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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the discourse around robots in 1950s Japan in order to place into context the hype around technological singularity and replacement theory today.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines depictions of machinic autopoiesis in 1950s Japan to shed new light on theories of technological singularity and racial replacement. Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s nine-part serialized novel The Last Republic (Saigo no kyōwakoku), first published in Chūō Kōron between April and December of 1952, featured a Malthusian world of gender equality, declining birth rate, population pinches, labour shortages, and a drug- and hormone-addled humanity dependent on robot agro-labour. Then in March 1953 as if in unspoken reaction to Ishikawa, Abe Kōbō published “The Invention of No. R62” (R62 gō no hatsumei) in Bungakkai, a concise short story that tells the simple tale of the creation of a new class of robot workers made from the bodies of human labourers, shedding allegorical light on the long history of global capitalization and corporatization. Published at the end of the Occupation era and the dawn of the Cold War, the fears, anxieties, and fantasies revealed in these fictional tales of economy and social change demonstrate just how much has changed and how much remains the same in some of the wildest prognostications about the social costs of technologization today. Their short novels destabilize the canonical vision of a robot dichotomy between robots that humans control remotely (Tetsujin 29) and autonomous humanoid robots (Tetsuwan Atomu) that is often read back onto the period in latter day accounts. Through the representations of robots making robots, we can see how singularity discourse today is related to the zero sum, white supremacist fear of replacement by uncanny others.