Abstract
From worries about machines’ impact on the moral and civic fibre of men and women in 18th-century USA to imaginations of the affordances of artificial intelligence in HBO’s Westworld, The American Robot finds that an irreducibly modern, dual tension, defines Americans’ relationship with robots. On the one hand, as increasingly humanized machines, robots constantly actualize the possibility of replacing humans with machines. On the other, the mechanization of humans through behavioural and biochemical calculations and electromechanical appendages actualizes the possibility of transforming humans into machines. Ultimately, Abnet argues, expectations and anxieties on both sides of this tension reproduce questions about what it is to be human, a canonical argument in the lineage of the equally canonical, timeless concern of robotics scholarship: why do robots matter culturally?
In a chronological arc, the book’s 10 chapters examine the development of this dual tension in cultural, social and political economy terms across high culture, dime novels, industrial legislation, Hollywood’s golden era cinema and senatorial debates. The effective ability of certain bodies to imagine and arrange their and other bodies, human and non-human, in a horizon of cultural production where the former transcend the economic, political and organic limitations of life holds this tension together: a utopia made of all the pleasure and none of the guilt (p. 236), or of power over others without moral obligation (p. 272). ‘Robot’ is a slippery noun; embracing literalist uses of the term, a variation from a Slavic root for ‘servant’ or enforced labourer to design irreflexive automatons, Abnet also expands ‘robot’ to capture all catalysers of questions about the human condition along the edge of technological innovation. Robot, here, includes vending machines (p. 144), war paraphernalia (p. 193), an orientalized, chess-playing humanoid (p. 45) and plain home appliances (p. 258). This polyvalence was a felicitous authorial choice, lending the argument cohesion and rhetorical flexibility and confirming the book’s concern with the nuances of this tension rather than with pedantic categorizations of what counts, or not, as a robot.
The book is contributing to a very crowded field; the careful historical, political and economic framing of its predominantly cultural concern sets it apart, giving the analysis a persuasive encyclopaedic gravitas. This framing excels, first, in showing how technological, medical, and scientific developments in completely unrelated fields put renewed pressure on the humanized-machines/mechanized-humans tension. Abnet shows convincingly how, for example, as thermodynamics formalized the relationship between heat, force and work (pp. 79–81), a new, materialist understanding of energy explaining human, non-human and even inorganic processes with the same grammar fuelled speculation around further potential equivalences, earthly and metaphysical, between engines and humans. Similarly, the developments of endocrinology (pp. 164–165) and of behavioural sciences (pp. 165–169) rendered dreams, personalities and potentially what was imagined as free will intelligible in terms of replicable biochemical fluids, electrical impulses, and programmable responses, authorizing the imagination of a standardized humanity and of emotional responsiveness from ‘actual’ machines.
Second, Abnet’s framing is also particularly good at capturing how robots consolidated capitalism as a politico-economic order, in practice and ideologically, particularly capitalist production and consumption (pp. 45–50, 136–137, 158–159). Always in the broadest sense of the term, robots morally legitimized the standardization of tasks and work days and helped recast anxieties about the future of labour (and ultimately, about the future and ethics of capitalism) into the mould of an enhanced leisure time to be celebrated. Films, washing machines and rollercoasters created and populated an expanding consumer frontier, a cultural democratization by robots that left the political economy of capitalism untouched, if not further entrenched it (p. 122).
Throughout the book it is older, wealthier, and educated white males who emerge as protagonists of this imagination that sorted everybody out. Abnet contributes most convincingly to the urgent debates in race and gender critical theory he invokes when working through the framings mentionedearlier, as in the case of an arrow-firing Indian automaton demonstrating an exotic stoicism that white settlers feared and mocked as they advanced into then-frontier land (pp. 19–21). When addressing culture most literally or through a mostly interpretivist take, like the claim that robots undermined Donald Duck’s ‘whiteness and masculinity’ (p. 156), or that a woman automaton’s pet parrot (also an automaton) symbolized her parroting of someone else’s words (p. 33), the argument keeps, of course, its moral authority, but loses perhaps some rhetorical potency beyond the analytical conventions of strict cultural studies. These moments are few, however, and accompany rather than interfere with the methods other social sciences might prefer.
Purposefully interdisciplinary, written in extremely accessible, lively prose, and fundamentally interesting, this book would make a good course reading for introductory STS, anthropology, sociology and general humanities courses as well as the public at large.