Player Piano
* Book: Player Piano. Kurt Vonnegut. Dell Press, 1952.
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Discussion
John Bellamy Foster:
"It was only with the rise of monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that large-scale industry and the application of science to industry were able to introduce the “real” as opposed to “formal” subsumption of labor within production.2 Here knowledge of the labor process was removed systematically from the workers and concentrated within management in such a way that the labor process could be progressively broken down and subsumed within a logic dominated by machine technology. With the consolidation of monopoly capitalism after the Second World War and the development of cybernetics, the transistor, and digital technology, automation of production—and particularly what we now call artificial intelligence (AI)—constituted a growing threat to labor.
This shift was dramatically portrayed in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel, Player Piano, which drew on his experience working for General Electric. Set in the near future in the fictional town of Ilium in upstate New York, Player Piano depicts a society that had been entirely automated, displacing nearly all production workers. On one side of the river dividing the town, in an area known as Homestead, live the mass of the population, including all those who failed to score high enough on a set of national tests, and who are largely idle or employed in reconstruction and reclamation projects, the few remaining commercial jobs, and the military. The population overall mostly subsists on universal basic income, set at levels far below the wage income that unskilled workers had formerly obtained, though they are able to enjoy twenty-eight-inch TVs. On the other side of the river live the engineers, managers, and civil servants who service the machinery of production, also located on that side of the river, or who conduct public affairs. The novel centers on how the main protagonist, Paul Proteus, a highly esteemed engineer, drives over the bridge to the Homestead side of the river, meeting ordinary people and getting entangled in a mass revolt. Early on in the novel, Proteus explains that “the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work,” while a projected Third Industrial Revolution would be based on computerized “machines that devalue human thinking,” decentering “the real brain work.” Human intelligence would be replaced by machines, or with what a few years after the publication of Vonnegut’s novel would be dubbed “artificial intelligence.”
Vonnegut’s Player Piano was a product of the widespread concern regarding automation in the 1950s."