An indifferent novel but packed with horribly relevant ideas

In 1983 Kurt Vonnegut said of his first novel Player Piano published in 1952 that it was “more timely with each passing day.” He died in 2007, but his novel, which is 75 (the same age as me), is even more relevant in 2026. The novel describes a world in which people are being progressively replaced by machines, creating an unhuman world and leaving people wondering whether their lives have any point or meaning. In both the novel and the world machines have already replaced many jobs that depend on muscle, and now the arrival of artificial intelligence threatens to replace jobs that have depended on brains. I’ve been reading Vonnegut’s novel at the same time as rereading Ivan Illich’s 1975 book Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health and shortly after reading his book 1973 book Tools for Conviviality. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2024/07/01/ivan-illich-foresaw-permacrisis-fifty-years-ago-not-least-in-health-care/ The three books fit closely together,…