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Article mentions Player Piano!!! Completely underrated Vonnegut work, it is a great depiction of what a fully-automated dystopia might look like. The unemployed
by Apocryphon 3y ago
Article mentions Player Piano!!! Completely underrated Vonnegut work, it is a great depiction of what a fully-automated dystopia might look like. The unemployed living on a UBI dole, engaging in undignified menial labor "reclaiming" scrap infrastructure. (Though at least they all have free healthcare in the book, something that seems too good to be true in real life.) The creative arts are both strictly licensed and all content must adhere to the calculated tests determined by the machines. Even for the elites, a sort of corrosive credentialism runs amok has taken over, with everyone having multiple secondary degrees. Also he somehow predicts the over-commercialism and optimization of college football.
- slothtrop 3y agoQuite prescient. Realistically I expect the dominant activity to be consumption, and creating/selling useless artisanal crafts to one another. Notwithstanding cheap energy, the red tape could definitely be heavy to build anything of material consequence, particularly if we charge the responsibility of dolling out resources and capital to the government.