His talk today will be on what he calls the law of amplification. So its a very interesting talk because, you know, here at mit our motto is let us build technology and, obviously, that will solve all of the worlds problems. [laughter] and its kind of a heresy in some way to have this talk, and the talk is aptly named geek heresy rescuing social change from the cult of technology, something thats very interesting because it provokes, you know, important conversations. Technology is important, but its also important to think about what is the impact of the technology and how do we design the technology in the best way we can. So without further ado, i will introduce kentaro here. [applause] thank you for that introduction, and id like to thank the center as well as mit for hosting this and all of you for coming. So, you know, when you have a book titled geek heresy, i feel like i need to establish my geek credentials. [laughter] and in an mit audience, thats particularly difficult. I want to do it in a slightly different way, i want to talk about policy issues. So over the last four decades or so, the United States has not seen a dramatic change in its rate of poverty. Here in america, basically, poverty, the poverty rate declined from about 1940 til about 1970, but since then its hovered somewhere around 12, 13, 14 , and meanwhile inequality has risen, and social mobility has stagnated. Now, during the that same period, we have witnessed an explosion of digital technologies. So everything from the internet to the personal computer, from mobile phones to facebook all appeared on the scene. And these are all technologies that we think are transformational, they have changed the world in a dramatic way. But if you combine these two facts together, then it should be clear that any narrative that suggests that the tools of Silicon Valley automatically address social ills like poverty, inequality and social mobility, its somehow flawed. And what im going to try to do for the first half of the talk is, basically, explain why that is, and itll become clear later on why. Let me start off, first, by acknowledging that technology is, in fact, transformational in certain ways. It certainly changes a lot of things. So in this audience, raise your hand if you send or receive over a hundred Text Messages or other messages on your smartphone every day. Okay. If you look around, for the most part with some exception, youll find that 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 with the technology. Basically, what happened is in the span of five or ten years we have gone from a society which believes that, you know, doing this all day is a little bit strange to a society in which, you know, people think that that is the dominant form of communication. I teach undergrads at the university of michigan, and, you know, they have a very difficult time living even for an hour without their smartphones, primarily because it is the primary means by which they communicate with their friends and their family. So on the one hand, Technology Changes very rapidly and causes these dramatic changes in society. And if you believe that same technology causes significant social changes, then youre certainly not alone. So, for example, Mark Zuckerberg, whos the see eau ceo of facebook, is on the record saying Something Like the following. He say that is the worlds 500 million richest people have way more wealth than the remaining six billion come binded. You solve that by getting everyone online. His claim is that inequality can be addressed through spreading more of the internet. Now, you might say, well, you know, hes, you know, hes a tech tycoon. Obviously, hes going to say that about technology. But there are also very many serious leaders like Hillary Clinton who also believe in the same way that the technology itself is going to fundamentally change the world. So in 2011 while she was secretary of state, she announced a Foreign Policy called internet freedom. And the basis of that policy was that by spreading the internet throughout the world and making sure that it was free, free to communicate, that it would allow citizens to keep their governments accountable. And thats been a strong part of the policy of the state department ever since then. Or consider our secretary of education, arne duncan, who is also on the record saying that technology is a game changer in the field of education, a game changer we desperately need to both improve achievement for all and increase equity. So these are all claims made by very prominent leaders, and theyre largely uncontested. They make these claims very casually, and the general population doesnt seem to think that they need to be to contested. But im going to suggest that they do, and im going to draw on my personal experience. I used to work at microsoft. I was there for 12 years. And the last five year ors or so i went to years or so i went to india to help start a new research lab for the company. And i switched from research that was primarily technical in the area of Artificial Intelligence called Computer Vision to one in which i looked for different ways to use Digital Technology for Poverty Alleviation of various kinds. Now, indias a very unique place. On the one hand, theres a thriving i. T. Sector. We have hard about india being an i. T. Superpower. Much of the software that we use every day has, you know, at least had some portion of it written in india and so forth. But at the same time, the country is still extremely poor by our own, you know, by the standards of the United States. So probably about 80 Million People still 800 Million People still live on Something Like 2 u. S. A day, and they get their livelihood in some way connected to agriculture, subsistence agriculture. So this is a country of extreme con contrasts. And what i felt was 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 kinds of projects that we were engaged in. At one point we worked with a sugarcane cooperative that had set up through a government grant a network of computers that were initially meant to be internet connected, and what they wanted was to provide agriculture information to the farmers, health care through telemedicine, Distance Learning and education for the kids in those villages. But when we got there several years after the project had started, what we found was that most of the computers were in disrepair, and the primary use of the existing computers was for farmers to, basically, query how much of their sugarcane was harvested and sent to the cooperative, how much it weighed and how much they ultimately received. So we thought there was a very simple fix to the situation, you know, the computer maintenance costs were rising, and the cooperative was thinking of shutting the whole system down. So we replaced the Computer Network with a system of mobile phones where, basically, farmers could individually send Text Messages, inquire about their harvests and then get their results back. We did a pilot in seven villages, and we found that the farmers really enjoyed the interaction. They liked the fact that they could do it privately on their own. We logged queries as early as three a. M. In the morning when many farmers get up. And overall we estimated that if the cooperative were to use this system in all 54 of the villages that it operated in, it could conceivably save them Something Like 25,000 a year which is not dramatically significant, but enough that it would, you know, it would change the way that it operates, possibly contribute back to the farmers. But ultimately, we were not able to get this pilot to run in the remaining villages, because there was some political rivalry between the people that we worked with most closely in the cooperative and the managing director. It seemed like he felt some kind of threat with this, you know, technology that was being promoted by the i. T. Department. Now, you might think thats a kind of exception. You know, this is a situation where the technology solved the problem at hand, but there were some institutional dysfunctions that did not allow the technology to work. In ore projects other projects i found, for example, with education, where we had, again, Interesting Technology projects, but as we tried to roll them out beyond a research pilot, we ran into very, very common and stubborn problems of things like administrators not really being, caring about additional instruction for the students, teachers being undertrained, teachers being afraid of the technology, often times there not being sufficient budget to actually 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 on larger rollout. And similarly, we had another project where we tried to provide a kind of kiosk for women who live in slums in bangalore to find, to search for jobs where they were employed as domestic laborers in private households. And we set up, basically, a terminal in which the system was designed to be without any texts so that the women who were nonliterate could still navigate the ui. And again in Research Pilots we were able to show that the women could navigate the ui, find jobs and so forth. But we eventually found that actually getting the employers to sign up on this particular system and then providing the kind of training that many of the women needed to qualify for those jobs was ultimately a much, much, much bigger task. So here again we had working technology that addressed a particular kind of problem, but it didnt handle the endtoend issues at hand. In fact, we found that the technology maybe solved, at most, 10 of the larger issues. Over a little over five years, i worked on 50 or more projects in india, all of which were about applying some 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 ive described where we would design a Technology Solution that worked in a Research Context, but as soon as we tried to take it to larger scale, the technology failed to have an impact because of either institutional deficiency in capacity or because individuals were unable to make use of the technology on their own. So, you know, im a scientist by training, and so i wanted to find out, you know, why this was the case. Why was it that things that we had done, spent a lot of time trying to design well and where research showed that there was some positive impact did not actually have impact at a larger scale. And the ultimate conclusion that i came to was a very simple premise which is that technology in and of itself only amplifies underlying human forces. So what that means is wherever the human forces are positive and capable, you can use technology and things get better. But where those human forces are either indifferent or possibly corrupt or fundamentally unable to take advantage of the technology, then no amount of Technology Turns things around. And this goes in direct contradiction to some of the earlier quotes that i mentioned where people believe that technology in and of itself causes the kind of social changes that were looking for. So, you know, to say that Technology Amplifies underlying human forces is, at some level, obvious. And ive heard people say, you know, thats obvious, technologys a tool, but it has direct corollaries that actually go against, i think, more deepseeded intuitions that many of us have. So what im going to do in three different questions is, basically, try to drive that intuition home. So the 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 is not able to meet its sales goals, right . Which of the following several options do you think is most likely to turn things around. So, a, replace the leadership team; b, set up a new strategy; c, provide extensive training for the sales team; or, d, buy a new be ipad for all the employees. So im guessing from your laughter that you dont really believe that, d, buying an ipad for everybody, makes much of a difference. Nor will, e, setting up a brand 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 that thats going to be the thing that turns around a school is flawed. Basically, you know, in our country we have a situation in which there are plenty of welltodo kids who have managed to get a good education, but then there are many, more schools that are failing their studentings. Partly its the fault of the school, but partly the fault of the Larger Society that is not basically providing the necessary readiness for the students who come in. And in those contexts, you cant theres nothing we can do through technology thats going to turn the that situation around. The underlying human forces are not set up and 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 think of, think of the poorest person that you have either encountered or can imagine, somebody whos involuntarily poor, right . 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 bandwidth internet to achieve that goal. Who do you think would be able to raise more money . So who thinks you . Okay. Who thinks the poor person . All right. So most of you, most of the hands went up for you. Why is that . Among the people who raised your hands . Any ideas as to why youd be more successful at this task . Social capital. Right, you have richer friends. Good. What else . Yes. Right, absolutely. Youre more likely to know how to use the tools, and you might be a better organizer overall. You might be able to get your friends to help you. Anything else . Okay. Right. So one week might be so you have some Prior Experience that helps you in this case, right. I would say, you know, lets try to experiment with one year if you think that the time limit is an issue. On the whole youll do much better, and its because the interesting thing about this particular thought experiment is that the technology is the same, but the outcomes differ directly in proportion to what you believe the capacitying capacities that you already pez, experiences that you have, people that you know. So you can flip this around. Imagine youre competing against bill clinton or bill gates. Whod be able to raise more money . We know that the Clinton Global Initiative does very well as a fund raiser, and he has access to the same technologies that all of you do. Again, this is a situation where your underlying, the underlying person that you are, whatever advantages you already have, ultimately, get amplified by the technology. So a third question cha 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, okay . So there are going to be four countries. North korea, china, russia or the United States. So my guess is that most of you believe the United States. Now, if you believe that its the United States, then the question is, well, is it the case that the other countries dont have the internet . Because we all think of the internet as a democratizing force. The reality is in all of these countries there is Something Like the internet there, but its different in each country. In north korea, they have reconstructed an entire internet that used the same internet protocols as in 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 one, but you cannot access the regular facebook and google from inside north korea. On the other hand, there are other services there that look a lot like google and facebook which North Koreans use, and you can be pretty sure that nobody on that internet is criticizing the Supreme Leader there. In china they have, you know, they have, again, internet that in many ways mirrors much of the internet outside, but its not completely disconnected from the rest of the world. Other than, china employs Something Like 300,000 people who basically are hired for the specific purpose of censoring all social media content. And their Response Rate is amazing. Apparently, within 4 hours of a post 24 hours of a post 24 hours of a post, anything the government deems sensitive is immediately taken off. In russia theres almost no censorship online. I guess the government has given up on that. On the other hand, the government employs, apparently, a small army of internet trolls who basically pretend to be regular citizens and spread misinformation, you know, basically spread government propaganda. So in all of these countries the interesting thing is what you see is not, you know, the american internet that we see here in w