The novel, Player Piano, started the familiar discordant tune on the rise of automation

Robotics veracity aside, the overarching theme in Player Piano is that individual intelligence and creativity is a comforting lie we tell ourselves about why we are irreplaceable by machines.

Here's the link to my Science Robotics article that bypasses the paywall shortly. Besides the amazingly correct technology that Vonnegut predicted (Checkers player, learning by demonstration, medical diagnosis and recommender systems), he also predicted the social tensions that we are seeing today.

NPR covered the article on All Things Considered. They asked me a lot about why I teach robotics with science fiction- those didn't make the final edit. I like to teach with it because it gives a sense of the whole system— how it really gets used, the good. It also helps imagine the corner cases, the unexpected events, and the ethics- not just the individual parts of a robot or an algorithm. You can see my books explaining robots through science fiction here.

NPR really liked this quote from the article: "Robotics veracity aside, the overarching theme in Player Piano is that individual intelligence and creativity is a comforting lie we tell ourselves about why we are irreplaceable by machines." And indeed that was one of the things that Vonnegut forsaw-- that it was not just physical, blue collar labor that would be replaced, but eventually white collar jobs would be lost too. While robots may be slower to replace the marvelous flexibility and adaptability of humans, AI is already replacing workers. NASDAQ ran a recent article on how AI is effecting the finance industry. The lead engineers and CEOs kept telling themselves that they were too creative, too talented, too well-educated to be replaced, but they were missing signs that it was already happening. Unlike earlier dystopian works like Metropolis, worker replacement was part of the quest for everyone to have a higher standard of living, including generous universal basic incomes. Nobody is trying to be mean or discriminatory, the loss of meaningful jobs is just a byproduct. of the quest for cheaper, faster, and better.

Vonnegut both challenges and accepts the "it's worker displacement, not worker replacement" theme that policy makers have rallied for decades (for every factory job taken over by a robot, it creates multiple new jobs-- robot repair and maintenance, robot programming, IT, etc.), Factory workers are clearly replaced and don't have the college and the aptitude for most of the new jobs in engineering; they are given a universal basic income which covers an increasing high standard of living. But the white collar workers are in a bind too; as automation comes for their jobs and more academically-oriented or higher educated people get displaced, they are being forced to obtain additional advanced degrees in order to be competitive for dwindling jobs- now real estate agent must have a PhD.