Arms of the State: A History of the Industrial Robot in Postwar America

Abstract

“Arms of the State: A History of the Industrial Robot in Postwar America” shows how the pursuit of ‘security’ via the socialization of technoscientific development produced highly advanced and expensive forms of capital as well as new market-state modalities of capital accumulation, both of which fueled a political economy that exacerbated economic insecurity and social inequality. The industrial robot, designed and developed by defense contractors as a direct replacement for humans in industrial settings, did much more than manufacture material goods and disrupt labor markets. It functioned simultaneously as a technology of worker discipline and as a totem of worker emancipation. It helped produce and reproduce racial difference inside and outside the factory. It played a crucial yet overlooked role in the development of artificial intelligence (AI). And it served as a double-edged sword in the arsenals of the American security and welfare states both at home and abroad. In the workshops of the ‘military-industrial complex,’ the labs of MIT and Stanford, and the factories of Ford and General Motors (GM), the robots of science fiction were forged into the industrial robots of science fact, and the history of this transformation demonstrates the deep imbrications and powerful oscillations of automation, labor, race, and security in Cold War America. A variety of historical actors engaging with, and historical processes mutually constitutive of, the industrial robot have been overlooked or under-analyzed in the broader literature of postwar US history. These include the Catch-22 of labor’s relationship to automation whereby corporations and major industrial unions like the UAW linked standard of living increases to automation-induced productivity growth, the very technologies of which threatened to displace workers. Second, automation was a distinct force within the evolution of the welfare state, and business, government, and labor leaders shaped public policy to not infringe on private actors’ ‘right’ to automate-at-will. Third, the role of robotics and the manipulation of the concrete and physical world in the early development of artificial intelligence (AI) beginning in the 1960s has been underestimated. And lastly, the history of the industrial robot provides a potent example of the politics of technology transfer from publicly subsidized R&D labs to industry, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. While at its core “Arms of the State” is an artifact-centered history, the industrial robot serves as a vehicle for socially, spatially, and temporally navigating the terrain of automation. The dissertation integrates histories of economics, labor, politics, race, and security with political economy and Science, Technology, and Society (STS) to provide the first archivally based scholarly history of the industrial robot. This interdisciplinary approach allows the industrial robot as a socially constructed technological artifact to be pulled apart and reassembled into the cultural, economic, political, and social domains it emerged from and impinged upon while also embedding these processes in the politics of the American state and the geopolitics of the Cold War.