[The greatest immediate risk presented to humanity by AI is not
robotic control of military weapons, but its application within the
logic of capitalism—an alignment that will further relegate human
needs as secondary to market forces.]
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KURT VONNEGUT WARNED US ABOUT THE DANGERS OF AUTOMATION  
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David H. Price
June 21, 2023
The Progressive
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_ The greatest immediate risk presented to humanity by AI is not
robotic control of military weapons, but its application within the
logic of capitalism—an alignment that will further relegate human
needs as secondary to market forces. _

View of the Automated Manufacturing Research Facility, National
Institute of Standards and Technology, (NIST)

 

Last fall, I taught a seminar for first-year college students on
automation’s projected impacts on society. We read think tank
reports predicting
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a third of now existing jobs will be replaced by robots in the next
decade and a half. We also looked at a variety of techno-utopian and
dystopian predictions, and works of fiction by authors like Steven
Millhauser and Kurt Vonnegut. And we couldn’t have known it at the
time, but looking back, it was the last period of techno-calm before
the unleashing of ChatGPT and other Artificial Intelligence engines.

We also read David Graeber’s essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit
Jobs
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which has this great opening where he reflects on childhood memories
from the 1960s when he was promised a labor saving
high-tech Jetsonian
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with jet packs, flying cars, and robots doing most of our labor for
us; leaving us with increased leisure time. While flying cars never
materialized, many other labor-saving devices have arrived. But
instead of liberating us, as promised, our work days instead expanded,
and job security has become precarious. It is true that many of these
old jobs are now done by machines, but the promise that automation
would result in less work for us was a lie; what happened instead was
that unnecessary managerial work proliferated, generating meaningless
endless assessment tasks and the creation of bureaucracies that
self-replicate while most workers endure longer hours
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pay [[link removed]].

But it was Vonnegut’s 1952 novel, _Player Piano_
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fueled our most interesting discussions. _Player Piano_, the
author’s first novel, portrays a dystopia following a Third World
War where automation makes most work unnecessary. It explores what
happens to people in a world where technology eliminates the need for
human labor and thought. 

[PlayerPianoFirstEd.jpeg]

Charles Scribner's Sons publishers

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, First edition, hardcover, 1952.

_Player Piano_ depicts of future where most human labor is not longer
needed as automated processes manufacture all goods and standardized
tests select the few elite engineers who will run the massive,
automated manufacturing plants, while the vast majority of society is
kept alive with some sort of basic universal subsistence payment and
made docile with television, alcohol, parades, and other diversions.
This is a world where automation has liberated humankind from the need
to toil but has failed to provide meaningful tasks for these
supposedly liberated people.    

Vonnegut describes these developments as forms of
techno-colonialization, in which “ 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.”
This technology creates permanent structural unemployment, and
Vonnegut shows us how that can result in a more harshly bifurcated
form of social stratification. 

The technology running the machines in _Player Piano_ isn’t of the
variety dominating today’s high-tech factories. The novel’s
machines instead record the actual movements of the skilled workers’
hands; they later emulate the human movements they have
recorded—using a similar process as the one used to create the
self-playing pianos that became popular in the early 1900s.

Vonnegut observed this sort of technological evolutionary
path-not-taken while working at General Electric (GE) in the 1940s in
their public relations department. As postwar automation rapidly
progressed, industrialists experimented with a form of industrial
automation known as  the Record Playback System
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General Electric pioneered this system, which recorded, with great
precision, the movements of skilled machinists producing parts. This
system had advantages for small projects needing rapid production, but
fell short in its reliance on a skilled worker to generate the master
work that would be copied and reproduced by machines. 

[AutomatedManufacturingResearchFacility_014.jpeg]

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Group discusses Automated Manufacturing Research Facility

While at GE, Vonnegut was privately shown a prototype record playback
system that mass produced mill rotor blades for gas turbines. He was
told to not make information on these machines public, because, as
Vonnegut later wrote, “ the workers’ union would put the ugliest
possible interpretation on the development. [They’d] frighten their
members with the prospect of being canned. Nobody cared to explain
that to me. My duty was to write and release only stories which would
make everyone think well of the company.” 

Some GE managers and engineers privately expressed misgivings to
Vonnegut, including worries about machines completely replacing
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craftsmanship of skilled workers And yet no one publicly protested
these developments, as the then-predominant view was that “all
technological advances were by definition good.” Vonnegut later
recalled how the unease of these GE engineers and managers inspired
him to write _Player Piano._

In our world today, AI now appears ready
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replace everyone from fast food workers to the computer coders who
replaced the skilled craftspeople who once manufactured goods. In some
ways, the record and playback technology dominating _Player
Piano_’s world has eerie parallels to the plagiaristic mechanisms
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today’s AI technologies: These programs mimic the words, arguments,
brushstrokes, and creativity of human labor as they adapt these
products for their own uses. 

_Player Piano_ wasn’t the only novel where Vonnegut critiqued
technology as a force beyond human control, In _Deadeye Dick_
[[link removed]] (1982)_, _firearms
are killing machines that humans had failed to control; _Breakfast of
Champions_
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envisions robotized humans operating beyond the possibility of
freewill. In the latter, he viewed
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history as having “used human beings for machinery, and, even after
slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their
descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as
machines.” 

But it was _God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_
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that provides his most relevant critique of automation in a capitalist
society. Here, Vonnegut understood that labor-saving technologies
don’t necessarily make human lives easier, and as labor-saving
devices reduce the need for human labor, these technologies reveal
fundamental questions about what people are good for.

Towards the conclusion of _God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_,
Vonnegut’s alter ego, Kilgore Trout, philosophizes about a world
where the newly unemployed are despised after new technologies make
their labor obsolete. Instead of liberation, automation brings scorn
for displaced workers. The situation, according to Kilgore Trout,
presents “a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made
world-wide by this sophistication of machines. The problem is this:
How to love people who have no use?”

Vonnegut understood the ease with which American capitalism blames
those who are surplus labor for their plight once they are no longer
needed. This understanding is broadly missing in our modern world, and
if AI rapidly displaces workers across a vast spectrum of jobs, we
will be ignoring these truths at our peril. 

In fact, we are already seeing how rapidly vicious attacks on
AI-displaced workers can occur. During the recent debt default
negotiations between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin
McCarthy, the bipartisan willingness
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link basic economic benefits to employment is just one expression of
Trout’s recognition
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“Americans have long been taught to hate all people who will not or
cannot work.” And the ease with which our society angrily blames
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unhoused for their fate makes it easy to imagine the sort of dark
outcomes that rapid AI displacement could bring. 

As such, I believe that the greatest immediate risk presented to
humanity by AI is not some robotic control of military weapons, but
instead its application within the logic of capitalism—an alignment
that will further relegate human needs as secondary to market
forces.       

[Advanced_Automation_for_Space_Missions_-_Cover copy.png]

NASA

Proposed demonstration of simple robot self-replication.

We simply do not know what comes next, and while things like universal
basic income are occasionally dangled
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possible solutions, capitalism cannot meet the crisis that will emerge
in the next stages of automation, whatever they may be. 

Vonnegut teaches us that technology can’t solve our problems and
that caring about other people is our best hope. Questions of what we
do with the new worlds created by AI will be political struggles that
will need to address inherent human worth and the value and dignity of
work. We will need to understand that these new machines will be
incapable of _caring_ about human suffering. Or, as Vonnegut put it
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they won’t be able to find “reasons and methods for treasuring
human beings because they are _human beings._” These are uniquely
human tasks, Vonnegut reminds us, they are why we are here. 

_David Price is a professor of Anthropology at Saint Martin’s
University. For the last three decades he has used the Freedom of
Information Act to document the FBI and CIA’s engagements with
anthropologists, activists, and public intellectuals._

_Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent
and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of
championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are
nonviolence and freedom of speech.  Based in Madison, Wisconsin, we
publish on national politics, culture, and events including U.S.
foreign policy; we also focus on issues of particular importance to
the heartland. Two flagship projects of The
Progressive include Public School Shakedown
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to resist the privatization of public education, and The Progressive
Media Project [[link removed]], aiming to diversify our
nation’s op-ed pages. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization. Donate [[link removed]]_

* Automation
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* artificial intelligence
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* Technology
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* unemployment
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* capitalism
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* Kurt Vonnegut
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