So It Goes: Vonnegut, AI, and the Lawless Future We’re Building
"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
The Prophet Who Laughed at Armageddon
Kurt Vonnegut never set out to be a prophet. He was too funny, too self-effacing, too suspicious of anyone claiming to know the grand truths. And yet his books—equal parts absurdist comedy and moral clarity—read today like prophecies we failed to heed.
He didn’t gain his insights through theory. He earned them in blood and smoke. As a young soldier in World War II, he survived the firebombing of Dresden, locked in an underground slaughterhouse as tens of thousands of civilians burned above him. He walked through ash, saw the world reduced to rubble, and learned to laugh at it—not because it was funny, but because laughing was the only way to survive.
That dark, humane humor runs through all of his work, but nowhere more clearly than in his two great masterpieces of technological dread: Player Piano (1952) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
In Player Piano, Vonnegut imagined a future ruled by engineers and machines. Labor had been automated away; humanity was “freed” from work. But the result wasn’t utopia. It was despair. People, stripped of their purpose, drifted into quiet rage. A resistance formed—not to destroy the machines exactly, but to destroy the assumption that life without meaningful work was still life worth living.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, he pushed deeper. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, became “unstuck in time,” drifting helplessly through his own past, present, and future with the fatalistic calm of someone who has seen too much to believe in free will. After every death, the book repeats the same phrase, like a shrug or a prayer: “So it goes.”
More than half a century later, Vonnegut’s worlds feel less like fiction and more like maps of our present: a world on the brink of an AI-driven transformation, buzzing with techno-optimism and existential dread.
Because we are, in many ways, now living in his imagined futures.
Vonnegut’s Letter to the Engineers—and to Us
In Player Piano, Vonnegut placed a fictional letter from a resistance leader to the engineers and bureaucrats who built their automated world:
“Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness.”
Lawlessness. That’s the word that echoes most loudly today.
Vonnegut didn’t hate machines. He hated blind momentum—the belief that if something can be built, it should be built, regardless of its human cost. It’s hard not to read that line now without thinking of OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic—the arms race of AI development, where new models are pushed out weekly, sometimes daily, in the name of “progress.”
AI is being advanced faster than it is being understood, and regulators lag far behind. Most crucially, we’ve barely stopped to ask what we actually want this technology to do for us. Just as the bombers over Dresden believed they were performing a noble mission, we too are tempted to view technological progress as an unquestioned good. But Vonnegut’s warning still holds: without asking whether our machines serve human well-being, we’re not practicing progress—we’re practicing lawlessness.
The Eden That Feels Empty
Vonnegut was obsessed with the tragedy of progress. In Player Piano, he described a future that looks eerily like our imagined AI utopias:
“Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.”
The tragedy isn’t just that machines take our jobs. It’s that work is more than work. It’s meaning. It’s proof we matter. Take that away, and people quietly lose the will to live.
We already see hints of this: epidemics of loneliness, depression, and “deaths of despair.” A world of convenience that often feels less human. Self-checkout lanes and customer service bots are minor examples; AI replacing artists, teachers, or caregivers would be far worse. If used poorly, AI may deepen the hollowing-out of purpose that Vonnegut foresaw—not because AI is evil, but because we have no shared vision for what we want technology for.
Convenience without meaning isn’t progress. It’s despair with better UX.
The Tralfamadorian Temptation: Fatalism in the Age of AI
In Slaughterhouse-Five, the Tralfamadorians—Vonnegut’s fictional alien race—see time differently. All moments exist simultaneously. Death is just one moment among many. Nothing changes, nothing can be changed. “So it goes.”
It’s a strangely comforting philosophy, but also a dangerous one. Billy Pilgrim accepts it. Vonnegut doesn’t.
Yet we are flirting with Tralfamadorian fatalism ourselves. How often do we hear:
“AI will replace millions of jobs, and there’s nothing we can do. The future is inevitable.”
“If we don’t build it, someone else will.”
“Regulation will just slow us down—progress can’t be stopped.”
This isn’t wisdom. It’s surrender dressed as realism. And it’s exactly what Vonnegut warned against. His nonlinear storytelling—the fractured, jumbled narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five—is itself a protest. It says: even if the bombs fall, even if the future feels inevitable, we still get to choose how we tell the story, how we live in the moments we have.
Fatalism is easy. Responsibility is harder. But only responsibility keeps us human.
AI, Trauma, and the Human Search for Meaning
Vonnegut understood trauma as few writers ever have. Billy Pilgrim’s “unstuck in time” existence is not just science fiction—it’s the psychological reality of PTSD. Trauma fragments memory; it makes life feel nonlinear, incoherent. The mind loops through past horrors, unable to reconcile them with the present.
Our relationship to technology is not trauma in the same way, but it may become existentially disorienting. As AI reshapes our work, our relationships, and even our sense of self, we may find ourselves similarly “unstuck.” If machines outperform us in creative, intellectual, and emotional domains, where will we locate our sense of purpose?
The danger isn’t just economic displacement—it’s psychological displacement. A world where your labor, creativity, and even your flaws are no longer valued can feel as disorienting as trauma. Vonnegut understood that humans need more than survival. We need stories that give our lives meaning. And if we don’t write those stories ourselves, someone—or something—else will write them for us.
The Virtue of Imperfection
Perhaps Vonnegut’s most radical insight, hidden in Player Piano, is this:
“There must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God.”
This runs directly counter to Silicon Valley’s worship of optimization. But it may be the most important lesson for the age of AI.
Efficiency is not inherently bad. But if it becomes our highest value, we risk optimizing away the very things that make life worth living—our slowness, our curiosity, our messy human weirdness. Generative AI already tends toward homogenization: it writes acceptable essays, paints acceptable images, but rarely anything gloriously wrong or wildly alive.
Maybe the future isn’t about competing with machines on efficiency. Maybe it’s about doubling down on imperfection—celebrating the mistakes, detours, and quirks that make us human.
What Vonnegut Would Tell Us Now
If Vonnegut were here to see the AI boom, he’d likely be both amused and horrified. Amused by the absurdity—he loved absurdity. Horrified by the lawlessness.
He might write another letter, short and sharp, something like this:
Dear Engineers, Managers, and Dreamers of Machines,
You’ve built another miracle. Good for you. You’ve made words dance and pictures sing, and you think this makes you gods. It doesn’t. It makes you clever children with matches.
You are so worried about what the machines can do that you haven’t stopped to ask what the machines should do.
If you want to play God, then at least remember this: God made men slow, stupid, and breakable on purpose. Maybe you should ask why.
Please give people something to do besides staring at screens while machines do all the living for them.
And for the love of everything, stop pretending inevitability is wisdom. It’s just cowardice in a lab coat.
So it goes.
Yours,
Kurt
Where This Leaves Us
Vonnegut never claimed to have answers. He wasn’t a futurist or a policymaker. But he gave us something rarer: clarity.
The dangers of technology aren’t just mechanical. They’re moral. They’re psychological. A world of perfect machines can still be a world of lonely, purposeless, broken people.
So what do we do?
Resist fatalism. “The future” isn’t inevitable. It’s made of choices—our choices.
Redefine progress. Not as efficiency or scale, but as dignity, joy, and meaning.
Protect imperfection. Build spaces where humans can be inefficient, creative, gloriously wrong.
Ask the question almost no one in Silicon Valley asks: What do people actually need to feel alive?
If we fail to ask, we may wake up one day in Vonnegut’s Eden—comfortable, efficient, and deeply unhappy.
And maybe, after the last factory closes and the last human job is replaced, a bird will sing outside our window. It won’t offer wisdom or comfort, just the same absurd syllable Vonnegut left us with at the end of Slaughterhouse-Five:
“Poo-tee-weet?”
A nonsense word. A joke. Or maybe the only honest thing left to say.