

He was certain technology would save the world. Here’s what changed his mind - SimplyUseless
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/06/03/he-was-certain-technology-would-save-the-world-heres-what-changed-his-mind/

======
circlefavshape
"A gun is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a
shovel or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember
that."

------
Mithaldu
> Toyama believes it’s foolish to think education is about having content
> available to study. [...] "we have fed it to them online possibly through
> some fancy interactive graphic"

It's hard to tell whether the author is engaging heavily in quote-out-of-
context or whether Kentaro is truly just amazingly narrow-minded.

Of course having online-access is not a panacea. How useful it is to any given
person depends on what kind of person that person is in the first place.

However, to those people who _would_ go to a library and dig through books to
learn knowledge, who _would_ try and gain some knowledge before making a
decision, the internet works as a massive force multiplier just by providing
basic access to text. I can say this because i grew up in the depths of
eastern germany, in the poorest part of the country, and having only minimal
resources available to me for the first 15 years of my life, and then moving
over the course of a few short years when the wall fell to being able to rely
on the internet to provide reliable information on all manner of subjects
ranging from simple things like gardening to personal health.

Frankly, the way people who grew up in the lap of luxury try to disparage the
internet disgusts me.

------
keithpeter
_"...For example, what if a low-income person is given a lottery ticket every
time he or she deposits a certain amount of money in a savings account? That
might be an effective way to use the inclination to believe in luck to teach
the value of saving money."_

Or what if we just paid decent wages?

If the OA is a true reflection of the quality of thinking in the book then
I'll save my £18 I think. A poor school will be a poor school whatever
technology you install.

------
dredmorbius
He: Kentaro Toyama, Harvard physics PhD and Microsoft researcher.

What changed his mind: _“I saw this sort of thing happen over and over and
over where the technology worked as advertised, and we could even do research
on it that showed in certain conditions it outperformed not having the
technology,” Toyama said. “But those special conditions in which it worked,
turned out to be exactly what was missing in those places that we wanted to
roll it out in.”_

------
habitue
linkbait title. I suggest "Technology is an amplifier of human intentions, not
a cure-all for human problems.", which is a paraphrased quote from the text

