Amara’s Law: False Expectations About Technological Advances
When a new technology is presented, with any purpose and use, it is normal that at first it is perceived as something very promising, generating high expectations in the short term.
However, after a while, these expectations are reduced, causing people to completely forget about what, until relatively recently, was seen as something that was not going to be missing in their lives.
This phenomenon is known as Amara’s law and it is of great importance when it comes to understanding how human beings relate to new technological discoveries, in addition to the new uses that we can give them in the long term.
Roy Amara was one of the co-founders of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, United States, in the intellectual heart of Silicon Valley. This futurist is known for having described the law that bears his surname, considered a good description of how new technologies develop and prosper.
Amara’s law holds that, in most cases, human beings We tend to overestimate the short-term effects of a new technology, while we underestimate its long-term effect
That is to say, when a new device, a new social network or technological application appears, at first people see it as something of great interest and that they will not be able to avoid incorporating into their lives, and those who have invented them will believe that they are going to contribute significantly to humanity or will bring them a large profit margin.
The problem is that, in the same way that everything that goes up must come down, after a while people seem to find fault with these novelties, in addition to the fact that those who have invented them see the limitations of the product, or that it does not seem to What they initially wanted their new technology to help solve is being satisfied.
The relationship of the law with overexpectation
Generally speaking, Amara’s law can be quite extrapolated to how we perceive the appearance of new technologies on the market, in addition to describing how we behave in relation to it after a certain time.
In fact, Amara’s law has been useful to propose the stages of the so-called cycle of overexpectation proposed by the technology consulting firm Gartner Inc. This cycle is what most technological innovations go through.
The usual pattern in people’s interest when a new technology appears is that, at first, there are very high expectations, then they plummet and, with the passage of time, interest is consolidated and even increases. original. The specific stages of the process are the following five.
1. Trigger
A technological innovation receives publicity, either by the company that produces it, the media that want to explain it as news In this phase, the usefulness of the product is demonstrated, without its commercial use being visible yet.
2. Peak of expectations
Advertising has already had its impact: there is a wave of enthusiasm and interest among the population Expectations are raised and people wonder how many applications this novelty could have.
3. Disillusionment
Once the application has been marketed and people are familiar, to a greater or lesser extent, they see the flaws of this new technology, the possible economic waste it entails and its limitations.
Expectations fall since it is possible that many of the functions that the device or appliance was expected to be able to perform correctly, it does not do them as it should.
However, it is in this phase that those who have manufactured the new technology learn from their mistakes, see new real applications of the product and economize on the production process.
4. Lighting costs
Once everything in the previous point has been seen, it is clear what technology is for, how it should be used to get the most out of it and when its use is most recommended
5. Productive plain
Technological adoption occurs. The product grows again, now improved, growth which increases or decreases depending on consumption.
A real case of Amara’s law: GPS
A great example of how Amara’s law has occurred in the development of new technologies is the case of GPS the application that we all have on our cell phones, smart cars and computers.
The Global Positioning System is a project whose beginnings date back to 1978 and, as with many new technologies, its original purpose was military. The program began by putting 24 satellites into orbit that work together around the planet. The main objective of this was to be able to easily locate US troops abroad and provide them with supplies, without running the risk of mistaken location and being attacked by the enemy.
However, and despite the fact that today we know of its great usefulness, this program was canceled again and again in the eighties. The first operational use of this technology came in 1991 during Operation Sandstorm in the Gulf War, although the North American military was still reluctant to use GPS devices and required more successful demonstrations to finally adopt it.
Today it is not only used by the United States military. Its usefulness is very evident when you can see that practically the majority of people who have a mobile phone have replaced the paper map with the comfortable GPS application. But It not only allows us to know where a place is and where we are also calculates how long it will take us to get there, in addition to what the traffic is like, public transportation schedules, and interesting establishments nearby.
In addition, large transport such as navigation and airplanes make use of this device, avoiding entering the same route as other large vehicles, in addition to avoiding deviating from where they have to stop. It would be unthinkable today for an international airport to decide to disconnect the GPS signal from airplanes, since doing so would lead to an air disaster.
All these utilities were not even imaginable for those who developed this technology in the seventies. Surely they could only think about its military utility, never that any individual would use it in their daily life, or that it would serve to organize gatherings in large cities.
So, as we can see, Amara’s law is fulfilled very well: there were high expectations of GPS for military use, the army was reluctant to use it and expectations fell. Bugs were fixed and all the endless benefits were discovered What GPS has today.
But GPS has not been a unique case. Other great technologies have also experienced the same path from when they were designed until they reached the general public. Computing, human genome sequencing, renewable energy, and even home automation all had their ups and downs in terms of how promising they turned out to be.
New technologies in the classroom: between hope and disappointment
Although Roy Amara did not intend to explain the sociological fascination that human beings have with technology, his approach makes it possible for us to understand more deeply how the abuse of new technologies, because of how novel and attractive they are to us, has posed a problem in a fairly important area of ​​society: education.
Between 2010 and 2020, there were few educational centers in Spain that did not choose to incorporate all types of new devices in their classrooms: projectors with electronic screens, tablets, laptops, virtual campus mobile applications and a long etcetera. The philosophy that any new information and communication technology (ICT) was inherently good was widespread
However, just as expectations were high at the beginning, many teachers and students at innovative centers began to become demotivated because the technology, no matter how good it was, did not know how to use it and, in many cases, , we didn’t know how to get the maximum potential out of it, it didn’t bear fruit.
Relating it to Amara’s law, it is clear that Spanish education (and that of many other European countries) was negatively affected by the desire to innovate with anything in class, thinking that, magically, academic performance would increase. However, the moment it was realized that this was not the case, discouragement set in and it seemed that the centers had spent large amounts of money on devices that, in practice, seemed like all they would do was gather dust.
But, as Amara’s law rightly maintains, we tend to overestimate the effects of new technologies at first and later end up underestimating them, making it difficult for us to understand their real and beneficial uses.
It is because of that Once you have seen the errors when deciding which technologies to put in the classroom and understand how they work, you can take advantage of their maximum potential, in addition to promoting the familiarization of teachers and students in their management. Furthermore, in the event that it is decided to incorporate new applications and devices with the latest technological trends, it will be necessary to foresee what their real use will be in the classroom, in addition to asking if it is really worth incorporating it into the institution.
In the same way that in the last 10 years technology has presented dramatic changes, with Spanish educational centers being a particular case, it is known that, in the not too distant future, changes will also occur in the next 5 and 10 years. equally important. For the new ICTs to be useful in schools, they must consider whether they are prepared or really need them to incorporate them.
If, as is already the case in Spanish education, they are incorporated in a very disruptive way, the degree of uncertainty will be very high, which could have a negative impact on the school curriculum, given that teachers will either not know how to handle them appropriately. or they will choose not to incorporate them into their classes.
