Within the glass pyramids and shiny domes of Bangalore’s tech acropolises, recruiters struggle to find qualified engineers in a country with four times the population of the United States. The rest – as many as 800 million people who live on less than two dollars a day – are lucky if they can work as servants to the rising middle class. India has pole-vaulted onto the global stage as an IT superpower, but only a thin stratum of the country’s educated elite is a part of that phenomenon. Read ExcerptĬonflicting Results in Educational Technology Contrasting the outlandish claims of tech zealots with stories of people like Patrick Awuah, a Microsoft millionaire who left his engineering job to open Ghana’s first liberal arts university, and Tara Sreenivasa, a graduate of a remarkable South Indian school that takes impoverished children into the high-tech offices of Goldman Sachs and Mercedes-Benz, Geek Heresy is a heartwarming reminder that it’s human wisdom, not machines, that move our world forward. In this incisive book, Toyama cures us of the manic rhetoric of digital utopians and reinvigorates us with a deeply people-centric view of social change. Why then do we keep hoping that technology will solve our greatest social ills?

And four decades of incredible innovation in America have done nothing to turn the tide of rising poverty and inequality. Executives in Silicon Valley evangelize novel technologies at work even as they send their children to Waldorf schools that ban electronics.

Mobile phone apps meant to spread hygiene practices in Africa fail to improve health. After a decade designing technologies meant to address education, health, and global poverty, award-winning computer scientist Kentaro Toyama came to a difficult conclusion: Even in an age of amazing technology, social progress depends on human changes that gadgets can’t deliver.Ĭomputers in Bangalore are locked away in dusty cabinets because teachers don’t know what to do with them.

Geek heresy by kentaro toyama