Would you like to see what the world will look like if the AI company CEOs, AI cheerleaders, along with EdTech AI evangelists get the automated world they so desperately desire?
I've been re-reading one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novels, Player Piano written in the 1950s. In that book, you have a world where the machines have replaced all the workers, doing the "so-called work that no one really wants to do.
It is a divided world where there are machines, there are engineers and managers, and there is everyone else. The machines do all the work. The engineers design machines for every task, because there is the faith that they can always do it better.
The managers keep the machines running and the engineers designing. The rest of the people? They take on the left over jobs, such as cleaning the streets; they become members of what is called in the “Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps” or the “Reeks and Wrecks.” They are the people for whom the automated, artificial society no longer had a place for, so they were relegated to the left-over portion of society because they “couldn’t compete with machines.” They even live separately from the machines, managers, engineers in a place called “Homestead” where they can be out of view and only interacted with when needed.
I read the book a few years ago, but now as I re-read, it seems to take on an even greater relevance in the AI arguments of today. It’s almost prophetic!
Vonnegut wrote in his Forward:
“This book is not a book about what is, but a book about what could be,” and I think it a very apt description.
Player Piano is a book about what could be if humanity continues down a path of pursuing blind efficiency and profit at all costs, and mechanizing and automating everything including their thinking.
Player Piano is what happens when one views everything in the world as a design problem.
The problem with the vision that AI evangelists and promoters have for the future, is that it is a dreamworld, and a world where they thrive at the expense of many others. That’s world that Vonnegut captures in this novel.
There’s all this AI hype about freeing up workers so they can do more important work. But that is nonsense. That is not what will happen. History shows us this, if only they would read it. In this instance, our fiction is becoming our history.
Besides, the reality is, work does not always have to provide us with meaning; we can find meaning in our work, no matter what it is.
And then there is the dreamy idea a so-called “Universal Minimum Income.” That’s really nonsense. (Actually Vonnegut has such a feature in this society, and it does not wokr.) But it will not happen, ever, in a society such as ours. In our current society, we are constantly cutting food stamps, medicaid and all manner of services for those in need, and we expect our government is going to provide a universal income for everyone regardless of what they do? That is biggest nonsensical idea ever!
I am so glad to be revisiting the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano now, because it offers a clearer picture than ever, where this blind, religious faith in AI is going to take us. It is not a “Promise land of abundant milk and honey flowing" either.
I’m sure Vonnegut would have a big laugh at the thought of him being a prophet because that would be nonsense to him. But, his world in Player Piano and the beliefs that underpin it, are very much alive in the hearts and minds of AI dreamers.
No comments:
Post a Comment