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US technological leadership and domination of the world economy were further enhanced by the extraordinarily rapid rate of technical change and output growth in the semiconductor, computer, and telecommunications industries in which American firms played a leading role and to which American universities made a vital contribution.

Whereas some historians have cast doubts on the pervasiveness and the magnitude of the effects of earlier technological revolutions, such as the railways, few doubt the significance of the Information Technology Revolution and some, such as Castells, see it as ushering in a new type of economy and even a new civilization.

Just as in the 1920s the Hoover Report had stressed that changes in mass production technology and other business developments had given rise to a new style of management, so many economists and management consultants today stress the ways in which the new ICT infrastructure and especially the Internet are bringing in a new type of firm—the ‘network firm’ organizing both production and distribution in entirely new ways.

Great uncertainty still attends more profound social and political changes associated with ICT including the diminished capabilities of national governments to tax and regulate powerful multinational firms and the rise of a new culture of ‘virtual reality’.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the three elements that give the book its title: the sense of a ‘ technological revolution’; the idea of regulation (which will take us again to the contrast between technology as a regulatory target and as a regulatory tool); and the notion of rights (and, by implication, the threat to rights presented by the development of new technologies). An overview of the subsequent chapters is then presented.

This chapter reviews the relationship between human rights and new technologies. Three different frames — repetition, revolution, and resonance — are used to carry out the review. The overall conclusion is that human rights advocates should be paying close attention to the development and use of new technologies, especially the role accorded to rights in regulating such technologies.

The key inventions that led to the internal combustion engine, to the automobile, the truck, the tractor, and the tank, were made in Europe, but the innovations that led to the assembly line, to mass production and consumption, were made at the Ford plant in Detroit in the early years of the twentieth century.

These technical and organizational innovations gave such an impetus to productivity, profitability, output, and exports of the US automobile industry that the plant became a Mecca for visitors from all over the world and ‘Fordism’ became a dominant management philosophy as well as an economic and cultural ideology, believed to herald the dawn of a ‘new economy’.

The chapter devotes considerable attention to possible explanations for the collapse of this boom and the advent of the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s, concluding that, as with previous clusters of innovations, the assimilation of a major new technology into the social system gave rise to enormous political and social tensions and to structural crises of adjustment, both at national and international levels.

These tensions and conflicts led ultimately to a Second World War, a motorized war in which tanks and aircraft proved decisive weapons and oil was the essential fuel for the motorized armed forces.

The world economy after the war was no less dependent on abundant cheap oil, and became a system dominated by the mass production of cars and consumer durables, as well as motor highways, the mass media, mass tourism, mass education, mass culture, and the political and military supremacy of the US.

‘Big Science’ as a notion was coined in 1960 by physicist Alvin Weinberg and physicist-turned-historian Derek de Solla Price, and immediately became the center of heated discussions in the U.S. Simultaneously, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, a counterpart of the American discussion of Big Science was epitomized in the concept of Scientific-Technological Revolution, which became the center of a theoretically significant discussions focused on the conditions and consequences of scientific-technical, social and economic change in different political systems. Throughout the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union advocated their ability to offer and display different visions of a modern industrial society, and Big Science played major role in these powerful Cold War imageries. This chapter examines different ways in which Big Science was deployed as a resource to debate, negotiate, and rationalize the concerns and anxieties of the Cold War, on the opposite sides of the political divide. In both political settings, scientists, as well as social theorists, promoted the view that Big Science needs what might be called “Big Science Studies” – an independent expertise, which would provide a systematic assessment and characterization of Big Science, and advise governments accordingly.

Two changes currently seem to be contributing to the dislocation of cities in Europe: a technological revolution — that is, new information and communication technologies — and the globalization of the economy. Market logics seem to be openly pushing societies towards what Marxists interpret as a new and deeper form of capitalism. This chapter examines the dynamics of economic globalization and their impact on European cities from two, inevitably partial, angles: first, in order to identify the dynamics and the forces of change and second, to demonstrate the paradoxes and contradictions, or least the uncertainties, of their impact. This chapter concentrates first on the uneven dynamism of urban and regional economies, in order to identify restructuring on the United States pattern. It then explores the process of globalization and ‘marketization’ of urban services, firms, and networks, which is leading to pressures on cities.

This chapter concludes that unbridled technology is catastrophic to man's future. But it is equally obvious that what man has learned about the uses of technology should not, cannot ever be lost. Yet acknowledging the need to be wary is not the same as using caution to found a politics of dismantling in the present. In the twenty-first century, a time and place far from the Maine conversations of the Boggses and Paines, there must be a willingness to lose the machines. To decide in advance not to lose them is only the least objectionable version of the ambivalent formula that technology should not be unbridled, and that people want something other than a technological revolution, but the value of certain machines cannot ever be lost. It was a powerful ambivalence in its moment, because it called out unbridled exploitation but held firm to technological possibility. But at this late date, when tech firms and state agents hold all the codes, something still more urgent is required: to sweep past noncommittal logics, to risk relinquishing any use of any machine, and to move in groups toward more concrete practices of technological responsibility through dismantling.

Almost daily we are told how some new technology will revolutionize in our lives. The truth of the matter is most technologies do not. However, occasionally a new technology does appear which provides the grounding for gradual changes that eventually transform our systems of production and the way we live our lives. Historically, we speak of these developments as technological revolutions. By focusing on how such technologies change the nature of work, occupational structures, and systems of production, this chapter attempts to answer two questions: “What is a technological revolution?” and, more importantly, “How do current technologies associated with artificial intelligence fit into the history of technological change?”

We argue that innovation-led growth requires bringing innovation to the heart of economic policy, and bridging macro and micro policies to assure that growth is smart, sustainable, and inclusive. Our analysis puts finance at the centre, holding that the challenge today is not to only ‘fix’ finance, but rather to change the way that the real economy and the financial sector interact, including definancializing the real economy. The historical record shows that this shift from finance to production has repeatedly been the key to moving from recession to golden age, and challenges the common assumption that the state only needs to ‘create the conditions’ for innovation. We argue instead for mission-oriented investments and policies, which create a specific direction of change. In particular we call for the ‘green’ direction, understood broadly as a tilting of the playing field towards wide-ranging sustainability, redirecting the entire economy.

Difference between cognitive capacities and abilities; neurons as prime material for cognition; evolution of materials; technology, learning and cultural transmission; the downfall of Neanderthals; technological revolutions; the need for cultivating, documenting, and passing on science and engineering to the next generations

This chapter argues that the Western dream of upward mobility has been destroyed because the scientific-technological revolution has fundamentally altered the forms of work, skill, and occupation. Today, knowledge rather than traditional skill is the main productive force. Knowledge becomes interconnected with and dependent on technology, and even so-called labor-intensive work becomes increasingly mechanized and begins to be replaced by capital- and technology-intensive work—capitech-intensive work. The tendency of science to dominate the labor process signals an entirely new regime of work in which almost no production skills are required, thus eliminating the worker.

This chapter discusses changes in American law in the twentieth century. Change in the twentieth century was, in some ways less dramatic than those in the previous century; in other ways, more so. The United States now dominated large portions of the world, even when it did not actually own these far-off places. At home, the population grew enormously; according to the 2000 census, the population was just over 280 million, and by 2016, grew to something over 325 million. The main engines of revolution were social and technological. The technological revolution was, perhaps, a chief cause of the social revolution. This was the century of the automobile and the airplane, radio, the movies, and television, the computer and the internet, antibiotics and the birth control pill. Each of these great advances in science and technology eventually had a deep impact on society and on law.