Hype on Steroids: Self-Driving Cars and School Technologies by larrycuban

20/7/2016 A full week of mainstream and social media swept across the nation about the death of a Tesla car owner killed in Florida using the self-driving option. With the auto-pilot function turned on, the Tesla driver collided with a tractor-trailer and became the first known fatality in the industry's surge to produce self-driving cars. Google and Tesla and 30 other companies (e.g., Honda, Ford, GM,Toyota) compete for what is hyped as the "next big thing"; such cars, they claim, will "disrupt" the century-old personal transportation market. A Morgan Stanley Blue Paper announced in 2013: Autonomous cars are no longer just the realm of science fiction.They are real and will be on roads sooner than you think. Cars with basic autonomous capability are in showrooms today, semi-autonomous cars are coming in 12-18 months, and completely autonomous cars are set to be available before the end of the decade Tesla's founder, Elon Musk said the self-driving function on the Tesla meant that "[t]he probability of having an accident is 50 per cent lower if you have Autopilot on" .... "Even with our first version, it's almost twice as good as a person." Skeptics have tossed in their two cents (see here and here; for rebutting skeptics, seehere) but when it comes to questioning new technologies in U.S. culture, skeptics are alien creatures. While the hype pumping up self-driving cars can lead to accidents and deaths, no such serious consequences accompany promoters of technological innovations who have promised increased teacher efficiency, improved student achievement, and the end of low-performing schools for the  past half-century.  Need I mention that Google has a "Chief Evangelist for Global Education?" Nothing surprising about hype (even when  injected with steroids)  in a consumer-driven, highly commercial society committed to practicing democracy. Hype is hype either for self-driving cars or for school technologies. Parsing the hyped language and images becomes important because real-life consequences flow from these words and pictures. Consider these advertisements championing new technologies since the 1950s. Over-stated claims are  commonplace when it comes to pumping up the benefits of the "next big thing." Early adopters of new technologies discover the bugs in new hardware and software soon enough.  Glitches, however, seldom dissuade this crowd from peering around the corner for its replacement. Does hype serve any social and political purpose other than to stimulate consumers to buy the product? I believe it does. 1. Over-the-top statements strengthen the popular belief that change is "good" for individuals and society overall. Not only is change "good" for Americans but in the technology industry and culture of school reform, change morphs into improvement. In Silicon Valley argot, "making the world a better place," means a new product, a new service, a new app will improve life (a parody of this oft-repeated phrase can be seenhere) Equating change with improvement is a cognitive error. Surely, an improvement implies a change has occurred but because the change has happened, improvement does not necessarily follow. A moment's thought would quickly squelch equating change with improvement. Stepping on a scale and seeing that you have gained five pounds while on a low-carb diet is clearly a change but not, in your view, an improvement. Think of a divorce in a family. The spouse initiating the divorce sees the split as a change for the better but for the others involved including children, few would see it as an improvement with two homes, living with different parents or weekend visits. Change occurs constantly but improvement is in the mind of the beholder. Consider whether a new app that has a "smart" button and zipper that alerts you if your fly is down or another app that locates rentable yachts are improvements to one's life (see here). To those individuals who buy and download these apps they appear as improvements promising a better life but to others, they appear as trivial indulgences that hardly make the "world a better place." School reformers who believe that changes lead to improvements in teaching and learning, for example, often refer to gains in student test scores, increases in teacher productivity (i.e., less time to do routine tasks), and other measurable outcomes as evidence of  better schooling. Reformers holding divergent values (e.g., higher civic engagement, student well-being), however, would differ over whether test scores, et. al. are improvements. Quite often, then, the definition of improvement depends upon who does the defining and the values they prize. 2. Hype over new technologies raises questions about the existing institution's quality.  Consider current health care where millions still lack health insurance, emergency rooms are over-crowded, wait time to see specialists physicians increases, and patients get less and less time when they do see their doctors. Hyping the "next big thing" in medical technology becomes a direct criticism of existing health care. Think of "hospital in a box," or patient kiosks placed in pharmacies, where ill people go to the kiosk for video conferencing with one or more doctors about what ails them. Such new technologies raises implicit questions about access to adequate health care and to what degree the relationship between doctor and patient is important in improving health. Or consider the thousands of lives lost on the nation's roads to accidents and human error in driving. Self-driving cars, once prevalent on the nation's highways will, promoters claim, dramatically reduce the 32,000 deaths in car accidents while increasing worker productivity since with self-driving cars owners can complete other tasks that heretofore would have not been done. Self-driving cars raises anew questions about the lack of adequate public transportation and a society committed to one-person-per car. And hype for technological innovations in schools for "personalized" or "adaptive" learning pictures the existing system as factory-like  whole-class, age graded, teacher-dominated instruction that ignores, even neglects individualized lessons, student-centered learning, and reconfigured classrooms. These two outcomes of hype are not justifications for its ubiquity. They  help me understand the role that it (and its cousin, "magical thinking") perform in U.S. society.