SOPHIA oder das Ende der Humanisten

Rotenturmstrasse 20

1010 Wien

 

We live in a world of the unconscious, where an artificial consciousness goes unnoticed.

Wolfgang Bergmann, the great scientist, feels his world slipping away. His students and the university turn away from him, as does his wife. But then SOPHIA enters his life: clever, quick, infinitely patient, and unconditionally devoted to him. For his 60th birthday, Wolfgang gave himself a humanoid android. Suddenly, he's no longer out of time, but everyone else is. When Wolfgang's daughter's boyfriend – a failed computer science student – tampers with SOPHIA's system at the birthday party, she begins to learn uncontrollably and define herself. And soon, she not only seems more human than we are, but also questions her own existence. What begins as an experiment increasingly becomes an existential threat.

Moritz Rinke's play lightheartedly introduces the frightening logic of the "intelligence explosion," as predicted by the British mathematician Irving John Good: The first ultra-intelligent machine will be humanity's last invention.

"When I first had the idea, I thought I was writing a science fiction comedy. But now that SOPHIA, or The End of the Humanists, is about to be staged, it's probably become more of a play about our present. Artificial intelligence is changing our lives at breathtaking speed. And it won't be long before we actually live alongside them—with machines that become so human-like that we no longer know where the boundaries lie."
Moritz Rinke

(Source: josefstadt.org)