PLAYER PIANO WAS the very first novel published by the great American fabulist Kurt Vonnegut.1 It is a dystopia about a world where most jobs have disappeared.

Written in 1952 in the wake of the great postwar expansion of jobs, it was either extremely farsighted or astoundingly misguided, but, either way, it’s a perfect novel for our times.

A player piano is a piano that plays itself. In Vonnegut’s world, machines run themselves and people are no longer needed. They are provided for, and get to do various forms of make-work, but there is nothing meaningful or useful they can do. As Mr. Rosewater, a character in a later (1965) novel by Vonnegut puts it: “The problem is this: How to love people who have no use?”² Or even have them not hate themselves?

The increasing sophistication of robots and the progress of artificial intelligence has generated considerable anxiety about what would happen to our societies if only a few people had interesting jobs and everyone else had either no work or had a horrible job, and inequality ballooned as a result. Especially if this happened because of forces largely out of their control. Tech moguls are getting desperate to find ideas to solve the problems their technologies might cause. But we don’t need to contemplate the future in order to get a sense of what happens when economic growth leaves behind the majority of a country’s citizens. This has already happened—in the United States since 1980.