In the future, sooner than you think, we’re all going to have computer chips implanted in our brains. Or maybe we’ll all have full-service robot assistants, who will be able to make us a cocktail just how we like it and suggest the perfect jazz playlist to enjoy it with. It’s possible that we’re on the precipice of an AI-powered technological revolution that will, in pursuit of our mass enlightenment, end in our own mass extinction. Or maybe we’re just going to have more realistic porn.
These and many other scenarios are laid out in three new plays about artificial general intelligence, currently being staged on and off Broadway: The Antiquities, Maybe Happy Ending, and Doomers. They were not, as far as we know, written by AI, though Doomers credits the AI assistants ChatGPT and Claude as part of the “production team” in the program. These plays don’t necessarily tell us what the AGI apocalypse is going to look like. Nobody can tell us that. But they do tell us how humans act when presented with a new and unwieldy technology. It’s a welcome trend in the theater-verse, where offerings often fall into the dusty or pandering buckets; does the world really need BOOP!, a musical about Betty Boop? Or another rendition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, except this time, with a girl! Or the bicentennial run of The Lion King?
True, theater is an odd medium in which to explore such an abstract subject. It’s hard enough to wrap your mind around concepts like interpretability and superintelligence, let alone get actors to communicate them to the public, while being entertaining. And these plays are sometimes a little awkward in trying to do all that. But unlike so much theater, they’re humanizing a subject that’s both in the headlines—see this month: DeepSeek, Elon bidding to buy OpenAI, and Project Stargate—and very much on our minds.