Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It was the miracle that won the war—production with almost no manpower.

a mouse had gnawed through the insulation on a control wire and put buildings 17, 19, and 21 temporarily out of commission.

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles—the fruits of peace.

Bud’s mentality was one that had been remarked upon as being peculiarly American since the nation had been born—the restless, erratic insight and imagination of a gadgeteer.

talk of deeper, thicker shelters for the possessors of know-how, and of keeping this cream of the population out of the front-line fighting.

Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day.

EPICAC, a computing machine in Carlsbad Caverns, felt the economy could absorb.

guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking.

Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a creditable counterfeit of warmth. Paul could only suspect that her feelings were shallow—and perhaps that suspicion was part of what he was beginning to think of as his sickness.

“And any man who cannot support himself by doing a job better than a machine is employed by the government, either in the Army

He had overheard her telling visitors that he had had it rebuilt in such a way that it was far better mechanically than what was coming off the automatic assembly lines at Detroit—which simply wasn’t true.

Like new military tech

You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.”

Baer embodied the knowledge and technique of industry; Kroner personified the faith,

priceless quality of believing in the system, and of making others believe in it, too, and do as they were told.

Machines were doing America’s work far better than Americans had ever done it. There were better goods for more people at less cost, and who could deny that that was magnificent and gratifying?

annoyance or boredom that people used to experience in routine

I was thinking of it from the worker’s point of view. The two industrial revolutions eliminated two kinds of drudgery, and I was looking for some way of estimating just how much the second revolution had relieved men of.”

“you can’t prove a logical connection between those factors.”

But an AI can

“A brain, a brain,” said Berringer triumphantly. “Checker Charley, world’s champion checker player, and looking for new planets to conquer.”

another light went on, indicating the perfect countermove for Berringer. Berringer smiled and did what the machine told him to do.

“Sure, but if Checker Charley was working right he couldn’t lose.” Berringer arose unsteadily. “Listen, we’d better call this thing off while we find out what’s wrong.” He tapped the front panel experimentally. “Jesus Christ, he’s hot as a frying pan!” “Finish the game, Junior. I want to know who’s champ,” said Finnerty. “Don’tcha see!” said Berringer furiously. “It isn’t working right.” He looked pleadingly around the room.

Those who live by electronics, die by electronics.

Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.

if these not slaves, how you get them to do what they do?” “Patriotism,” said General of the Armies Bromley

What about the gadget you invented for—” “Thet’s it,” said Bud with an eerie mixture of pride and remorse. “Works. Does a fine job.” He smiled sheepishly. “Does it a whole lot better than Ah did it.” “It runs the whole operation?” “Yup. Some gadget.” “And so you’re out of a job.”

Bud Calhoun

Made a machine that replaced his job. PKD overlaps with Vonnegut here, PKD pointing out that machines will always need peope to fix them.

Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it’s sure to be a bloody business.”

At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity.

Not only must a person be bright, he must be bright in certain approved, useful directions: basically, management or engineering.”

Paul loved these common people, and wanted to help, and let them know they were loved and understood, and he wanted them to love him too.

whose common denominator was that their people represented untapped markets for America’s stupendous industrial output.

EPICAC XIV could consider simultaneously hundreds or even thousands of sides of a question utterly fairly, that EPICAC XIV was wholly free of reason-muddying emotions, that EPICAC XIV never forgot anything—that, in short, EPICAC XIV was dead right about everything.

EPICAC I had been intelligent enough, dispassionate enough, retentive enough to convince men that he, rather than they, had better do the planning for the war that was approaching with stupifying certainty.

Operations

now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, but touched almost nowhere.

Time didn’t mean anything in those days. The industrial dark ages,

“He wanted to know if we weren’t doing something bad in the name of progress.”

“Anyway, Thoreau was in jail because he wouldn’t pay a tax to support the Mexican War. He didn’t believe in the war. And Emerson came to jail to see him. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘why are you here?’ And Thoreau said, ‘Ralph, why aren’t you here?’ ” “I should want to go to jail?” said Paul, trying to get some sort of message for himself out of the anecdote. “You shouldn’t let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in.”

Farming—now there was a magic word. Like so many words with little magic from the past still clinging to them, the word “farming” was a reminder of what rugged stock the present generation had come from, of how tough a thing a human being could be if he had to. The word had little meaning in the present.

all paid for by regular deductions from Edgar’s R&RC pay check,

“In order to get what we’ve got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them—the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.”

“If someone has brains,” said Anita firmly, “he can still get to the top. That’s the American way, Paul, and it hasn’t changed.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Brains and nerve, Paul.”

Education—nothing but promotion.

But the law’s the law now, and not a contest between a lot of men paid to grin and lie and yell and finagle for whatever somebody wanted them to grin and lie and yell and finagle about.

“The men from the boys—that’s what they used to say in the Army, Sergeant Elm Wheeler would. Memphis boy. ‘Here we go, boys,’ he’d say. ‘Here’s where we separate the men from the boys.’ And off we’d go for the next hill, and the medics’d follow and separate the dead from the wounded. And then Wheeler’d say, ‘Here we go, here’s where we separate the men from the boys.’ And that went on till we got separated from our battalion and Wheeler got his head separated from his shoulders.

The war made him, and this life would of killed him. “And another nice thing about war—not that anything about war is nice, I guess—is that while it’s going on and you’re in it, you never worry about doing the right thing. See? Up there, fighting and all, you couldn’t be righter.

“These kids in the Army now, that’s just a place to keep ’em off the streets and out of trouble, because there isn’t anything else to do with them. And the only chance they’ll ever get to be anybody is if there’s a war. That’s the only chance in the world they got of showing anybody they lived and died, and for something, by God.

all kinds of dangerous things, and still be a dumb bastard. “Now the machines take all the dangerous jobs, and the dumb bastards just get tucked away

Now the point seemed to be to pretend drunkenness, but to stay sober and discard only those inhibitions and motor skills one could safely do without.

somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions,

The conductor’s plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn’t that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn’t do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.