Cat’s Cradle, Oranges, and Weather

I’m about fifty pages from the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. I’ve read a lot of Vonnegut’s non-fiction essays including Armageddon in Retrospect, which I absolutely loved. And so, there I stood in the Cudahy Family Library, waiting for László to find an Easter egg taped to the wall, when Cat’s Cradle caught my eye and I realized that I had never read any of his fiction. This book was lauded at the time for it’s precise observations and satire of modernism of the early 60s. Though it seems we still have powerful people content to play around with nuclear weapons in the year 2026, I can’t help but reading it with an eye toward Artificial Intelligence and the people we’re meant to see as geniuses who are just playing around with that tech. Stipulated, there are people in the world right now using AI for good and productive ends. It doesn’t take much to find plenty behaving like Dr. Felix Hoenikker inventing ice-nine. It’s also not hard to find people who want to solve…