Nonetheless, Katharine somehow manages to convince herself that it’s a good thing that the two Industrial Revolutions made routine work obsolete and pointless, apparently believing that efficiency is more important-more valuable-than anything else. It’s a little ironic that Katharine is so convinced by this point, since her job as a secretary falls into this category of “routine mental work,” at least according to the other managers at Ilium Works, all of whom have replaced their secretaries with machines. Paul Proteus must thus unlearn his desiring for the metallized body, and, by the end of the novel, his reeducation is complete. Such lust is a lust for war though, or at the very least, the longing for the obsolescence of humanity itself. In this highly streamlined, automatized society, any task that could be completed by a machine has been “devalued”-even “routine mental work” no longer has a place in the workforce, since machines can supposedly fill the roles of people whose jobs don’t require complex thinking. This is the logical endgame for the metallized body that even Paul Proteus cannot help secretly desiring. This perspective completely discounts the idea of craftsmanship, ignoring that it’s possible for people to take pride in physical labor and, thus, feel rewarded by their work. Paul Proteus (referred to as Paul), an intelligent, 35-year-old factory manager of Ilium Works. The more prominent plotline follows the protagonist, Dr. When Katharine talks about manual labor, she emphasizes the drudgery of mindless repetition. Player Piano develops two parallel plotlines that converge only briefly and then insubstantially, at the beginning and the end of the novel.
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