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A review by safekeeper
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
adventurous
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
5.0
A cautionary tale from the 50s that feels more relevant than ever, with ever more widespread automation and the advent of AI that is already making jobs obsolete. In Player Piano, machines have made humans largely obsolete for all but manual labour. Even bureaucratic tasks like police work are handled by what we today would call algorithms. This has lead to a widespread sense of hopelessness for the people who, even though they are well provided-for by the State thanks to the abundant wealth brought about by the machines, also struggle with how they don't feel valuable to society, or get to pursue careers in fields that actually interest them. A visiting shah, seeing the society where the citizens are increasingly lacking a purpose, even wants to ask EPICAC, the master computer running and micro-managing every aspect of society, what it thinks is the purpose of the (increasingly obsolete) humans living in America.
Player Piano is sobering in that it takes one of our contemporary visions of the future --a society where machines make the wheels of the economy turn for us and people are paid a universal basic income, and portrays it as a dystopia plagued by directionlessness. That being said, it's also a cautionary tale about how those who prefer the inciting revolutions and civil wars instead of steady, incremental progress tend to immediately lose control of them and see them become way more atrocious and bloody than they envisioned.
(And yes, it's from the 50s, so obviously comes with the baggage of that period's racism, gender roles, and American exceptionalism.)
Player Piano is sobering in that it takes one of our contemporary visions of the future --a society where machines make the wheels of the economy turn for us and people are paid a universal basic income, and portrays it as a dystopia plagued by directionlessness. That being said, it's also a cautionary tale about how those who prefer the inciting revolutions and civil wars instead of steady, incremental progress tend to immediately lose control of them and see them become way more atrocious and bloody than they envisioned.
(And yes, it's from the 50s, so obviously comes with the baggage of that period's racism, gender roles, and American exceptionalism.)