You could argue that technology amplifies existing inequalities.”
“Technology doesn’t fix broken institutions, whether they’re corporate, educational, or something else. In order to get that result, the institutions themselves would have to be changed, something Toyama says technology cannot do. The technology worked, but had no impact.” He eventually reached the conclusion that it was the social and cultural institutions–the human factors–surrounding a certain problem that prevented the technology from having the desired result. “I worked on 50 or more projects and very often the solution failed at scale. “I thought that more tech overall was somehow better.” But it was his time working for Microsoft in India that began to change his mind about the role of technology in social development. With a background in computer science, he was trained to solve problems through technology. Toyama, a professor at the University of Michigan and former head of Microsoft Research India, said he came to this conclusion through a long and difficult personal journey. On Tuesday evening at the MIT Media Lab, the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics hosted a talk by Kentaro Toyama, author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, in which he laid out his thesis that technology, in and of itself, is not a force for positive change in the world, but “only amplifies the underlying human forces” already at work in a society. Geek Heresy author discusses his belief that social change can’t come about through technology alone.
0 kommentar(er)
