Sci-fi Capital and Humanoid Robotics: Conjuring the Speculative Value of Not-Yet-Existing Technologies

As economic value becomes ever more decoupled from material production and labour in financialized capitalism, simulation and reality become increasingly indistinguishable. I explore the largely overlooked role of science fiction in this speculative turn, developing the concept of ‘sci-fi capital’ to capture how entrepreneurs in the emerging field of humanoid robotics deploy this genre’s eutopian and dystopian narratives, imagery and modes of world-building to sustain and amplify the speculative value of not-yet-existent technologies. I illustrate how this form of genre-specific cultural capital is convertible into speculative capital, including projections of future economic potential that eclipse considerations of (non-)profitability and (non-)functionality of present-day technologies. It is through entrepreneurs’ adeptness at symbolically deploying sci-fi capital to create hyperreal simulations of future technologies, I argue, that humanoid robotics ventures garner speculative value from the articulation and enactment of sci-fi’s utopian imaginations of ‘better worlds’.