“What do humans want from their machines?” crooned the always-amazing Ethan Lipton, who my grad students and I went to see Tuesday night (11/12) at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn.
The show or as he called it, the “demonstration,” “We Are Your Robots” introduced a quartet of humanoid robots who look quite a bit like Ethan and his three-piece orchestra. These machines want to know what we, the human audience, wants from them, the robot performers. They also want to know what I also want to know – what is the future of humans and our machines?
Compared with the deeply personal stories of “No Place to Go” and “The Outer Space,” as well as the gloriously goofy Western “Tumacho,” this latest offering from Lipton was less narrative and more philosophy of mind. Did I expect to hear the refrain of Thomas Nagel – “What is it like to be a bat?” – set to music? I did not – but I have to say I loved it. Maybe philosophy should always be presented in catchy jazz-swing tunes? With cameos by Daniel Dennett, Mozart, panpsychism, David Chalmers’s “hard question of consciousness,” and quite a few amazing guitar, bass, and saxophone riffs?
What do you want to keep?, Lipton asked us. Your iphone or your glasses? Your glasses or your knife and fork? Maybe we’ve been living with robots for longer than we like to remember.
We humans are, or maybe we need to admit that we are, “collaborators in our own evolution,” and the trick is not to do the job too badly. One refrain in the show is Noam Chomsky’s dour pronouncement that, from a certain point of view, humans resembles a species built in order to destroy itself. In Lipton’s songs, that dark vision of p(doom) (i.e, the percentage chance that our coming AI overlords will wipe out humanity) hovered just off stage for most of the evening, as the orchestra’s glorious music sounded out a more hopeful, messier, and more emotionally rich entanglement. What if the truth is that we love our machines?
I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who’s not already made it out during opening week – I’ll be back with a family crew in December, after taking students yesterday – so I won’t talk in too much detail about my favorite songs, including an unexpected and quite moving duet. As usual, the band was extraordinary – listening to Vito Dieterle’s saxophone always takes me all the way back to my middle school woodwind days, and Ethan’s gentle, speculative voice sneaks itself inside your imagination. If this is what the robots will be, maybe it won’t be so bad? Or maybe we’re already with them?
I was wondering, as I was chatting about Chat-GPT and other language-spewing robots with my students before going into the show last night, if Ethan’s signature blend of wit and sentiment would make me love our robots? Or understand them better?
Get to Theatre for a New Audience before the Robots vanish on December 8th!