get a good education but then there are many, many schools failing their students, partly its the schools part and partly also the fault of the Larger Society that it nose basically providing the necessary readiness for the students who come in, and in those context, theres nothing we can do through technology that will turn that situation around. The underlying human forces are not aligned in the right direction. So, technology in and of itself doesnt fix broken institutions, whether theyre corporate, educational, or health care or otherwise. So, a second question. Imagine that this time you think of the poorest person you have either encountered or can imagine, somebody who is involuntarily poor, and imagine that youre in a contest with that person to raise as much money for the charity of your choice, and you have one weeks use of free unlimited high ban Division Internet to achieve that goal. Who would be able to raise the mostman . Who thinks you . Who thinks the poor person. Most of the hand went up for you. Why is that . Among the people who raised your hands. Any idea white you would be more successful at this task . Social capital. You have richer friends, good. What else . Right. Absolutely. More likely to know how to use the tools and might be a better organizer and get your friends to help you. Anything else . Okay. Right. So, one week you have some Prior Experience that helps you in this case. I would say let try an experiment with one year if you think that the time limit issue. On the whole youll do better. The interesting thing about this thought experiment is that technology is the same but the outcomes differ directly in proportion to what you believe the capacitiers you already possess, whether its people you know or inherent capacity you have and experiences you have. You could also flip this around. National your competing against bill clinton and billgates. Who could raise more money. We know the Clinton Global Initiative does very well and he has access to the same technologies all of you do. So, again, this is a situation where your underlying the underlying person that you are, whatever advantages you already have, get amplified by the technology. So, a third question that im going to ask this time has to do with which of the following countries do you think has the most Democratic Free speech online. Four countries, north korea, china, russia, or the United States. So, my guess is most of you believe the United States. Now, if you believe that its the United States, the question is, its the case the other countries dont have the internet . We think of the internet as a democratizing force. The arrest it all of this kin tries theyre somethings like the water . There but a different internet in north korea have reconstructed an entire internet that uses the same internet protocols as the United States but which is completely disconnected from the rest of the worlds internet. A few government officials have access to both the internal and external well but you can north for example, access the regular facebook and google from inside of north korea. On the other hand there oar services that look a lot like doingle and facebook which North Koreans use, and you can be pretty sure nobody on that internet is criticizing the Supreme Leader there. In china, they have a again, internet that in many ways mirrors the internet outside but not completely different connected. China employed Something Like 300,000 people who are hired for the specific purpose of censoring all social media content, and their Response Rate is amazing. Within 24 hours of a post, anything that the government deems offensive is basically taken off. An amazing censorship machine inch russia theres almost no explicit cent shoreship online. The government has given up. On the other hand the government employs a small army of internet trolls who pretend to be citizens and basically spread government propaganda. In all these countries what you see is not the American Water . That we see here, which theres a lot of thriving discourse online and free speech, but an internet that basically is reflecting and am any fight the underlying situation in those countries. The idea that technology in and of itself brings democracy to other countries itself has some issues. So, that brings me back to the original two facts i brought up. The idea that over the last 45 years we have not seep dramatic improvements in poverty and inequality has skyrocketed but we have had a golden age of digital inknow vacation. How is it possible these two things are happening at the same time . I basically argue that as a country, we are not plately, culturally, socially, economically focused on eliminating poverty. Even though we have great tools which might advance that cause, because of the social situation, the technologies are not contributing to the elimination of inequality in this country, and if you believe that Technology Amplifies underlying human forces then theres no amount of technology that we can pile on that is going to undo the political situation. The ultimate engagement has to be social and so on in nature. So, just to spies the talk up to this point, im going say again that Technology Amplifies underlying human forces, and as direct corollaries it means that technology by itself does not fix broken human institutions. It does not political democracy in and of itself and in and of itself doesnt decrease inequality. In fact you could argue that the technologies amplify existing inequalities. So, my ultimate interest is to see ways in which we can cause positive social change in the world with or without technology so one question is how can you use this idea of technology amplify