Announcing Techno-Visions: A Summer Book Club by Behavioral Scientist

This summer, we invite you to join Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book Club: Techno-Visions. We’ll read Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Player Piano, about a future society full of powerful machines, the special class of engineers who manages them, and the people at the mercy of both. The 1952 novel poses questions that we’re still seeking answers to, even more urgently in the age of AI, about what technological progress means for us individually and collectively.

Over the past several years, we’ve all been whipsawed by competing visions of where AI is headed. We’ve been told that AI will take jobs and create them; eliminate creativity and bolster it; stunt our intelligence and extend it; destroy what makes us human and allow us reimagine who we are.

We’ve been told AI could usher in the long-awaited, Keynesian future, when “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure … to live wisely and agreeably and well.” We’ve also been told that AI poses an existential threat; that we’re one errant model away from catastrophe.

Vonnegut would empathize with our lot. Although observing a different technological age, Vonnegut too wondered what the future might look like if technology really did advance the way some hoped (and others forebode). At the heart of Vonnegut’s Player Piano and our own uncertainty about the future lie the same questions: Where exactly is the technology we’re developing taking us? And: Do the people building it have an accurate idea? Do the rest of us get a say in where we go?

The novel will give us a leaping off point to discuss these questions and others with leading behavioral scientists, technologists, writers, and each other. We’ll host several synchronous and asynchronous conversations in July and August, peppered with bonus content throughout the summer. (For instance, we’ll explore the 1950 essay, “The Human Use of Human Beings” by an MIT mathematician that helped inspire Player Piano. And, did you know that Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago? Learn how the ideas of a particularly eccentric professor influenced his writing.) 

Player Piano is a book I’ve spontaneously gifted to friends, colleagues, and people I’ve just met. If you’ve read a book by Vonnegut before you know the pleasure of his original ideas, gallows humor, biting sarcasm, and overflowing empathy. If this will be your first, you’re in for a treat. But don’t just take my word for it. The back cover of my copy of Player Piano refers to Vonnegut as “one of the best living American writers.” Having passed away in 2007, he’s now considered one of the best dead ones too. How about that for crossover appeal?

Interested in joining Techno-Visions? Find out how to join here.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reply to this email or reach out at editor@behavioralscientist.org

We look forward to reading with you this summer.