AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s Job
The rise and fall of the player piano indicates a robust demand for human labor that machines cannot replace.
About 130 years ago, the job of pianist was automated when Edwin Votey created the first player piano. The machine worked by reading music that was encoded by holes punched into rolls of paper, which in turn directed airflows to levers that depressed piano keys. The human’s task was relegated to pumping a foot pedal to create the pneumatic pressure that drove the automaton.
Things got worse for the human pianist from there.
By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. With the Seeburg Lilliputian Model L, the only job left for humans who wanted to play the piano in the 1920s was to put in a coin.
Nearly every major pianist of the early 20th century made music for these machines. Echoing AI commentary today, some musicians viewed the player piano as not just replicating human playing, but exceeding it. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky explained that he wrote pieces specifically for the machines because “there are tone combinations beyond my ten fingers,” and argued that “there is a new polyphonic truth in the player-piano … There are new possibilities. It is something more.”
