It was 1952, and the idea of the modern digital computer was only a few years old – and unknown to the general public. But a newly-minted science fiction writer managed to anticipate the day when machines would run everything, eliminating the need for human labor, and consequently enshrined his anticipation in his first novel – Player Piano.
Kurt Vonnegut’s first literary excursion imagines the world of Paul Proteus, a manager at Ilium Works, a company – like all companies, in the book’s near-future setting – run mostly by machines. There are far more displaced workers than employed ones, and Paul – one of the “lucky” ones – gets a glimpse of what life is like for those not blessed with jobs. Vonnegut presents their lot as miserable, their lives as “meaningless”.
Seeing the light, Proteus becomes a critic of the system, and winds up the unwitting leader of a rebellion in which mobs riot and destroy the automated factories.
Foreseeing the world we are entering now, 70 years later, Vonnegut’s is an introductory statement about the consequences of progress, showcasing automation as an icy cudgel, smashing away at human dignity. It is as much a statement about capitalism and the elite in governance, but Vonnegut’s stance goes beyond a writer’s insightful speculation into more slippery terrain.
“[It is] a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will,” he said in offhanded description of the book. But the theme is deeper, and he restates it in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater a dozen years later, as his fictional sci-fi author Kilgore Trout critiques the title character’s experimental socialism in his family’s home county:
“It was quite possibly the most important social experiment of our time,” Trout assures Eliot Rosewater, “for it dealt on a very small scale with a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use?”
Vonnegut is speaking in the mid-20th century, a time very different from the present, when social roles were more entrenched and communication between the strata was more constrained. In hindsight, he is assuming more “meaning” in human labor than actually exists, writing in a day when the job a person succumbed to at age 22 was the job they held until they died. And that’s assuming that the human occupation of what AI CEO Ben Goertzel describes above as “scrambling for resources” is even able to constitute “meaning”. What he's really talking about is "identity", and he's not the first to conflate the two.
Where Vonnegut gets it oh-so-right is his portrayal of the framing society in the novel as being one generated, not by nefarious authoritarians or scheming socially dominant elites, but through indifference – the disinterest that he sees as separating us all. The focus in a capitalist society, the novel implies, distracts us fiercely from the humanity that actually does surround us. The displaced have no purpose in a capitalist society, and have been hypnotized into insensitivity to the fact that they have as much purpose within humanity as they ever did.
The novel is well worth a reader’s time for this truth alone, to soak up the sense of displacement from humanity that even the most useful cog in the big machine unwittingly suffers for being part of it at all – that the big machine is what humankind has become, and that to give one’s existence meaning is to whirl around inside it. And the idea that this is what makes us worthy of love and heirs to dignity is, and should be, anathema.
Why is he telling you this?
I’m telling you this because Player Piano asked, seven decades ago, the very question we are now facing. As the next few years unfold, and as this generation fades into the next, more and more of us are going to be pushed aside by the machine. More and more of us are going to be “of no use.”
How, then, will we be loved?
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