“Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher. “The machines are to practically everbody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano is a dystopian novel that is rarely mentioned and somewhat ignored among the likes of 1984 or Brave New World or The Handmaid’s Tale . After reading a handful of Vonnegut’s book , even if it’s not the best, I really admire it.
The center theme of Player Piano is dehumanization through mass mechanization in almost every field of production. Although this has been a concern for some decades now, with the rise of AI(or a big step towards the ultimate rise) in this decade, this became alarmingly close to home. Engineers, the very creator of this technology,will also not be exempt from its consequences – and will be replaced by few humans who will supervise AI managers,who in turn will supervise AI programmers ,which subsequently will create programs to generate movies/art/books/songs and to review them also.Human will be left out of this mechanism altogether and some who will remain , have to follow strict conventions defined by machines whose ultimate goal is profit, not critical thinking.
One of the harrowing parallels in our world is that,it has also started to affect some of the white collar jobs especially that can be done at a much faster pace by machines like content creation,translation,video tutorials,voice acting among some and will be used to a much bigger extent to produce things without soul. The thing that Vonnegut got wrong in my opinion is his optimism and rationality in society, and that of universal basic income would be achieved and everyone will have access to basic needs and healthcare and insurance,etc and they will be more happy and healthy than in past(although with less pride and more bored-this seems to be coming true though). This seems more and more impossible with the concentration of power in the hand of few big tech and can also be seen in constant lobbying against open source side of software or open and alternate AI/LLMS.
“Do?” said Harrison. “Do? That’s just it, my boy. All of the doors have been closed. There’s nothing to do but to find a womb suitable for an adult, and crawl into it. One without machines would suit me particularly.”
Our hero is a discontented middle manager who have grown to despise the dehumanization slowly. The social hierarchy described in the novel almost directly parallel the structure we go through student and then work/corporate phase,allover the world and here in India too. Everyone is either a top dog or else a faceless mob hired by top dogs and to remain grateful to them because they hired him to make money for him.
To conclude, this is one of the Kurt’s most straightforward novels to get started, which in these times is truer in most aspects.Being his first novel it still lacks his voice, of dark humor and satire,but still rings ideas which are more realistic today than it was in 1952, when the book was published. Although technology is a novel thing, but the greed driving it and the vision of few controlling entities doesn’t always lead to the best humanizing outcome.
“If it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people’ said Finnerty, ‘always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s paradise.”
Black as My Coffee 