, a

researcher in Microsoft, reached India in 2004 to start

, excited at the prospect of transforming a developing country through technological solutions for social problems such as poor

,

and

. Instead, the five-year India stint convinced him of the importance of investing in people and institutions rather than sinking billions in tech fixes. In 2010, he quit Microsoft and became a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, to work on a thesis that became the book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. Now a professor at the University Of Michigan, Toyama spoke to

Rema Nagarajan

about how a technology fixation distracts from addressing real problems.

What did you see in India that made you disillusioned with tech fixes for social problems?

Why is ‘pilotitis’ — social programmes doing well in pilots but failing when scaled up — so common?

Are tech solutions failing to achieve social change in other developing and

?

Despite several failures of tech fixes, why do governments, international agencies and philanthropies have such implicit faith in technology?

The title of your book implies social change is in danger from the technology cult. What is the danger?

You criticise the effort to fix problems with computers and distance education in schools that lack teachers, principals or IT staff. But aren’t those the ones that need such tech fixes?

Mass sms-ing of health messages, tablets for community health workers, telemedicine and electronic medical records — what was your experience in India with such tech solutions to problems in healthcare delivery and access?

You are sceptical of bottom-of-the-pyramid marketing and social entrepreneurs. Why?

You wrote: “It is as if there is no point to saving lives or teaching children if you have to keep paying to do so.” What do you mean by this?

I was in India for over five years. During that time, I conducted or supervised over 50 research projects whose goals were to design electronic technologies that improved education, healthcare, governance, microfinance, agriculture, and so on. Most succeeded as research pilots, but more often than not, they failed when we tried to implement them on a larger scale. What distinguished success from failure was never the technology itself, but our own commitment, as well as the capacities of the organizations we partnered with. If the right human forces were in place, technology made things better; if not, technology didn’t have positive impact no matter how well it was designed.Running many pilots isn’t itself a problem, since we need to try lots of things to find the best solutions – and not everything we try will result in success. The problem is when we make a fetish of a certain class of programs – those that provide people with pills, gadgets, and other magic panaceas. When we do that, we fail to attend to the real causes of social progress -- individual and collective maturation.Consider the United States: Over the last four decades, the country has witnessed a golden age of technological innovation, yet during the same period the poverty rate rose, social mobility stagnated, and inequality skyrocketed. That tells you that even in the world’s richest country, machines in and of themselves don’t improve social conditions. If anything, technology amplifies underlying human forces, so a country that sees growing inequality will have inequities amplified by technology. This is even more true in the developing world, where socio-economic inequalities are often greater. Many more people in the developing world don’t receive the basic education that could help them take advantage of technology.Technology is seductive. For one thing it’s highly visible, and it makes for great photo ops. It’s easy to show off a smartphone-based microscope that helps identify malaria, but it’s harder to visually illustrate what good management of a healthcare facility looks like.Also, technology lures people who want to have large-scale impact at low cost. It’s far cheaper to send SMS text message reminders to pregnant mothers than it is to send a healthcare worker to check in on them. But, the text message will have little impact unless it’s associated with a trusted healthcare worker who makes occasional visits.I also think that we are hard-wired as human beings to be fascinated by technology.I once taught computer programming to primary school children, and I found that the greatest obstacle to teaching them how to program computers was the computer itself – the students were easily distracted by games and videos.Distraction is the primary danger of the cult of technology – that we become so focused on inventing and disseminating new technologies that we fail to address the more critical, human causes of social change. Technology is like the engine in a car that human beings drive. You can have the fastest engine in the world, but it doesn’t help unless the human driver knows where to go or how to drive.In education, machines amplify pedagogical capacity. In other words, any positive impact of that technology requires good teaching first. The ironic consequence is that it’s exactly the schools that most need help – the ones with undertrained teachers or indifferent administrators – that technology has nothing to amplify.These kinds of technology projects work to the extent that they are run in collaboration with an effective healthcare institution. A good hospital will use technology to further their life-saving mission; but a bad hospital doesn’t become better with technology. Technology amplifies the institutional capacity that is already there; it doesn’t substitute for it. Think of it like this – if you had a terrible doctor, is there any technology in the world that will make you trust the person enough to have them perform a life-threatening procedure on you?I don’t condemn all social enterprises – in fact, there are some which create earning opportunities for poorer people which are very good. But, so-called “bottom of the pyramid” enterprises are flawed. There’s something deeply wrong with the idea that poor people can consume their way out of poverty. And, it’s even worse to imagine others – usually people who are already well-off – profiting from their poor customers.There is a common belief in philanthropy today that solutions must be “sustainable,” by which people usually mean they are self-financing. People who believe this think that projects should eventually pay for themselves, and that nothing else is worth doing because it requires an ongoing influx of cash.But, every country in the world with universal healthcare or universal education has the government subsidize these services. They are sustainable, but only on a very long-term cycle that the private sector is generally not willing to invest in.