“Technology widens existing disparities”
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Mr. Toyama used to share that worldview: “I am a recovering technoholic,” he writes. Then he moved to India, to lead the Microsoft lab, and observed a phenomenon that he would come to believe was universal: “Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” When computers entered rural schools, for instance, guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys. Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.
Technology lets you do more and more extreme versions of what you were going to do anyway. It should come as no surprise that the most newsworthy outcome of putting laptops in the hands of schoolchildren is teachers using them to spy on kids. It's a predictable outcome of the social dynamic, one which technology itself can only amplify, not change.
Of course, technology can be a component enabling larger trends of social change. Consider the industrial revolution. A strong argument can be made that modern technology is a prerequisite for modern liberal democracy. But the immediate impact of industrialization was not liberal democracy throughout Europe. That followed about a century later, on the back of human forces.
Then he moved to India, to lead the Microsoft lab, and
observed a phenomenon that he would come to believe was
universal: “Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human
forces.” When computers entered rural schools, for instance,
guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys.
Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to
archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools
to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.
If true change is desired, tech powerhouses like Google & FB cannot but develop a political will to address the chronic root causes behind the problems of technological disenfranchisement, among the world's downtrodden.
[1] http://www.google.com/loon/how/
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/technology/drones-beaming-...
My favorite is probably "Twitter Isn't Spreading Democracy—Democracy Is Spreading Twitter" http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/twitte...
I've noticed similar things. I'm not sure how we really get to the point where technology is a force used for leveling the playing field and not a force used for exacerbating it.
But I do know that it's important for the people who care about these things to engage with it. I know we'll be even worse off if the tech people that care about how tech impacts the world and care about leveling the playing field drop out of the field.
Tech has become increasingly soulless. None of us can afford to let that trend win.
The point I would like to make is, exclusivity and organization would be a good thing for the altruistic tech community.
Agreed. Not in an elitist sense, but in the sense that no amount of excellence in technological skill excuses being a a terrible person who drives others away. Choosing not to exclude anyone from a community is still an exclusionary practice: it drives away people who aren't willing to put up with the worst anyone in that community serves up. So if you're going to end up excluding people no matter what you do, better to actively choose to exclude the awful people rather than leaving them around to drive away others.
You say that as though there exists a unifying driving force behind technological change that could choose to change direction, rather than a million people all acting independently or in loose groups. If you want to see technology used as a force for "leveling the playing field", start a company or a charitable organization to do exactly that. Or, failing that, pitch a convincing vision and to a lot of people who have such organizations. Or join one of the many organizations already working on that.
> But I do know that it's important for the people who care about these things to engage with it. I know we'll be even worse off if the tech people that care about how tech impacts the world and care about leveling the playing field drop out of the field.
The article artificially divides people into two camps: people who understand and don't care, and people who care and don't understand (as well as implying that the latter have only the best interests of the world at heart but are stymied by those darn technologists). That leaves out two much more relevant groups: the substantial set of technologists who are out to change the world (and not in the trite "by creating another social network" sense), as well as the people who understand technology well enough to level useful criticisms about its direction and seek to influence that direction (for instance, the EFF and the FSF).
There are plenty of people and organizations out there that are using technology to improve people's lives in numerous ways. More such people and organizations would always be welcome, but I personally find the bleak picture painted by the article quite unwarranted.
Yes, and that's unadulterated bullshit, which is why I said the first half of the article was eyeroll inducing.
> You say that as though there exists a unifying driving force behind technological change that could choose to change direction, rather than a million people all acting independently or in loose groups.
Actually nothing I said assumes that, because I don't. However, tech does have change in aggregate and each of the people involve bring whatever push they have to that soup. Which is why it's important for people who care about things, say, more important than money, to be involved in the field.
> If you want to see technology used as a force for "leveling the playing field", start a company or a charitable organization to do exactly that. Or, failing that, pitch a convincing vision and to a lot of people who have such organizations. Or join one of the many organizations already working on that.
No shit.
I just think far too many of us aren't doing it. We're focused on things like... growth curves.
You sure we haven't already started to roll over and do whatever the politicians and bankers want?
Edit: journalists.
Having gone to engineering school, I used to have the same arrogance for superior role of engineers in society. As I have gotten older, I have come to realize that while engineers are important, other people play very important roles in progress.
I believe that us techies have this powerful skill to leverage technology to make change at greater scale and more cost effectively than possible ever before. But, we need to careful in wielding this powerful skill and make sure that we're having lasting positive changes; RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) are a great way of measuring and verifying the impact of our work.
We're a team of techies who believe that we can change the world. We've built engageSPARK.com (a not-for-profit social business) to help organizations on the ground amplify their work through the use of Voice IVR, SMS Text, and Missed Call campaigns by making it super easy for non-techies to build interactive campaigns in just minutes in any country; think of us as "Twilio for non-techies". We spent a lot of time on our UX making it simple.
As an example of our work, we did a large program with Mercy Corps to help 20,000 survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines learn how to budget and save money through interactive soap operas with quizzes (to measure comprehension at the end of each episode) delivered via Voice Calls and via SMS. They did an RCT and found amazing results for the people who received the campaigns via Voice Calls: 106% increase in use of savings products. The response rates for quizzes were 4.5% for SMS vs. 48% for Voice Calls. There have now been a few RCTs that show that Voice is a powerful medium in developing countries for behavior change (unlike in the west, people in most developing countries are not robocalled regularly and actually pick up most phone calls!).
If you're a technologist and want to use your powerful skills to help alleviate poverty, come join our team! Our stack is JS, Python/Django, Java, and we're converting the back end from Java to Go microservices.
And I strongly recommend reading Kentaro's book (from the nytimes article) as a necessary introduction when thinking about bringing technology to people in need. The world is littered with failed tech projects that were meant to alleviate poverty; let's make sure that we're not adding to the pile.
Technology is like a stick. You could use it to sow seeds into the ground, or to beat people up with it. Its purpose is entirely infused into it by its user. The nature of the stick is irrelevant, it's the wielder that really matters.
First off, we aren't equally giving everyone in the world sticks. And second off, I think I agree with the point that even if we did, those sticks would likely end up being used to accentuate divides, not smooth them.
Believe me, I'm not saying we should go backwards. I'm just saying real effects come from our work and it makes sense to concern ourselves with them.
Not all technology is neutral; some technologies are primarily used to help or to harm, and many technologies enforce policies in lieu of humans. It's reasonable to ask people to think about what they're doing when they develop technology.
I was trying to emphasize that the responsibility is overwhelmingly resting on the user's shoulders. When it comes to doing good vs. doing bad things, technology itself is merely an accessory. We should pay attention to people first, technology second. But yes, we should pay some attention to technology - I agree with that.
Why would technology ever get us there? It's a tool that magnifies the power of the one wielding it. It already hit it's maximum for empowering the underdog; because the already-empowered noticed and realized they needed to get in on this technology thing too.
Changes have to come from government policy or lawbreaking - that's how the existing power structures protects their positions of power. Their systems adapt just fine to technological progress.
I know we'll be even worse off if the tech people that care about how tech impacts the world and care about leveling the playing field drop out of the field.
Building tech to empower others for them (governments, companies, etc) is worse than dropping out of the field. Not only is it not helping, it's actively hurting. Yet here were all are anyway.
So while technology can multiply effects, let's say, that would mean it can multiply it for all but what it doesn't do is smooth it. Smoothing would take judgement and external manipulation to correct a course.
During the bronze age militaries and governments wielded bronze.
During the iron age militaries and governments wielded iron.
We shouldn't be surprised that, during the information age, militaries and governments wield information.
The utilization of technology, like any tool, can be used for bad or good or positive or negative or might or right. It is agnostic to propriety and to morals.
When techies magnified the power of technology in the 80s, they used to herald information and its decentralization as something to magnify the power of the people.
Today when techies magnify the power of technology, they herald its use by large corporations or mimick the interests of their military. They think they are champions for people, for decentralization, but the vocabulary changed without their knowing about it and the excuses are more plentiful than good intentions, manifestos or philosophies.
I think this encapsulated most of it, followed by:
> In each arena, he writes, technologists ignore “the unavoidable role of social forces.”
Yes. In my early-career, I think I had bought into this foggy notion that somehow everything could be solved if you just made a clever-enough technological solution that somehow realigned people's incentives and desires.
After working in a large company for a while, I've gradually come to believe that a lot of sub-par technology exists because nobody faced the social/organizational problems first.
Institutions and norms still matter regardless of how cheap the next iPhone can be made. And if you still have institutions and norms that promote something like racism or homo/transphobia then you're going to still have those around no matter what technology is employed. If you can't change minds, then you can't change how technology will be used.
Of course it's not an intrinsic leveler. Who claims that? But wasn't it "technology" that made it possible for the rural school to have a computer at all? That looks like leveling to me - between urban "haves" and rural "have nots". Sure, most of us would want this leveling to happen faster - but over time each kid will get their own mouse (or whatever), and we can move on to concerns about how the brahmin kid's computer is nicer. That's progress.
>It’s a world full of trained engineers — and many college dropouts — who cannot be expected to grasp human dynamics any more than political scientists understand Java code.
What a ridiculous false-equivalency. Engineers live in the world and thus develop some understanding of "human dynamics" whereas non-coders do not get exposure to coding just by living their lives.
>If family dinners and school lunches were painful for you, “disrupting” eating with a venture-capital-backed protein drink like Soylent can seem like liberation.
This is cringe-worthy. Psychologize much?
>Talented chefs don’t believe their sauteeing skills entitle them to reimagine Web browsers, but talented technologists feel entitled to reimagine cooking
Because technologists cook too! Especially anyone who'd create cooking technology! Another false equivalency. Technologists: live in the world, use products, cook, clean, travel, eat, buy, ... whereas non-engineers (for the most part) do not code, or design electronics, etc.
>“If you’re a concert pianist, it doesn’t mean that you have any special knowledge about how to cause social change,” Mr. Toyama told me. “And yet that’s the equivalent of the thinking that many entrepreneurs engage in.”
Really? We're a bunch of idiot savants with Dunning-Kruger? Screw you Toyama.
>But Mr. Toyama disagrees: “Technology — even when it’s equally distributed — isn’t a bridge, but a jack. It widens existing disparities.”
Evidence please? And what if disparities are widened because everyone gets a 50% boost? Don't do it?
I'm the first to agree that handing out a tablet to every kid is no panacea, and that programs where that happens are poorly planned. But naive, poorly executed attempts to introduce technology are hardly evidence of futility. Silver bullets have never tended to be as effective as holistic efforts with measurement and feedback loops. A critique of tech as silver bullet is certainly justified. A critique of it as inherently malignant is not.
> Evidence please? And what if disparities are widened because everyone gets a 50% boost? Don't do it?
Well, it's not evidence, but Paul Graham said the same thing in one of his essays (don't remember which one, sorry). He said that technology is a multiplier. Instead of the distribution of talent (or perhaps productivity?) going from 1 to 10, now it goes from 1 to 1000.
So PG's position is that it's not just 50% boost for everybody. It widens differences more than just by scaling existing ones by a constant factor.
A lot of the points in the article are of course right in line with many of the arguments that RMS et al have more over the years.
The assertion that 'technologists' (as opposed to concert pianists etc) feel entitled to enact social change is simplistic and misleading. Those who feel entitled in this way are in general just wealthy ego-maniacal control freaks... and in the current age technology is one place where the money is, so that's where they are. That said, there seems to be a bizarre tendency to give 'technologists' a free pass on ideas and actions that are quite obviously negative for free society and human rights.
Of course, powerful monied interests trying to reshape societal for the perpetuation of their own power and ideology is nothing new... meet the new boss, same as the old boss. At least the article does a good job of attacking the false notion the power of technology to transform is unequivocally positive.
I think tech billionaires occupy the position of the "new, cool rich". I don't know if it's our (Western? US?) culture or humanity in general that likes seeing underdogs (or, more often, people who can paint themselves as underdogs successfully) win, but there seems to be a long history of the powerful becoming out of touch and against the interests of the many (Either by ignorance, indifference, or very occasionally deliberate malice), new powerful people emerging (Sometimes but not always replacing the old powerful people), and people thinking of them as heroes who "made it" for a while before they've been around long enough that it's clear they've become out of touch and against the interests of the many, if they weren't in the first place.
The free pass is the sheen of new power, rather than entrenched power, and it wears off quickly.
As an unqualified statement this is too absolute. Some technology decidedly levels the playing field. As always the key is to be mindful of the consequences of your actions.
A quarter century ago there were very popular pop psychology books by a guy named john gray whom I believe is still alive on the difference between men talking about problems and women talking about problems with the claim of an unusually accurate stereotype is men, especially tech men, mostly talk about problems to fix them as best they can (however poorly that may be) and women mostly talk about problems to air their grievances and de-stress and if they wanted a best effort repair, being strong women they'd have already done it themselves so men should F off, shut up, listen, and not tell them what to do. The above is a gross and inaccurate summary based on failing memories of an entire series of pop psych books from a long time ago, but I don't think I totally messed up my summary. At least not on purpose.
Anyway looking at the article thru 25 year old pop psych glasses in a crazy extended mash up, the author is bent out of shape because worldwide whenever problems are discussed the only response is the "manly response" of trying their best to fix the problem, however incompetently. So far the author and quarter century old pop psych are in sync. They diverge at my suggestion that perhaps attempting the "womanly response" of actually listening would be worth a try when confronted with a problem. Or maybe 25 year old pop psych is best left in the dustbin of history. But it is interesting to think about a bit.
I've made a lot of money for longer than many HN readers/posters have been alive by fixing stuff. When I've gotten really stuck, sometimes its helped to actually listen rather than wielding keyboards and screwdrivers and soldering irons. Just saying anecdotally the obsolete pop psych stuff is occasionally not totally useless.
Note I'm not trying to ignite a flamewar about women in tech. Especially since "shut up and listen" isn't necessarily only useful when talking to women, and I'm not even claiming that a quarter century old pop psych worldview is true or universal or even generally useful, although I am claiming its super creepy deja vu to hear a modern retelling of part of the story, admittedly with different conclusions. Its just that the author describing (male) techies trying to solve the worlds problems totally sounds like something John Grey would have written. I wonder if the author read the same books and quite possibly unconsciously is channeling John Grey or something.
Edit: I've taken another crack at it. (Previous title was "Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces".) Part of the problem here is that the columnist seems to want to turn this into a dramatic, even violent confrontation (spike-studded tire iron? how silly). It's not clear at all that Toyama holds such views. Indeed his actual quoted words are more moderate than the frame the columnist is putting on it.
Then as now: the article and topic are actually quite good. The contemptuous headlines do them a disservice.
I think that's just a coincidence and not really the cause. You can find luddites nowadays on hn who understand technology.
> if you’re a concert pianist, it doesn’t mean that you have any special knowledge about how to cause social change.
Haha such as Victor Borge, Tom Lehrer, and more.
What about actors like Schwarzenegger and Regan?
Recovering Alcoholics try to change the people around them too. Sometimes even if the people around them don't have the same problems.
The humans are the problem and not the subset of human techies.
I admire the Toyama for blowing the whistle, but I think he's nearly as blind as he was before realizing all this.
No one's listening to recovering alcoholics outside of AA and maybe their families. Schwarzenegger, Reagan, Borge, Lehrer—these are all individuals, influential in their own way, but not commanding entire social movements with uncritical followings. (Well, maybe Reagan did/does.)