Kentaro Toyoma

Technology Doesn't Fix Broken Systems. It Makes Them Worse. A Warning From Inside Microsoft. Paths of Curiosity in an AI World What if the most honest thing anyone in tech has ever said is that technology almost never does what we think it will? Dr. Kentaro Toyama spent a decade at Microsoft building technology for some of the world's most underserved communities. What he found changed everything he thought he knew — and led him to write a book called Geek Heresy. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Toyama, W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan and author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. He co-founded Microsoft Research India, ran over fifty humanitarian technology projects, and came to a conclusion that Silicon Valley still doesn't want to hear. Together, we explore: The law of amplification: why technology makes already positive situations better and broken systems even worse What happened when Microsoft built a brilliant solution for rural schools in India — and why it failed anyway Why the people who build educational technology often send their own children to schools with almost no electronics What it means that AI is the first technology that can actually change your mind — and why that breaks the rules Who really has power over AI right now, and what their actual behavior tells us about what gets amplified Why if the AI guidance is free, your brain might be the product Dr. Toyama also reflects on a career that took him from physics at Harvard to computer science at Yale to Microsoft to a research lab in Ghana to one of the most cited critics of technology utopianism in the world — and why none of it was planned. This conversation will change how you think about every promise you have ever heard about what AI will do for education, healthcare, and hiring. Because in a world where technology amplifies everything underneath it, the most important question was never what the tool can do. It's who controls it — and what they actually want.