A society in which intelligent machines leave highly qualified people unemployed, who have their material needs covered but suffer an existential void. This is the fiction imagined by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut in his first novel, La pianola, published in 1952. Reread today, the precision with which he anticipated technical advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) and some its psychological and social consequences.
Vonnegut, who had worked at General Electric, describes in La pianola a computer that plays checkers by calculating all the possible moves in the following moves. The astonishing thing about the description is that the first computer program capable of playing checkers was created in 1952, the year the novel was published, and that it worked in much the same way that Vonnegut had anticipated.
“It’s easy to miss the surprisingly accurate speculations in the book because so many of them are current today,” writes computer engineer Robin Murphy of the University of Texas A.
Another of Vonnegut’s envisioned machines uses its superhuman computing power to learn to perform complex tasks by watching a person perform them. This machine is capable of what is now called machine learning, a concept that engineer Arthur Samuel defined in 1959 and which has become one of the most important branches of AI.
A third machine described in the novel is an industrial cleaning robot that works in a similar way to the first commercial model of this type of machine, the RobotKent from 1989, notes Robin Murphy.
Computer engineer from the University of Texas A
The pianola anticipates that even activities based on intelligence and creativity can be replaced by machines, which divides society into an elite of managers and engineers and a majority of voiceless citizens.
This does not mean that machines are intelligent, just that they can simulate intelligence. In a characteristic scene of Vonnegut’s black humor, a robot causes an absurd accident by blindly obeying his program. The episode is reminiscent of accidents caused in recent years by autonomous vehicles.
Nor does it mean that people are especially smart. In another premonition of La pianola, when citizens are given the opportunity to escape the domination of machines, most end up preferring the comforts that technology offers them. The characters in the novel, like today’s citizens, tend to accept what the machines tell them without questioning how they have been programmed.
As precisely as the omens in La pianola are being fulfilled, Vonnegut failed to anticipate some of the profound social changes that have occurred since its publication. The writer overlooked the benefits that robotics and AI have brought, be it in medicine, transportation or energy production, among other fields. He envisioned a society where people drive cars like those of the 1950s, with their traditional mechanical breakdowns and unawareness of climate change. And, above all, it did not occur to him that society would evolve towards greater equality and that women could be engineers and managers just like men. For a novel that so accurately reflects some of the changes in today’s world, the subordinate position in which he places women is anachronistic.
Despite this flaw, La pianola is both funny and worrying, entertaining in a thought-provoking way, and the phrases in the preface still hold true today: “This book is not about what it is but about what it is.†What could it be. At this point in history our lives and freedom depend in large part on the talent and imagination and courage of our managers and engineers, and I hope that God helps them to help us stay alive and free.”