4/8/2020
CSUF Professor’s New Book on the History of Robots in America Resonates in Coronavirus Era
Historians in the Newstags: robots, COVID-19, Automation
The stay-at-home order over the coronavirus pandemic threw a kink into plans for a launch party to celebrate Dustin Abnet’s new book, “The American Robot: A Cultural History.”
....
Still, 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.
“I saw articles in Wired and the Washington Post about how this is going to lead to more robots in American society,” said Abnet, who worked on the book, published by University of Chicago Press, for more than 11 years.
“Amazon has been trying for the last several years to develop more automated means of distributing goods. But it’s really a whole wide range of things. Anything you can automate to get rid of any human contact, the safer it will be,” he said. “And I think that’s a longstanding discussion in American cultural life and one we need to think carefully about. Once those kinds of jobs are gone then what’s going to replace them? Are we going to build for ourselves later problems?”
“The American Robot” explores how robots and their like — automatons, androids, artificial intelligence and cyborgs — are tied to questions about modern culture.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel