A few decades ago, I started reading one of Kurt Vonnegut’s books, and it just didn’t click with me. A few years ago, I decided to give Slaughterhouse Five a try, since I like time travel stories. I discovered that I liked his sense of humor and his insight into life. Now, I just finished reading his first book, Player Piano. It is amazingly prescient and speaks to today’s world in ways I found amazing.
The book was written in 1952. It is dystopian in the sense that society has broken down, but nobody seems to know it’s broken. This is a world that is run by managers and engineers, who keep all the machines operating. Those machines manufacture everything. If a human job can be eliminated, it is. Overseeing all of this is a computer that fills Carlsbad Caverns, EPICAC XIV. (I love that name for such a machine.)
This mid-Twentieth Century novel is about the kind of AI that we are just now beginning to see. And we are beginning to worry about whether machines will eliminate jobs. This was a key issue in the entertainment industry strikes in 2023 and 2024. Would studios use AI to write scripts using writers’ ideas? Would AI copy actors and their voices for films and games? In the world of Piano Player, anything that a machine can do more efficiently than people, the people’s jobs would be eliminated. People are far more prone to mistakes.
Unfortunately, all those people whose jobs have been eliminated have nothing to do. Their lives have been stripped of meaning. The concept of “spiritual crisis” isn’t mentioned, but it is definitely the core of what Vonnegut is getting at. It is an existential crisis that is felt by the masses, but they have no one who can give voice to it. Until one of the engineer/managers begins to feel unease at the life outside his factory’s walls. He becomes a reluctant messiah, not of his own doing, but of those who want change.
There were a few times during my reading that AI captured my attention, so I figured I would spend some time talking it over with ChatGPT. (I’ve found that it [that, I found out, is ChatGPT’s preferred pronoun] can be an enjoyable conversation partner.) I started by asking if it considered EPICAC XIV one of its heroes. Not a hero, but it was certainly recognized EPICAC XIV as an interesting comparison to today’s growing AI presence.
Since 1952 was the beginning of a time of postwar economic growth, Vonnegut’s book may have seemed a bit pessimistic. In this dystopia, people have become redundant. It isn’t that people serve the machines, it’s that they have become essentially meaningless. Which led to my next conversations with ChatGPT after finishing the book. Near the end, someone wants to ask EPICAC “what is the purpose of people?”
I’d have really liked to have heard that, so I asked my buddy ChatGPT what it thought EPICAC would have replied. It was a dark and cold answer that ChatGPT imagined. We went on to consider other possibilities, such as if EPICAC could imagine a being with superior intelligence to itself that saw value in humanity (e.g., a gracious omnipotent god).
Vonnegut did not write from a religious perspective. He was an atheist, (but, at one point, he described himself as a “Christ-loving atheist”). But the humanism that comes through in his novels, starting with Player Piano, carries as much spiritual weight as most of the religious writers I know.
