The book review below appeared in the November, 2012 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine. I was prompted to write it after viewing a TED talk that made clear the insight of Kurt Vonnegut.
Player Piano
By Kurt Vonnegut
Dial Press, 2006
Originally Published
1952
Paperback, 341 pages
ISBN 0-385-33378-1
List: $15.00 Amazon:
$10.20
There's a great big
beautiful tomorrow
Shining at the end
of ev'ryday
There's a great big
beautiful tomorrow
And tomorrow's just
a dream away
The quotation above is the first verse of the theme for Walt Disney’s attraction “Carousel of
Progress.” Carousel of Progress
premiered at the 1964 New York World’s Fair where I saw it. I next viewed it about 17 years ago at
Walt Disney World. It captivated
my then three-year-old daughter who demanded to see it many times.
Carousel
of Progress captures part of the American spirit first noticed by Alexis De
Tocqueville in the 19th Century. Progress was and would be a constant feature, if not
defining characteristic of our nation.
Certainly, my baby boomer generation thought that way, at least until the
Viet Nam War. It is also true that materially life has only gotten better. What could go wrong?
Everything. At least Kurt Vonnegut thought so. Kurt Vonnegut was an American novelist
of the last century who lingered on into this. Not the least of his formative experiences was being
captured at the Battle of the Bulge during World War II and living through the
firebombing of Dresden. Dresden
was arguably as horrible as Hiroshima.
There is lingering controversy as to whether or not the raid was at all
necessary. Vonnegut did not
believe it anything other than an atrocity. In what is his most famous book, Slaughterhouse Five, he
recounts his work recovering bodies.
The main character, Billy Pilgrim, becomes “unstuck in time” and is
taken to the planet Tralfamadore.
Time and space travel are among the reasons Vonnegut was considered a “Science
Fiction” writer.
Player
Piano, his first novel, can’t be thought of as science fiction. It is more the result of an acute sense
of observation. Vonnegut saw a
technological advance. He reasoned
that more improvements would occur and compound. The result would be a change in the status of man versus
machine not to the advantage of our species.
In 1949,
while working at General Electric, Vonnegut saw the future. Machinists were expensively doing the
milling of parts for jet engines.
A computer operated milling machine was built and took over from the
skilled workers. The men who
developed the new equipment exulted about all the machines that could be “run
by little boxes.” The author
agreed, but was not optimistic about what it meant for society.
Has
constant technological improvement been a benefit? Depends on whom you ask. Cheerleaders are happy to point out that even with
dislocation, there is a net increase in employment and standards of living
after every advance. Generally, an
artisan craft is eliminated and lower skilled work expands. Textile mills wiped out weavers, as a
class. Their higher paid
employment was taken over by machines with lower wage armies replacing them to
labor at work that took less if any skill. Consumers got more, if not better goods at cheaper
prices. To the weaver, this was no improvement. Protests and sabotage happened but as it was only a minority
harmed at any one time, they were not all that effective. It was such that the term “luddite” is
considered an insult by most.
This has
been seen in many industries as technology changes a society, from the
beginnings of agriculture to the computer. What Vonnegut saw was the end of productive employment for
most if not all of humanity.
If the
computer could do machining, what could it not do? In Player Piano, all factory work is gone and even
higher-level skills get eliminated as soon as machinery and programming is
perfected. A small elite controls
everything.
Needless
to say, class conflict is a problem.
What to do with all the superfluous workers? In the novel the government employs them in a grand
make-work scheme called the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps. It is known
by the slang name as the Reeks and Wrecks.
The army
also absorbs a significant portion of the idle manpower. Class conflicts are obvious as they are
not trusted with weapons until overseas.
Alas,
when people have no feeling of being needed, as in Player Piano, there can be
nothing but class resentments. A
revolution is attempted, but the masses do not really know what they want and
it collapses.
So how
does Player Piano hold up today?
Actually, the flavor is antiquated. It’s as if the culture of the 50s did not end even though
the society was turned on its head.
Dad goes out to work on Reeks and Wrecks and comes home to dinner with
mom and the kids and then the family watches TV. A woman’s place is in the home, other than maybe as a
secretary. The idealized
domesticity of mid-century never stopped.
Vonnegut
did not predict the digital revolution.
All the techno programming is done on magnetic tape. This is understandable in the early
50s. Had anyone predicted even the
8-Track revolution back then, he could be considered no less than a prophet.
So why
should Player Piano resonate today?
The author may have missed the science, but as to the progress of
technology, he was dead on.
Machines advance daily in areas previously the province of the
human.
Some
improvements are devoutly to be wished and bring benefits many of us have
experienced. Robotic surgery is
getting better all the time. It
will not be long before it is completely autonomous. I assure you, we all want more precise, ergo less painful
and invasive operations.
The bad
news is good-bye jobs. You may
have heard that that JC Penney will be eliminating checkout clerks in it
stores. This is driven by the
chain’s struggle to be profitable.
If the people versus machine question comes down to corporate viability,
we lose.
Automated
checkout is the visible aspect of job destruction. Trades we might think safe are on the chopping block.
There is,
on the web, a series of videos by speakers on their area of expertise called
TED Talks. TED stands for “bringing
together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.” Some of the orations are
brilliant and in others, at least all the words are pronounced correctly.
One all
too interesting talk, posted in September is by a Mr. Andrew McAfee. McAfee is principal research scientist at
the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management. His resume is hardly limited to that
job. He has been studying tech for
a long time.
In his talk, there are two
quotes that stand out. First,
“Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools display skills and
abilities that … eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living.” Second, “Within [our lifetimes], we're
going to transition into an economy that … doesn't need a lot of human workers.
Managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society
faces.” They should change his
title to the Kurt Vonnegut Professor of Human Redundancy.
If those quotes don’t scare you,
this one should. The first decade
of the 21st Century “is the only time we have on record where there
were fewer people working at the end of the decade then at the beginning.” Andy is telling us the great job
destruction has already started.
Next big quote, “We ain’t seen nothing yet.”
So okay, tech can’t do
everything. You might say over the
road truck drivers are safe.
McAfee got to ride in the Google autonomous Prius. The driverless car worked flawlessly on
the highway. Andy does not see it
a long time from the Prius to the Mack Truck. Maybe the young fellow thinking of driving the big rigs
should contemplate another trade, but what?
After his scary discussion how
jobs are toast, he ends with a mealy mouthed pronouncement how humans will be
freed up to use our creativity to solve our problems. Moi, I think trends that already exist will continue.
Like Vonnegut’s dystopia, we
will move towards more made work.
Some of it might be continuous fixing of bridges and roads as in Reeks and Wrecks. The bigger
model is the wars we are now pretending to fight. The War on Drugs will continue and expand. A nation that is half drug users and
half drug fighters sops up a large number of unemployed. The War on Terror can do the same,
fighting opponents real and imagined.
Does not the nation cry out for the TSA keeping kids safe as they get on
the school bus?
I have not yet mentioned the
most disturbing point made by Mr. McAfee.
Andrew noted an algorithmically generated piece published in the Wall Street
Journal that he called "perfect." Now, it was perfect in the sense that there were no
mistakes. It could not be called
stylistically excellent. H.L.
Mencken does not fear from the grave for his reputation. Still, where this is going is obvious. I am sure the editor of this
publication is thinking about the progress of that algorithm with every article
I file.
To view Mr. McAfee’s talk, go to
http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs.html
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