Ulla Gomez’s Reviews > Player Piano > Status Update

It isn't knowledge that's making trouble, but the uses it's put to.

For generations they've been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men—and boom! it's all yanked out from under them. They can't participate, can't be useful any more

Their superiority is what gets me, this damn hierarchy that measures men against ma-chines. It's a pretty unimpressive kind of man that comes out on top.

Here Bud's graph was high for theory, there low for administration, here low for creativity, and so on, up and down across the page to the last quality— personality. In mysterious, unnamed units of measure, each graduate was credited with having a high, medium, or low personality.

It was a so-called Achievement and Aptitude Profile, and every college graduate got one along with his sheepskin.
And the sheepskin was nothing, and the graph was every-thing. When time for graduation came, a machine took a student's grades and other performances and integrated them into one graph-the profile.