I recently found myself sitting in a local cafe called Mea Culpa, eating an absurdly delicious biscuit sandwich. The biscuit, which was flaky, buttery, and utterly perfect, was, quite frankly, a far more meaningful part of my day than it had any right to be.
While brushing crumbs off my lap, I wandered over to the cafe’s nicely curated secondhand bookstore section. There, sandwiched between a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and some poems by Gregory Corso, a title spoke to me: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. Published in 1952. Written while he was working, briefly, for General Electric. Fascinating.
I read The Savage Detectives first. It was excellent. Then I read the poems. So were they. Last week I finally finished Player Piano after struggling for a while to remember where I’d come across it. Then I remembered that delicious biscuit sandwich and put the pieces together. I have a rule for myself which is if I buy a book, I must read it, no matter what. It saves huge piles of unread tomes accumulating.
Seventy-four years ago, long before ChatGPT started doing our jobs for us and investors began salivating over automated efficiency, Vonnegut had already charted our exact existential wreckage when he wrote the book.
Today, the internet is overflowing with handwringing and weeping over how artificial intelligence is going to devalue human labor. Intellectuals and tech podcasters speak of this as if it is a brand-new tragedy, an unforeseen ambush of the human soul. But Vonnegut’s satirical genius was in realizing that the real tragedy isn’t that machines are going to take away our jobs; It’s that we were stupid enough to tie our entire sense of human dignity to having a job in the first place.
The problem with AI “devaluing work” is that we all value it so highly to begin with. It’s a huge problem with LinkedIn, generally, and with writing about our careers and professional lives. Work is a way to earn money. It’s an exchange of your skills for demand in an economy. It needn’t define one’s entire life. It certainly doesn’t define mine. I’d rather be cooking than working, most of the time. Or reading another book. Or spending time with my wife and kid. Or watching movies. Playing sport. Looking at art. Just lazing around. That’s life as it should be!
Americans fell for a toxic work ethic that demands we justify our limited, fleeting time on Earth by being economically useful. We built a society where to be human is to be a unit of productivity. In Player Piano, Vonnegut’s characters suffer not from starvation, they have universal basic income, medical care, and matching prefabricated homes, but from a total “loss of self-worth and purpose.”
But it’s their fault. For generations, one character in the novel laments, Americans have been “built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness—and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them.”
We have spent decades turning ourselves into second-rate machines, and now we are outraged that first-rate machines can do the job better. That’s the point.
I have a friend who works in private equity. He is the ultimate, highly optimized human. He divides his weekends into fifteen-minute increments. He schedules “relaxation” between 2:15 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. on Saturdays (although admittedly, he calls it something else and I’ll spare us all the gruesome details). He is, in every sense of the word, a human clockwork. When he complains that generative AI might soon automate his financial modeling, I want to shake him and ask: What is there left to devalue? You already turned your life into a spreadsheet. You beat the machines to the punch!
We have forgotten the value of slowness, of craft, of the sheer joy of being alive.
But there is a cure, and it doesn’t involve blowing up our AI servers. It involves a radical, romantic rejection of the machine ethic. It means realizing, as the main character in the novel, Dr. Paul Proteus eventually does, that “the main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
If you find yourself color-coding your weekends or wondering why your job makes you feel like a vacuum tube, do yourself a favor. Leave your phone in a drawer, walk down to your nearest coffee shop, buy a ridiculously buttery sandwich, and read a copy of Player Piano.
As Vonnegut wisely notes in the book, “a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.” I wish I could predict the same for modern society but it’s up to each of us, individually, to decide what’s most important. I’m just making a plea, here, for each of us to get the answer right. Best of luck to you.
Matt Davis is a strategic communications consultant.
