"the man had been desperately unhappy then. Now he was proud and smiling becasue his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Pail supposed- replacing men like himself with machines. He hooked up the lamp behind the Orange-O sign." (338)

This quote from Player Piano could be the authors feelings on human nature. Finnerty and Paul finally succeeded in overcoming this world built of machines, and here are the people trying to start from scratch in building up the same society. On the surface, it just looks like the man was fixing a machine. However this man had designed a machine to take over his place and it did just that! It took over his role in society. And instead of despising the machines he is drawn to his machine like instincts of making them. This scene in the book is a bit degrading to human nature as a whole. Its message is that human beings are so naive and unintelligent to fully grasp what Paul and Finnerty's grounds were for the uproar. He was acting as a machine, seeing something was broken, and the only processing he took was to rush to it and fix it. This is a common theme in this book, comparing men to machines. It also is comments on how the human race is so reliant on machines as a whole for survival.