[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 amplifying human forces in other way that points to what we should really be doing . I think there are five Different Things we should be thinking about. The first one is that in some cases we have to be willing to say no to technology. There are many instances in which the dominant use of technology is either counterproductive or negative. So, for example, i teach in a University Context some as of several years ago i basically started banning the use of screens in my class except when a particular class activity requires their use, and find that dramatically theres a change in the degree to which theres actual discussion in the class. I no longer see the situation where students are doing this and occasionally smiling because theyre seeing something funny on facebook. And overall the students are paying much more attention, actually absorbing the material as opposed to being distracted, and this is true for me. If im in a meeting with my laptop open i am hardly paying attention what is going known room. My attention is emails and facebook and so on. So technology has an immense capacity to distract us because we have inherent to seek distraction and i with dont say no in the right context that can spell bad news. Its true particularly for children, young children, at this point ive given this talk in multiple contexts and almost every time there is a teacher or former teacher who comes up and says, i have faced this issue with the students in my which is where theyre increasingly distract bid the technology and its not a problem that you can fission with additional technology. Its something you have to do either through eliminating the technology in the classroom or making sure that the class is sufficiently structured in such way the technology is used for learning purposes. So, that the point number one. Just say no. Point number two is that in some context you will have a technology and be looking for something positive to do with it. Any guess in m. I. T. Youre in that situation, in those cases what i recommend its a recommendation that have not yet seen fail is that you should look for an existing social trend or organization that is already achieving your end goal. So let suppose youre interested in helping to address you want to tee crease incidence of malaria in the developing world and use technology to solve that. I say find an organization that is already doing well against malaria and then see how you can use the technology to amplify their affect in my own work im the chair of a nonprofit called digital green in which we use digital video in a way to help farmers gain better knowledge about agricultural practices, and even though this particular technique uses a lot of digital toolswhat we dials we look for organizations that are already working well with farmers and they have some established rapport with farmers and we basically help them amplify the impact of their works by using this particular way of using technology. So, the message again here is that if you have a technology, a technological hammer and looking for ways to use it, find good carpenters and help them do their tasks. The third point is that there are many contexts in which increasingly those of us who are involved in a Technology Industry have immense amounts of power at our under our control. One of the interesting things about our move towards digital in the last decade is that increasingly more and more of our time is being spent on platformed owned private companies. And those companies see as their moral mission the increasing of shareholder value as a prime mary goal i was at microsoft and i know how this works. Employees feel its their ethical obligation to find ways to make more profit. So my guess is, some of you may have heard about this idea calls singularity, the moment when computer intelligence outstrips human intelligence, and my guess is however you construe that idea. That singularity is likely to happen somewhere wind 100mile radius of san francisco. And if that does happen its likely to happen within some privately Held Corporation which is not directly accountable to the public, not governed by democratic means, but which sees the increase of shareholder value as its primary goal, and if we dont provide some larger policy framework by which we address those kind issues, then that technology, which were not sure what shape, form its going to take, how powerful, is going to be focused on increasing profits for small group of people rather than contributing to society generally. Those who might work at these powerful corporations, like you do consider, is there some way of insuring the technologies unleashed are fulfilling goals other than increasing profits for companies and contributing more to the general society. Let me those are points one, two, and three. Number four is that for many of us we often see the fruits of our ingenuity as being the thing we contribute to the world. If you really think about it, the robe why people become wealthier or better off we respect to technology is not because so much nastiers of technology but because theres producers of technology. Think about the situation where you buy on iphone. Your life might become a little more convenient but you dont become dramatically wealthy or better off or better czeched to powerful people. Connected to powerful people. On the other hand in the process of purchasing an iphone youre happening to make apple shareholders and employees more wealthy. And that transfer of income can work in our favor as long as everybody has the kind of job that allows them to earn significant income. So, in 2002 before i moved to india, for a short while i taught mathematics at new university there in ghana called this university was set up by former microsoft employee who was himself ghanaian, and he felled the thing that changed his life was his educate a swathmoore university. He quit is job at microsoft, doing very well, went to uc berkeley to taped business school, and his focus was on how to set up a similar university in ghana. In 2002 that university was begun and i was there in the first year to teach the new incoming students about 25 students, calculus, and i remember one student in particular, my top student, when i met her, her primary goal was to basically secure a wellpaying job for herself, and soon are she grad ited she end up being a soft air engineer for a local bank. Ten years after she started, she started sensing Something Else she wanted. I know how to get a good job and work a good job but at least in the come environment i was in, i was constantly told i should work towards being an ethical leader. So she quit her bank job and establish two organizations, one called a Consulting Firm that provides Software Services for small and medium businesses in ghana, and the other is a foundation, and what she does is she pours 80 of the revenue from 0 Consulting Firm into the foundation which teaches underprivileged girls in ghana how to code so they can have the opportunities she has. So, this is a situation where you see somebody patrick, the founder of the university, who was himself got an engineering education, and he didnt decide im going now go out and build new technologieses that help people in began New Hampshire rather he said how can i help people that i left behind get the kind of education got so they can have the same kind of lifestyle i have. He managed to multiple students, in the 11th or 12th year, every year they take 400 students from ghana and you end up with students like and patrick, the founder 0 of the school, says five of the population will graduate with a college degree. I if you can edcat that five percent well and instilling in them a sense of responsibility for their own communities in a generation they will be the leaders of their country and that would change the country a much more impactful way rather than spedding more laptops to people in ghana. Finally, i want to talk about point number five. In the same bay you can nurture individual, you can nurture society. Im going to tell a story that has nothing do with technology, story about venezuela, and in the 1970s, because of it oil wealth, managed to have several Different National orchestras and these National Orchestras were peopled by musicians who were hired from europe and north america because venezuela itself did not have a deep well of Classical Musicians there was an economist and man trained in Classical Music who sigh why we cannot have a venezuelan orchestra that has venezuelan musicians in it . And so he started a small orchestra, youth orchestra, which true from 1 people on the first day to within a month having 77 people. Many of these people could not play an instrument on their own but the asked the people who are musicians to mentor the younger ones and win a couple years they were performing for people like the president of mexico and then on International Circuits where they performed in all kinds of Classical Music outlets. That orchestra walled culled the Simone Bolivar orchestra and its the flagship orchestra of a movement which today involves Something Like 400,000 students across venezuela, many of them in the very poor parts of both the city and the rural areas. Apparently if you go to the rural areas there are people who have cows named beethoven and most moat saturday, and in los angeles man was tapped who was a product of the system to be its musical director. So in the says of 40 years this country went from having mo serious Classical Musicians to having a a country that appreciates Classical Music much more probably than the United States and which can produce some of the greatest conductors in the world. To me that is social change then kind of thing that is behind, for example, gender equality in the United States, or equality with respect to Sexual Orientation or changes in our views with respect to whether poverty is something we should aloe lou in this society or not, and requires the same kind of effort that learning a Musical Instrument requires. So the something thing is we all know intuitively it doesnt make a difference how Much Technology you have. You have to mutt in hours and hours of practice to be a musician. And we under that intattootively. Somehow when it comes to things like Economic Growth or plate al change we assume the changing can more rapidly and go viralment i want to suggest the just like music musical changes, that require changes a individual level and societal level and if we focus more on causing those kind of social movements well be in a situation the which all of our technologies will magically realign and work for us rather than doing things that emphasize whatever social situation were already in. So, just to summarize, what i wanted to suggest is the law of am mixification of technology, Technology Amplifies underlying human forces and technology doesnt fix broken human institutions itself, not some rink inequality, doesnt bring democracy by itself, but it does mean especially in a world which we already have so many different technologiesings the more we address the human forces and make sure theyre going in a positive way, the more the technology will work for us. Thank you. [applause] i guess we can take some questions. We have time for questions but wait for the microphone. Make sure theyre a question. Kentaro, would you Say Something more about how mentees need to be take the lead and mentors need to let their aspirations step aside a bit. Thank you for that question. You have obviously read my book. So in the last chapter i talk about how people who have advantages can support those with fewer advantages, and in International Development, which is the area i do most of the work in, theres always these debates about whether we should be quoteunquote paternallallistic or treat everybody as a equal. I feel wherever there is a status difference its impossible to be totally equalify but you can be on a journey together where youre both trying to grow, and i think that if you think of the relationship as being one of mentorship, enlightened mentorship, that allows you to simultaneously grow your own aspiration to be member who is providing something for the world, while helping other people gain their own capacity to achieve their own aspirations. Mentorship is very difficult to get right but i think its the most useful kind of framework to think about bilateral engagement. You mentioned that mark sucker boring pointed out there are 500 people that control 500 million. Actually, also something about the top 500 to be said. Sure, thats true, which he is probably one. Yeah. Also, of the 500, very few are using facebook, and if you want to address these inequalities in the system to suggest that the use interfaces implemented and provided by those that have installed the system and profit most from it seems to be not very convincing as an avenue. If you dont want to break the system and change the system, a okay might be made for or against, that shouldnt we focus on producing the increase the baseline of the absolute baseline of those at the bottom rather than reducing inequality if we cannot address inequality without breaking the system and breaking too many things in the process. Your question is whether or not to address inequality directly or simply try to cause growth overall. I think thats a very interesting question. I dont get into it too much in my book but i do think that increasingly were in a world in which we cannot ignore inequality if youre really concerned about people who are extremely poor, and the reasons are the following. One is, we as a population are increasingly hitting the upper limit of various resources on the planet, and so what that means is it is not an infinite world in which everybody can all boatings can rise on the same tide. Were competing, and one clear way to say that theres a land grab in africa where people who live outside of the continent are buying farming Agricultural Land in africa. The last time i saw this, something lick a country the size of france is owned by entities outside of africa. And basically they are planning for a future in which farmland is scarce and food is scarce and you can imagine sitter its certainly not poor people who are purchasing the land. Its very wealthy entities. So, given that theres a finite planet, i think that we have to address inequality. Theres no way around that. The other thing is that there are some things for which inequality is the issue. For example, power is limited. If you think of power as able of one person to cause change in another person without their direct interest, then that degree to which i have power over myself is less power for you cho age me and vice versa sacker which means there some things for which inequality itself is a problem. I do think its worthwhile to help people wherever they are grow in terms of their social economic aspirations, but if you only look at a narrow scope, i think it ignores the systemic inequality that are very hard to address. Wonder if you see a distinction within the broad category of technology, from like Power Infrastructure or human computer interfaces or machine learning. Theres a lot of variation within that, and whether you see differences there in terms of their ability to be amplifiers or Something Like actually could be agents of social change. Thats a great question. I think technologies vary what and how much they amplify Different Things and arguably if your mathematically inclined human beings of a vector of capabilities and that different technologies amplify them differently. Conceive my you can cause some rotation, but i think that one thing that i have never Seen Technology do is turn things 180 degrees around. Where people really dont want to do something, it is nearly impossible to design a technology that causes them to do that thing, or vice versa, where people really want to too something there are very few technologies that truly prevent them from doing it outside of other human beings who are imposing technologies on those people. So, i do think technologies are different. In the talk i certainly talked about them in with one broad stroke, but with re speak to the ultimate goal is have, i dont think it makes too much difference that its not the design of the technology that mattered at the first step. Its first of all are people willing to do the right thing with the technology. And then you talk about design and helping people through do want to help make better use of the technology. Hello. I was wondering if you could expand more on the idea of a policy framework and a policy framework set forth to amplify the beneficial affects possibly of technology and help reduce inequality. A great question. I think the policy frameworks are the same ones we would implement with or without technology. So just to give you an example. Lets say youre concerned about the inequality of education in the United States. The United States has a very unfortunate system of Public Education in which Public Schools are basically funded by local property taxes, which means that if you come from a poor neighborhood, youre going to end up with kids who have less money spend on them for education. There irvase you debates money is not the cause of better education but i think those are to some very thin level of analysis but not too overall. Rich parents know that if the spend more money on their kids education and send them to the right schoolsbetter things happen for their children. So, in that context, the right policy solution is we should be collecting property taxes at the state level, and then redistributing them for individual students or at the federal level. If youve do that, then even if youre not thinking about the technology, then the technology will naturally follow where the money goes. So, i think in most cases, the policy issues, similar to the last question, are of course important and as you get more and more fran already at levels of analysis, some have to incorporate discussions of technology but at a high level we can do more obvious yous, simpler things to address social challenges and technology to be better used as well. Thank you for being here and having this discussion because i think its very important. I come from a background of humanities and social sciences, and i was im old. Ive been in technology forever, and way back when the people kind of started the internet stuff, no one had tech degrees because there werent degrees in these things. So at this point is there a door that still exists for those people to help . Meaning which group is those for people like myself and friends i know, who created handouts and started some classes in web page startups, we used to be able to just do what we could, and now if i go on to an angel startup they want they have the person, the owner who has the idea, and they just hire programmers. Students from the Dalai Lama Center for ethics, do they hire those people in value . Is there a door for them . I have to say i dont know if i have a great answer for that question. Youre dressing a much larger question of how do we eval assess peoples skills such that they can be hired into the jobs theyre actual live qualified for, regardless of their paper credentials. I do think that will probably change over time and interestingly enough possibly technology will be one way in which that happens as we become better as assessments delivered through technology. Hi. So, kind of related to that perhaps is you mentioned how in some corporations it is ethical to support the companys financial goals. Here i feel like theres a lot of focus on entrepreneurship to create positive impact but could go maybe not the right direction. Do you have thoughts on how as a student or person who is just beginning to want to Share Technology to other to do it in a way that it impacts and doesnt go sideways. If you are really interested in social impact, it is better to have no constraints on how youll solve the problem at the beginning. Whether its through a business or the use of a particular technology or some other constraint. The space of solutions for any given hard problem is vast and you want to find the optimal one you can find without saying im going to irknow half of the solutions because they dont meet constraints. So if youre interested in addressing the problem, stay open as much as possible to what the solutions might be, what kind of business models, what kind after organizational models youll using, until youre shire theyre the ones that are going to work. With respect to second question, if you believe that technology amly flies underlying human forces, in any organization its the leadership and some conversation with their stakeholders and employees and customers and so on, that is really deciding the direction that the company is going to go. I do think its possible to have social enterprises that are really focused on impact but it takes an immense amount of discipline on the part of the leader to insist on that impact. You will be bombarded with impact investors who want to regular corps without impact goals and a constant desire to make sure youre making enough revenue just to keep the organization go, and inevident by ballot happens its easier to sacrifice impact goals, as opposed to revenue goals which might be the end of your company if you dont meet. So, i do think that there are social enterprises that can pull this off but its very difficult and very rare. You brought up this very interesting point between resources and inequality. Now, one aspect of resources has been addressed in in the past, the better boat, then because of productivity and we came out of it. Now when you inequality, it seems that someone who is really low at income level, has no choice but to resources will distribute themselves so everybody can afford them. So how does someone get out of inequality without adopting technology . Well, i think that efficiency and inequality or two different questions and we tend to theres an illusion along the lines youre sailing that some people have, this idea if you address the efficiency question enough, eventually well get to point where inequality disappears and that hat just not been the history of the world. Inequalities come and go based on many other social factors, and efficiency can contribute or not to lessening inequality. We live in a world that official said we have enough food to feed everybody in the world with a good amount of calories per day and good nutrition, but there are plenty of people in the world who are malnourished. I think its somewhere on the order of five hundred million and one billion people in the world that he will. No a technology or efficiency problem. It is a social, economic, political, cultural problem, as global civilization we have not solved. So, as much as die think its more efficiency is great and people who work on that should copy to work on that but its not in and of itself going to address inequality issues. So it was really nice to hear you complicate thats whole narrative around Technology Something id like to hear more about is also complicating or acknowledging the International Development narrative oversimply identified often, socially around Education Health been doing education initiatives since the 40s and 50s and havent seen significant improvement, especially as translating into opportunity in the labor market and things like that. So, somebody who came to m. I. T. Having come out of, like, an International Development background, one thing that appealed to me about technology was the idea it could actually potentially bypass the huge headaches you see. Bureaucrat seems like youre right on the nail in thinking there has to be more nuanced but im curious to now, instead of saying maybe technology is not the answer, to us think of a framing that is more about how can we thoughtfully implement technology in a way thats going serve the public good and promote these ins . Particularly i think it was interesting when youre talking around the idea of corporations really driving this inknow vacation and therefore the incentives behind the design and the types of problems theyre solving. There are ways to think. Fostering a pipeline of innovation that are designed to serve the public good and serve these things in a more thoughtful way . I think the short unfortunate answer to your question is notice. Dont think the technology in and of of it can be designed in such way it has a positive polarity, that wherever you take it will magically cause education to get better or health care to get better or any of these things were interested in, in International Development. In fact my book is in some sense an extended argument why we should stop trying to do that because basically what is happening is very talented people, including yourself, are distracted by these potential solutions when we actually know the solution to how to deliver good education. Many of you come from good backgrounds with reasonable amount of Financial Capacity and if you send your kids anywhere, its going to be to good schools. How do you know theyre good schools . Somehow you do. And somehow those schools know how to run themselves. That knowhow is not evenlily distribute net the world and not to me a technology problem. It is a problem of other kinds of a problem that has to do with, again, inequality and the way we distribute funds, problem of management, a problem of leadership, but in and of itself not easily solvable by technology. On the other hand i would say there are plenty of places in which you can use technology in a positive way. If youered . Using technology in education, i say find an organization, a school, that you can is already doing great job at owe educating kids, and inevitably you can find some way to use technology to help that school do it Mission Better or reach more students. Can tar row, can i ask you a personal question . Sure. When i hung out with you in 2005, we were mostly doing technology, and i dont remember having these conversations at that time. Thats right. And not every engineer goes through this journey, so my question is, what was your sort of internal journey in accepting these truths. That isauac a very good ques. So, yeah, as you mentioned, in 2004 when i first moved to india i was in the same class as Mark Zuckerberg and Hillary Clinton and arne duncan in believing i wasnt quite as optimistic that just spreading the internet would cack the face of inequality in the world but i did think that more Technology Overall was somehow better, and i went specifically with the intention of using my Computer Science skills to alleviate something of these problems. Accept that i rap into the reality on the ground, which is that project after project would do well in a Research Context and did well because we controlled all the human conditions. We picked partners that seemed to be good at what they did. We made sure we provided enough funding that any holes in the social system were fixed. If we need i. T. Support, we were there to provide. If we needed political support, we could find a way to get it. But exactly in those places where we most wanted to have impact, schools were dysfunctional, government was corrupt, Healthcare System didnt work, that other stuff we provided which is mostly human and institutional, didnt exist, and so when i kept seeing this over and over and over begin i come from a background in which im trained to look at human beings as part of the design of technology, and i kept seeing, itch you take if i take my training and apply to this problem, what im seeing is that technology is not the thing that causes positive or negative outcomes. Its then human beings that are involved. And where those human beings are trying to do the right thing and do it well they can make technology work. Where people are not like that, it doesnt matter how Much Technology you have. As you hinted this was a very difficult process for me. Took me probably 0 two or three years to really digest this issue and ultimately led to my leaving microsoft because now longer felt that working at a Technology Company was the most effective way to cause social change. Interesting any enough i find myself still having a difficult time transitioning to areas of research i think are more impactful because my own training is so much technical. Its nottesey for me to do work in economics or psychology or sociology, even though if think thats where the Real Solutions are, and another plane, its not even Academic Work that matters. Have all the knowledge we need to create we dont need new knowledge as much as much better implementation of what we already know. And that suggests somewhere somewhere in the back of hi head im very conscious that more research isnt what i should be doing but thats a very difficult personal transformation to make because i certainly identify as a researcher. The only thing i can say is that im trying to do as much as i can to nudge myself in directions i think are more beneficial. One of the more vexing and threatening areas in which Technology Amplifies is in the military affairs. Its very difficult to see how the technological juggernaut that produces military spending in applications is going to be turned around or is going to find a way to put the genie back in the bottle and may actually be one of the most cataclysmic forces. Do you suspect that technology can be expect that technology can be restrained or redirected away from that type of development . If think its up to us as individuals and as a society. I agree that men of thesing things seem to have a life of their own but in reality we can say no to certain kinded of technology. We said no to betamax. It can be done. And my guess is in the same way that as a generation we kind of look at television and say, why did we ever think that television at one point was going to solve our educational problems . My guess is in another 20 years well look back and think why did we think the internet would solve our educational problems. Hopefully were learning and if that it learn cycle speeds up well get to the point where we stop thinking of technology as the way to address these bigger issues. Thank you so much for your comments this afternoon. I wondered if you could comment on theres a longstanding conversation at m. I. T. Dating back at least to 2007 about what kind of ethics and values should we have not just for ourselves as individual alumni, students or faculty or administrators, but the way we Work Together with the world, as we go out with our as weigert the solves where we are telling other people what to do while not doing it ourselveses. You know, what how can we what would you advise us to look at you said before, look at yourself. What advice do you have for us. I think reflection is important. Im a fellow at the Dalai Lama Center here, and one thing the center is trying do is cause more reflection, selfawareness, and its a slow process. Im aware of my own kind of personal demons and ive been aware of them since i was 15 years old and im now 45. For 30 years i have been battling and not much seems to change but the effort is worth it. I think these things are fundmental to being a human being, and its because theyre hard problems that theyre meaningful to tackle. I find it a little bit strange in our society we think of chases after lowhanging fruit as a virtue, but we should be chasing after the hardest problems in our society, changing the hardest problems in our own souls, and its by doing that that i think we transform ourselves as human beings and as a society. Well, thank you so much for coming. And [applause] the book is geek heresy. Kentaro will be signing the books right outside, and thanks to the patient and gracious crew from cspan recording this shownfully be available at some point in some format so you can recommend others to watch it and ethics initiative, part of the series is one of those places where we can have candid conversations around relevant issues, like this one. Thank you again for coming. Thank you. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] heres a look at authors featuredded 0 booktvs offered words. Princeton university prefer argued that america continues to suffer from racial inequalities. Former senators tom daschle and trent lott offered their solutions to resolve the current state of bipartisanship in washington, and bull litter operates winning journalist may fong talks be the effects of chinas discontinued one child policy. We have this scenario where, you know, basically you have to pretend to be something youre not, and the unfortunate part is that in order to panderer to, say like, republican primary voters in iowa, you have to adopt a persona and a style that would actually hurt you when it comes to winning over millennials finish. Right. Or cos cosmopolitan americano i believe are turned off by the cultural baggage and the stylistic stereotypes of what we think of when we think of conservative. After words airs on booktv every saturday at 10 p. M. And sunday at 9 p. M