The argument I make in Smart Machines and Service Work takes a different tack altogether. I make the case that there are three primary reasons for the relatively insignificant impact new forms of automation are having on labor productivity growth rates in the world’s advanced economies. First, the types of labor processes many automation theorists suggest are vulnerable to replacement by smart machines in fact require an intuitive, embodied, and socially mediated form of knowledge or skill that even the most advanced machine-learning programs cannot master. This is especially the case with so-called “personal services,” the fastest-growing segment of today’s job market. These activities require in-person interactions between providers and consumers that pose technological, moral, and even legal limits to their replacement by machines. These limits are, I contend, reinforced by an even more powerful disincentive to automate certain lines of production: the prevalence of cheap labor in the advanced economies. When workers will take jobs that are poorly paid because nothing else is available, there is little reason for business owners to invest in expensive and soon obsolete machinery to do their work. In the pages that follow, I show that this prevalence of cheap labor, indexed by decades of stagnant wages for workers, is itself an effect of technological stagnation. Wage gains for workers depend primarily on prior gains in labor productivity, which in turn require elevated rates of business investment to develop and implement ever-newer technologies that will continually reshape labor processes. As I demonstrate in detail in Chapter Five, however, the u.s. economy since 1980 has demonstrated a steady decline in private-sector investment; since 2000, the downward trend has accelerated dramatically. This collapse in investment, occurring against the background of the rise of the tech giants, points to a still more profound disorder at the core of the advanced capitalist economies of North America, Europe, and Japan: a crisis of profitability whose roots lie in a decades-long expansion of what I call, following the classical political economists, “unproductive” labor.