PERSON
Kurt Vonnegut
The American novelist who began his career at a General Electric automation lab, spent fifty years arguing that machines can destroy people by making them unnecessary, and left behind the plainest moral vocabulary the AI debate keeps failing to find.
Kurt Vonnegut is not the obvious thinker to consult about artificial intelligence, which is precisely why he is the necessary one. He worked in public relations at the General Electric research laboratory in Schenectady after World War II, watched engineers there teach a milling machine to reproduce a skilled machinist’s movements, and recognized, decades before the rest of the conversation did, that the deepest danger of automation is not poverty but
superfluousness—the loss of the human sense that the world has work for them to do. His first novel,
Player Piano (1952), dramatized a fully automated America in which the displaced were provided for and dying anyway, of something that had no name in economics and no line in any budget. Across fourteen novels, from the ice-nine apocalypse of
Cat’s Cradle (1963) to the meat-machine doubts of
Breakfast of Champions (1973), he built a moral vocabulary—plainspoken to the point of seeming naïve—that turns out to be