The New Technology State: How Our Digital Dreams Became Societal Nightmares-and What We Can Do about It

by Bill Raduchel

Overview

"Bill Raduchel started at Harvard as my father's student, assistant, and friend. He went on to a career in technology as the digital revolution unfolded before his eyes. In The New Technology State, he suffuses the insights of The New Industrial State with the changes, challenges, and dangers of our information age." —James K. Galbraith, professor, University of Texas at Austin, and author of The End of Normal

This book is about society—how it has changed and what technology is enabling us to do to ourselves.

Sixty years ago, legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith issued a grim prophecy that the global elite would harness the potential of the burgeoning computing revolution to accumulate even more wealth and power.

His masterwork The New Industrial State redefined our perception of ourselves and our society. The computing revolution has turned his predictions into a reality that triggered conversations between technology pioneer Bill Raduchel (a former colleague of Galbraith's at Harvard) and British Army officer turned MP Tom Tugendhat.

The New Technology State recounts their discussions and reveals how the wealthy and powerful have used the incredible technological advances of the past half-century to gain unprecedented advantages and what we can do to reclaim control of our future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781637557464
Publisher:	Amplify Publishing
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bill Raduchel has served as a high-level executive and strategic adviser for organizations such as Sun Microsystems, AOL Time Warner, Xerox, McGraw-Hill, and the Salvation Army. Over nearly fifty years working with systems, software, and networks, he has remained at the forefront of the technology revolution in media, education, and corporate governance—including recognition at Sun as CIO of the Year and the top CFO in the computer industry. He holds more than twenty patents, as well as a PhD in econometrics from Harvard, where he was a teaching assistant for five years for John Kenneth Galbraith. He has been writing code in some form since he turned fifteen years old in 1961.

Editorial Reviews

2023-06-29
Raduchel, an American tech company executive, presents a book that had its origin in conversations he had with British Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat about the societal impact of technology.

More than a decade ago, the author, who’s worked as an adviser and executive for companies such as Sun Microsystems and AOL Time Warner, met Tugendhat at a conference that gathered leaders from various industries. It was an encounter that sparked the author’s reflections on the nature of society in this book, which is specifically “about what technology is enabling us to do to ourselves.” The author readily acknowledges technology’s extraordinary benefits, but he also concisely raises provocative questions about its negative aspects: “What is seen generally as ‘progress’—and which of course, economically speaking, was exactly that—was far from positive for many individuals. For them, the changes constituted a profound and altogether lamentable disruption of traditional patterns of life and behavior.” Every blessing that technology promises comes with an attendant curse, he notes; for example, tech advances have dramatically improved efficiency, but this “necessarily reduces the robustness and resilience of markets” by making them “too efficient” and less able to handle the unexpected, such as the recent pandemic; advances are also “devoid of compassion,” he asserts, as gains in efficiency surely result in massive job loss. Moreover, the tech industry tends toward monopolistic hegemony; the “history of the computing industry,” he notes, “is a succession of antitrust cases.” Raduchel’s impressive analysis goes even deeper than this, exploring the ways in which social interaction, the consumption of media, and even the nature of problem-solving have been deeply transformed by the proliferation of technology. This book is not merely a lament, however—the author also ably navigates a “path to sanity,” showing ways in which the growing excesses of technology can be chastened by targeted taxation, although these recommendations seem unequal to the radical emergence of a “New Technology State.” Still, Raduchel furnishes a critique of the latter that’s as thoughtful as it is rigorous.

A valuable contribution to an important debate about the consequences of technological progress.

Kirkus Reviews