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other words, unfettered access to technology doesn’t cause learning any more than does unfettered access to textbooks.
If anything, it’s less useful to master the tools of today, because we know there will be different tools tomorrow.
was missing an explanation of how and why machines contribute – or don’t – to social change.
modern society as a whole lacks a good framework for thinking about technology’s social impact.
But since I worked at a company whose soul was software, I kept wanting to see the technology prevail. I felt disloyal doubting its value.
“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Kranzberg, a historian of technology, embraced technology’s apparent contradictions. “Technology,” he wrote in 1986, “is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”22 This enigmatic statement captures what is probably the most common view among scholars of technology today: Its outcomes are context-dependent. Technology has both positive and negative impacts because technology and people interact in complex ways.
The first is the dedication of the researcher, not to research outcomes but to concrete social impact.
The second factor is the commitment and capacity of the partner organization.
The third factor lies with intended beneficiaries. They must have the desire and the ability to take advantage of the technology provided.
the technology isn’t the deciding factor even in a technology project. Of course, good design trumps poor design, but beyond some level of functionality, technical design matters much less than the human elements.
The right people can work around a bad technology, but the wrong people will mess up even a good one.
other words, what people get out of technology depends on what they can do and want to do even without technology.
So theories of social determinism say that technology is put to use according to underlying human intentions. At the same time, the degree to which technology makes an impact depends on existing human capacities. Put these ideas together and technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.32 Like a lever, technology amplifies people’s capacities in the direction of their intentions.
If a private company is failing to make a profit, no one expects that state-of-the-art data centers, better productivity software, and new laptops for all of the employees will turn things around. Yet, that is exactly the logic of so many attempts to fix schools with technology.
When technologies go mainstream, it’s because they help scratch itches that people already have, not because they create new itches that people don’t want.
Think of counter examples
In the choice between a challenging intimacy and casual fun, some of us choose the latter.
Claims of the Internet’s democratizing power fail to take into account the many things that the Internet hasn’t democratized, such as wealth, power, and genius.
Technology can improve systems that are already working – a kind of amplification – but it doesn’t fix systems that are broken. There is no knowledge management without management.
The danger of cyberbalkanization is that people become radicalized, intolerant, and “less likely to trust important decisions to people whose values differ from their own.”20
None of these devices exists today, but you will have no trouble picking which of each pair would sell better. That’s because you already have a good sense of what most people want. Your ability to predict a technology’s success is based on an intuitive grasp of the human condition. Consistent with amplification, human preferences, more than technological design, decide which products succeed.
Or, to put it another way, good design is the art of catering to our psyches.
Of course, technology, money, and infrastructure are needed. Yet, so often, those things are present, and the desired impact still fails to materialize.
But, as essential as they are, implementers are rarely appreciated.
Leaders, implementers, and beneficiaries. This trinity determines packaged-intervention success, but their all-important traits can’t be packaged. No technology includes the empathy and discernment needed in leaders. No law bundles capable implementation. No system guarantees that beneficiaries will want what others believe is good for them. Exactly that which makes a packaged intervention work can’t be mass-produced.
Technologists and technocrats might hear a challenge in that statement. They hate to admit the existence of systemic obstacles that can’t be overcome by sheer brilliance.
Similarly, any solution – technological or otherwise – that improves education depends crucially on parents, students, teachers, and principals. Anything that augments agriculture depends on suppliers, farmers, extension officers, and produce buyers. Anything that enhances governance depends on bureaucrats, administrators, leaders, and citizens. The lack of attention to these necessary human factors leads to the broken medical equipment, shuttered offices, and collapsed democracies that litter the history of social causes.
“The Iron Law of Evaluation and Other Metallic Rules.”39 In it, Rossi made a startling claim. The Iron Law of the title stated, “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.” That is, on average, large social programs show no impact. Rossi spent much of the paper considering this discouraging conclusion, and his analysis foretold the problems of packaged interventions. He explicitly noted three reasons why social programs so often fail when they go big.
What isn’t a packaged intervention? The caring attention of a good teacher. Citizen participation in a protest march. The capable execution of a vaccination program by a well-managed health-care system. A political leader’s decision to do what’s right in spite of pressure from special interests. Human virtues can’t be packaged. But if packaged interventions don’t include the critical human components of social change, then isn’t it tautological to say that packaged interventions aren’t enough? It does seem pretty obvious. But if it’s obvious, experts of every stripe nevertheless treat packaged
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Of course, technologies can enrich lives; voting can empower citizens; and microcredit can lead to better livelihoods. But “can” is not always “will.” Modern society fetishizes technocratic devices, but it’s a human finger on the on-switch and a human hand at the controls. Why are we so enamored of shrink-wrapped quick fixes? Why do even those of us who know better tout them as real solutions? The reasons run deep and have been centuries in the making.
So none of the nine cases Prahalad held out as paragons of “eradicating poverty with profits” were any such thing. Either they didn’t serve the poorest people, or they didn’t make much of a profit. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We already know how hard it is for the private sector to deliver services to poor populations on its own.
“That is our generation’s task – to make . . . life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.”
In other words, short-term pleasure often leads to long-term dissatisfaction. That intuition underlies the psychologist’s distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia. Pleasure-seeking hedonism is questionable, but maybe long-term eudaimonic life satisfaction is good.
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
The problem with measurement obsession is the obsession, not the measurement.
Again, it’s not that technology, packaged interventions, RCTs, social enterprises, happiness, scalability, measurability, and technocratic ideas in general are bad in and of themselves. Rather, the trouble is cultism and imbalance. New vaccines are good, but not while health-care systems go unfunded. Educational technology might be helpful, but not if good teachers and institutional support are lacking. Elections are great, but not if social norms and government institutions don’t support democracy.
Technocratic means might be a part of the solution, but with so much attention on them, who’s working on the other parts?
What’s notable, however, is that in a class about computers, what was required first was a change in people: good behavior from students and the willingness to discipline on my part. If technology amplifies human forces, then a poor outcome often means that the right human forces aren’t in place. Where people problems exist, even the best technology will flop.
Technology by itself only increases the gap between the haves and have-nots.
Social causes are better served as individuals with a narrow present-orientation expand to a future-orientation; and as people extend their concern from themselves to others in what philosopher Peter Singer has called “expanding circles.”9 It’s good to care for oneself, better to care for family and community, even better to care for country, and best to care for humanity as a whole.
“Unpleasant and undesirable consequences can be encountered but it is part of learning. Life is continued schooling.”
I’ll use the term intrinsic growth to describe progress in intention, discernment, and self-control.
The base of optimistic intentions, keen discernment, and greater self-control that a good rote education develops is far better than no education, poor education, or an ambitious educational program run badly.
Some people seek greater income at the expense of a satisfying career; others don’t mind low pay if the job fulfills a deep creative urge. Some people are magnanimous only when they’re acknowledged for it; others are consistently generous, indifferent to recognition. These kinds of differences are explained by the hierarchy of aspirations.
Thus, intrinsic growth can be a climb with switchbacks: Progress means that sharing will give way to private ownership, which evolves into enlightened sharing. Similarly, people grow from dependence to independence to interdependence; from unwanted poverty to prosperity to contentment; from oppression to freedom to responsibility; from helplessness to confidence to humility.
In a letter to his wife, John Adams, America’s second president, wrote: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”39 The progression goes from the hard and practical to the constructive and exploratory and eventually to the artistic and self-expressive.
Real progress isn’t strictly about satisfying our every present desire. It’s about our desires themselves evolving.
Mentees should own the agenda and set the terms of engagement. Mentees need to stand firm about their own aspirations and avoid second-guessing their mentors. And mentors must resist the temptation to impose their worldview onto mentees. Developing these attitudes can itself take effort, and it’s part of the work.
“You know, there’s no point pushing people beyond what they want for themselves.”
This process could be called an aspiration assessment, in contrast to the needs assessment so many social activists are trained to perform. The intent behind the needs assessment is a good one – efforts should obviously go toward what communities actually need, not what we, as outsiders, think they need. In practice, though, it’s nearly impossible not to project needs onto others. Richer people believe that their poorer counterparts need better health care. Citizens of democracies are certain that others need political freedom. University graduates assume that everyone needs higher education.
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