ABSTRACT

This chapter tells the history of Baxter and Sawyer, failed industrial robots that were supposed to revolutionize manufacturing and bring industrial jobs back to the United States. Rethink Robotics, the company that sold the robots from 2012 to 2018, went out of business not only because it misjudged the market for new industrial automation but also because late neoliberal capitalism is technologically stagnant. Faced with an anemically growing economy, contemporary capitalists prefer to invest in Wall Street, not robots—to make money with money, not with new productive technology. While business science fiction fantasizes about waves of robots rapidly infiltrating all areas of the US economy, their numbers are in fact growing at modest rates, and they remain clustered in the geographic regions and industrial sectors in which they have been established for roughly the last 50 years.