The seating plan for Trump’s Windsor Castle banquet placed Kemi Badenoch next to Sam Altman. That may or may be the cool kid’s end of the table. Perhaps the beleaguered Tory leader asked the OpenAI chief about his experience of surviving an attempted ousting in 2023. And had they been so minded, the pair could have relived the whole saga by swinging down to London’s Rose Lipman theatre the next night. On stage was the preview performance of Doomers.
It is a play that unfolds across one night and in two halves. The board of the fictional AI company Mindmesh has just ousted its CEO because of abusive behaviour and recklessness with AI safety. We first see the ex-chief and his team around a table scrambling for their next move. After the break, we see the board members around a different table but in similar disarray. On 17 November 2023, one year after the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s board ousted Sam Altman on the same grounds. In the event, he was reinstated five days later. Doomers dramatises the conflict and confusion of that first night.
The play was written soon after after OpenAI’s fallout by the New York writer Matthew Gasda, who this year published the delicate and provocative novel The Sleepers. Doomers was first shown in New York. Only Sam Hyrkin, who plays the CEO figure Seth, remains from the original cast, though another member, Zsuzsa Magyar, directs the London show. Perhaps more so in Britain than in America, Doomers is interesting as a document of the weird culture behind the companies that have such an effect on our lives. Drinking is “low-status”; the preferred inebriants are ketamine and mushrooms. Top performers wear dressing gowns and socks with sandals, not suits. All food comes by a delivery app.
And Doomers will be of historical interest for its account of a strange moment in human consciousness. We are all aware that artificial intelligence might very soon change everything totally. Doomers shows how this awareness tries our thoughts and imaginations. We recognise the familiar concepts, contours and cul-de-sacs of present AI debate: how Russia and China will continue their development if the west stops; how to weigh ethically the chance of total doom against total emancipation; comparisons to the industrial revolution and the discovery of fire.
Watching Doomers makes you imagine posterity looking back on moments like this, in which we tried to understand what was coming. You wonder if they will think we were right or wrong – and just what, exactly, is the nature of the intelligence that will be watching us.
[See also: Christopher Marlowe’s stage fright]
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