Their elliptical, dystopian “Computer World” (1981), for instance, didn’t just anticipate the ubiquity of the “home computer,” it described a society in which digital technology infiltrated every aspect of life. It wasn’t a celebration, it was a warning.

The band built its concept around a “Menschmaschine” (human machine) powered by a “Kraftwerk” (power station). But Kraftwerk never really forecast a robotic destiny. Its views were more like the futurist Ray Kurzweil’s concept of the singularity, a cultural moment when technologies such as artificial intelligence merge with humans to bring on a new historical epoch.

But Kraftwerk has never been just some novelty group whose members pretend to be robots. There is soul and beauty in their music, and both humor and melancholy. It’s not surprising that they have a social conscience.

In 1975 the group released “Radioactivity,” which punned about music on the radio: “Tune in to the melody/Radioactivity/Radioactivity is in the air for you and me.” But in 1991, after several major nuclear accidents, Kraftwerk radically remade the song. A monotone synthesized voice intones a brief litany of nuclear disasters: “Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield, Hiroshima.” Then Mr. Hütter sings mournfully, “Stop radioactivity,” and “Chain reaction and mutation/Contaminated population.”

Ever since, Kraftwerk has performed the song at antinuclear events, beginning with Greenpeace’s 1992 “Stop Sellafield” concert to protest the Sellafield reactor in England. In 2008, Kraftwerk played the song at Coachella, the annual music and arts festival in Southern California, on the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and the band also played it in 2012 at the No Nukes concert in Japan, not long after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Nuclear contamination is a byproduct of humankind’s inability to completely control the effects of its interactions with the physical world. In our relentless, reckless quest to produce more energy so we can produce more profit, we are interfering with nature, with effects that we can’t fully anticipate — often with catastrophic consequences, as with potentially apocalyptic climate breakdown.