Amara's Law: false expectations about technological advances

When a new technology is presented, for 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 lowered, causing people to forget completely of 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, as well as the new uses that we can give it in the long term.

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Amara's Law

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 futurologist is known for having described the law that bears his last name, 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 effects of a new technology in the short term, while we underestimate its effect in the long term.

In other words, 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 them into their lives, and those who have invented them will believe that they are going to contribute significantly to humanity or they will report a wide margin of benefit. benefit.

The problem is that, in the same way that everything that goes up has to come down, after a while people seem to find fault with these novelties, in addition to the fact that those who they have invented them, they see the limitations of the product, or that it does not seem that they are satisfying what they originally wanted their new technology to help to sort out.

The relationship of the law with overexpectation

Generalizing, Amara's law can be extrapolated to how we perceive the appearance of new technologies on the market, as well as describing how we behave in relation to it in the past certain time.

In fact, Amara's law It has been useful to propose the stages of the so-called cycle of overexpectation, proposed by the technology consultancy Gartner Inc. This cycle is through which most technological innovations pass.

The usual pattern in people's interest when a new technology appears is that, at first, there are some very high expectations to then plummet and, over time, consolidate and even increase interest 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 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. Disappointment

Once the application has been marketed and people are familiar, to a greater or lesser extent, they they see the flaws of this new technology, the potential economic waste it entails, and its limitations.

expectations fall, since it is possible that many of the functions that the device or apparatus was trusted to be able to carry out correctly, it does not do 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 the production process.

4. lighting cost

Once everything from 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 been given in the development of new technologies is the case of GPS, the application that we all have on our mobiles, smart cars and computers.

The Global Positioning System is a project that dates back to 1978 and, as with many new technologies, its original purpose was military. The program began by putting 24 satellites that work together around the planet into orbit. The main objective of this was to be able to easily locate the United States troops in the abroad and be able to give them provisions, without running the risk of making a mistake in their location and being attacked by the enemy.

However, and despite the fact that today we know of its great utility, this program was canceled time and time again in the eighties. The first operational use of this technology came in 1991 during Operation Sandstorm in the Gulf War, although the Army American was still reluctant to use GPS devices and it took more successful demonstrations to finish adopting 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 convenient GPS application. But not only allows us to know where a place is and where we are, it also calculates how long it will take us to get there, as well as how the traffic is, public transport schedules and nearby interesting establishments.

In addition, large transport such as shipping 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 go stall. It would be unthinkable today that an international airport would decide to disconnect the GPS signal from the planes, since doing so would imply an air disaster.

All of these utilities were not even imaginable to those who developed this technology in the 1970s. Surely they could only think of its military utility, never that an individual would use it in their day-to-day life, or that it would serve to organize gatherings in big cities.

So, as we can see, Amara's law works very well: expectations were high for GPS for military use, the military was reluctant to use it, and expectations fell. Errors were corrected and all the endless utilities were discovered What does GPS have today?

But the GPS has not been a unique case. Other great technologies have also lived the same path since 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.

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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 background how the abuse of new technologies, because of how novel and striking they are to us, has been a problem in a fairly important area of ​​society: the education.

Between the years 2010 and 2020 there were few educational centers in Spain that did not choose to incorporate all kinds of new devices in their classrooms: projectors with electronic screens, tablets, laptops, mobile applications for the virtual campus and a long etc. There was a widespread philosophy that all new information and communication technology (ICT) was inherently good..

However, in the same way that expectations were high at the beginning, many teachers and students in innovative centers began to lose motivation because technology, no matter how good it was, as it was not known how to handle it and, in many cases, it was not known how to get the most out of it, did not give its fruits.

Relating it to Amara's law, it is clear that Spanish education (and that of many other European countries) was affected negatively due to the desire to innovate with anything in class, thinking that, magically, academic performance would be seen increased. However, at the moment when it was understood that this was not the case, discouragement arrived and it seemed that the centers had spent vast amounts of money on devices that, in practice, seemed like all they would do was accumulate dust.

But, as Amara's law rightly states, we tend to overestimate the effects of new technologies when beginning to, later, end up underestimating them, having a hard time understanding the real and beneficial uses of same.

It is because of that Once you have seen the errors when deciding which technologies to put in the classroom and understand how it works, you can get its full potential, in addition to promoting the familiarization of teachers and students in their management. In addition, in the event that it is decided to incorporate new applications and devices of the latest technological trend, it will be necessary to anticipate what its real usefulness will be in the classroom, in addition to wondering 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, being that of educational centers Spaniards a particular case, it is known that, in the not too distant future, in the next 5 and 10 years there will also be changes important. In order for the new ICTs to be useful in the centers, 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 repercussions. negatively in the school curriculum, since teachers either will not know how to handle them properly or will choose not to incorporate them into their classes.

Bibliographic references:

• Amara, R.; Boucher, W. YO. (1977). National Science Foundation, ed. The study of the future: an agenda for research. Washington, D.C.: General Post Office. OCLC 3200105
• Amara, R.; Institute for the future (1972). A framework for national science policy analysis. Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for the Future. OCLC 4484161. P-18. «Reprinted from IEEE transactions on systems, man, and cybernetics, v. SMC-2, no. 1 January 1972».
• Amara, R.; Institute for the future (1973). Draft summaries of four workshops on the social impact of the computer. Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for the Future. OCLC 709544477