In his novel Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut shows a dystopian society split into an upper class of engineers (who make machines which make further machines, etc) and a lower class of people who... just don't matter. The extremely mechanized/automated economy requires very few engineers to operate, and those not smart enough to engineer and build improved machines have bullshit jobs like perpetual road reconstructions, or they can join the army or devote themselves fully to alcoholism. The lower class who makes most of the population are not left to starve, but it is made very clear to them that they cannot contribute and don't matter at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)

With today's massive push for AI, the doomed revolution in Player Piano comes into my mind increasingly often. This book has become surprisingly relevant...

Are we really heading this way?

"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it." (Frank Herbert? Ray Bradbury?)

Looking backwards, the dystopian sci-fi of the past just too often turns out to be an accurate description of what happened later.

This post was first published on Linkedin here on 2026-02-09.