The American Robot: A Cultural History

Although they entered the world as pure science fiction, robots are now very much a fact of everyday life. Whether a space-age cyborg, a chess-playing automaton, or simply the smartphone in our pocket, robots have long been a symbol of the fraught and fearful relationship between ourselves and our creations. Though we tend to think of them as products of twentieth-century technology--the word "robot" itself dates to only 1921--as a concept, they have colored US society and culture for far longer, as Dustin Abnet shows to dazzling effect in The American Robot. In tracing the history of the idea of robots in US culture, Abnet draws on intellectual history, religion, literature, film, and television. He explores how robots and their many kin have not only conceptually connected but literally embodied some of the most critical questions in modern culture. He also investigates how the discourse around robots has reinforced social and economic inequalities, as well as fantasies of mass domination--chilling thoughts that the recent increase in job automation has done little to quell. The American Robot argues that the deep history of robots has abetted both the literal replacement of humans by machines and the figurative transformation of humans into machines, connecting advances in technology and capitalism to individual and societal change. Look beneath the fears that fracture our society, Abnet tells us, and you're likely to find a robot lurking there.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: An Intimate and Distant Machine Part 1: God and Demon, 1790–1910 Chapter 1: The Republican Automaton Chapter 2: Humanizing the Industrial Machine Chapter 3: Mechanizing Men Part 2: Masters and Slaves? 1910–1945 Chapter 4: Symbolizing the Machine Age Chapter 5: Building the Slaves of Tomorrow Chapter 6: Conditioning the Robot’s Brain Chapter 7: A War against the Machine Age Part 3: Playfellow and Protector, 1945–2019 Chapter 8: Preserving American Innocence Chapter 9: The Postindustrial Gift Chapter 10: Cheerful Robots Epilogue: The American Robot   Acknowledgments Notes Index

About the Author :
Dustin A. Abnet is assistant professor of American studies at California State University, Fullerton.

Review :
“Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, The American Robot contextualizes centuries of discussions of artificial intelligence and cyborgs. With a dual focus on who was imagined to be machine-like and what machines were depicted as being almost human, Abnet demonstrates that robot identities have always been unstable and multifaceted.” “As The American Robot convincingly demonstrates, we are not the first generation to worry about the power, role, and meaning of robots. Abnet’s fascinating and engaging book traces American discussions of mechanized men, automata, and robots from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. His book makes a compelling case that debates about robots are really ways of thinking about freedom, power, and what it means to be human.” “Gracefully written and creatively researched, The American Robot not only tracks representations of robots from Frankenstein to Westworld, it also helps us to understand the manifold ways that ideas about difference, slavery, republicanism, mechanization, post-industrialism (and more) have regularly been inflected through these not quite human approximations of ourselves. An important and timely book.” “An intriguing examination of the American robot, the subject of millennial and apocalyptic sentiments.” “Purposefully interdisciplinary, written in extremely accessible, lively prose, and fundamentally interesting. . . [Abnet is] particularly good at capturing how robots consolidated capitalism as a politico-economic order, in practice and ideologically, particularly capitalist production and consumption." "Abnet brings a fresh understanding of the complex interactions between economics, politics, and culture." "[The] topic of his book—robots in the American culture—is increasingly becoming part of the national discussion in this pandemic era, especially as it relates to the safety of health care and other workers." "Abnet has written a very readable book, and one of great historical relevance." "In Dustin Abnet’s The American Robot: A Cultural History, the argument is made extensively, and convincingly, that America’s relationship with the robot is fundamentally about race and about the value of labour both in the market place and as identity. Beginning in 1790, Abnet provides a fascinating exploration of how a segment of the American population – white upper middle class men – first found the automaton amusing, a way of defining the citizen in contrast to the automaton, and then to define it in terms of servile, servant, and slave."