Player Piano By Kurt Vonnegut

While most Americans were fighting in the third world war, the nation's managers and engineers responded by developing ingenious automated systems that allowed factories to operate with only a few workers. Ten years after the war, most workers have now been replaced by machines. The polarization of the population is represented by the division of Ilium, New York, into "Homestead", where every person not a manager or an engineer lives – added to by the growing number of those displaced from that status – and the industrialized north side of the river, inhabited by those who service and develop the machines.