Reconstruction, Reclamation, Robots

I think Vonnegut was great at taking psychology & scenario and projecting a likely trajectory with a zany flight of fancy. Rod Serling did much the same, without the zane. Now I think of William Gibson, to round out one Trinity of latter-day Science Fiction greats…wait, in the beginning—of my literary life, age 9, c.1974)—I read Asimov, Bradbury & Clarke, then Heinlein, Herbert & Lem, then Orwell, Huxley & Dick…in the sense that I’ve watched Blade Runner, a lot, and the other movies based on his books; and read a graphic novel chapter of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? There are several others whose names won’t come to mind now… Mathematician/computer scienties Rudy Rucker’s short stories…speaking of ‘hard’ science fiction (plots that are feasible with what physics allows): Mission of Gravity and The Nitrogen Fix by Hal Clement, my chemistry and astronomy teacher in high school. I know, you don’t know him, but he was pals with Asimov, who gave a great talk one evening in the academy’s Straus Library. I’ve made it through some Buckminster Fuller books, which are full of words he invented. Fuller—an alumni—gave a lecture and presentation one time, and I met him. He also offered to pay for a new building on campus, but only if it was his, no-doubt, space-age design, and the high school—chartered in 1798, with its central lawn bordered by Georgian architecture like its chapel and Straus Library, turned him down. That’s what I heard, anyway, when I was there in the 1970s-80s.

Be that as it may, this started out about Vonnegut’s growing status as prescient, and so I present Jodie T. Allen (1982): “With the labor market already in so much trouble, it's hard to imagine things getting worse. But some experts are predicting that the tumult will continue--and perhaps worsen--in the decades ahead. My own favorite dire view of the economic future comes from Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. It's a world in which automation has advanced to the point where only a handful of managers and technicians are needed to keep consumer and defense goods streaming off the production lines in a cycleless pattern of economic growth. There's also a large and dispirited standing army and a small class of artisans and service workers--writers, painters, bartenders and the like--living on the fringes of society.”

Allen then writes of the novel’s Reconstruction & Reclamation Corps, nicknamed the Reeks & Wrecks, who do minor maintenance work all over the country.

With emphases mine, I now present Howard Husuck (2023): “[Vonnegut] was right about the coming of electric cars and large data farms…Even compared to Brave New World and 1984, Vonnegut chillingly foresaw trends involving social structure, social ills, and tech innovation—including drug use, income inequality and artificial intelligence—which were on no one’s screen when the book was published in 1952.

“But as the world of artificial intelligence unfolds, and with it the ever-increasing power of a technological elite, Player Piano merits revisiting—as both a guide and a warning. The title is a metaphor for a society in which virtually all manufacturing and household tasks are automated. Engineers are royalty who direct the economy; politicians are figureheads. The great majority…are consigned to the [Reeks & Wrecks]. Most do no useful work—or any work—at all but enjoy universal medical and dental services and are guaranteed ‘food, housing, clothes, and pocket money in their old age’.

“The decision as to who joins the fraternity of engineers is made strictly by a single ‘classification’ test administered in adolescence and judged by machine. Even engineers can find themselves demoted, as innovation continues and they become redundant.

“All is not well, however, in this version of a worker’s paradise…Proteus, a lead manager/engineer at the vast Ilium Works (modeled on General Electric, where Vonnegut once worked in PR) discovers when he wanders from his side of the river to Homestead, the neighborhood where non-elite live in Levittown-type homes. In a saloon there, he meets men whose sons have failed their tests and had only the Army or Reeks & Wrecks as life choices. Despite lifetime economic security they were prone, says one key skeptic who plots a futile rebellion, to ‘dope addiction, alcoholism and suicide. Organized vice and divorce and juvenile delinquency all parallel the growth of the use of vacuum tubes’. Or, as we have learned, lives without purpose lead to deaths of despair and anger. ‘It hurts a man a lot to be forgotten’, says one character.

“There is much more with which we have become sadly familiar, including a sort of debate/passion play performed annually at the engineers’ island retreat. In it, John Averageman is interrogated, first by the character identified only as Radical. The two establish the fact that, when John worked as a machinist, his weekly pay was $145; as a member of the Reeks & Wrecks, it is just $30. ‘I think it’s clear’, says Radical, ‘that the American standard of living has tumbled eighty percent’.

“The rebuttal, judged to carry the day, comes courtesy Young Engineeer. ‘When you had this large income’, he asks Averageman, ‘did you have a twenty-eight-inch television set? Or a laundry console or a radar stove or an electronic dust precipitator?’ The reply: ‘No sir, them things were for the rich folks’. It’s a debate, of course, we are still having, about how to calculate standard of living.

“As much as the engineers defend the world they’ve built, however, some see writing on their walls…Proteus reflects on an historical series of industrial revolutions—the first that ‘devalued muscle work, then the second one that devalued routine mental work’. Will there be third? ‘I guess the third would be machines that devaluate human thinking . . . the real brainwork’. Says our engineer hero: ‘I hope I’m not around to see that final step’. It is exactly that about which we worry and wonder as we lurch into the AI era.

“Like Orwell and Huxley, Vonnegut weaves a plot of [Spoilers Censored] but along the way manages to weave a subtle narrative about marriage, friendship and what constitutes professional integrity. Player Piano is, in other words, a good yarn as well as prescient commentary. Vonnegut’s hope, expressed in its forward, remains our charge and challenge: ‘to stay alive and free’.” https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/player-piano-revisited-in-the-age-of-ai/

Vonnegut’s hope was for us ‘to stay alive’ because, like many science-oriented people of his pre-/post-A-bomb generation (Richard Feynman, for example), he thought that the likelihood of nuclear annihilation in the near future was high. His hope that we’d also remain free refers to the AI-enhanced corporate totalitarianism Vonnegut foresaw, resulting in lives so without purpose that the 99% would be sedated and entertained into virtual zombiehood, a few ranks of drones, easy to control, as in Brave New World. That said, the Reeks & Wrecks’ universal medical and dental services, and guaranteed ‘food, housing, clothes, and pocket money in their old age’ is so much better than that of a rapidly growing majority of Americans at this very moment.

There’s a huge chance that the US will become a farcical, yet horror-filled, fascist rhyming couplet to Hitler’s Germany, unless some facsimile of universal medical, dental, food, housing & clothing plan is instituted, and soon. I mean, one could always recycle successful experiments from 90 years ago… ”From 1935 to 1938, the ‘Second New Deal’ introduced further legislation and additional agencies which focused on job creation and on improving the conditions of the elderly, workers, and the poor. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) supervised the construction of bridges, libraries, parks, and other facilities, while also investing in the arts; the National Labor Relations Act guaranteed employees the right to organize trade unions; and the Social Security Act introduced pensions for senior citizens and benefits for the disabled, mothers with dependent children, and the unemployed. The Fair Labor Standards Act prohibited ‘oppressive’ child labor, and enshrined a 40-hour work week and national minimum wage.

“In 1938, the Republican Party gained seats in Congress and joined with conservative Democrats to block further New Deal legislation, and some of it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The New Deal produced a political realignment, reorienting the Democratic Party's base to the New Deal coalition of labor unions, blue-collar workers, big city machines, racial minorities (most importantly African-Americans), white Southerners, and intellectuals. The realignment crystallized into a powerful liberal coalition which dominated presidential elections into the 1960s, as an opposing conservative coalition largely controlled Congress in domestic affairs from 1939 onwards…” -Wikipedia

Perhaps the problem has to do with more billionaire politicians, more wealth inequality in the US than ever before in its history. Perhaps that has to do with Reagan-era tax cuts for the rich. It’s not some kind of sci-fi rocket science…AI could figure it out—the problem, I suspect, is that the billionaire owners of AI won’t allow it to be humanist.