Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence. Tech companies and governments are pumping billions into this promising key technology of the future. It is expected to revolutionize virtually all areas of human life. Yet the idea is not new at its core: as early as 1816, Mary Shelley had her Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein create artificial intelligence—his famous monster has been wandering through pop culture for a good 200 years. Like today's "large language models" (e.g., ChatGPT), it learns through observation and imitation. Its clumsy brutality touches and frightens us, just as AI provokes both euphoria and apocalyptic fear. But what if these two reaction patterns were not contradictory at all: Could the desire for self-abolition be at the root of our inventiveness? Are we willingly replacing ourselves with a new, better form of existence—more rational and less destructive than the obsolete human species?
In his playful reinterpretation, director Tristan Linder combines Mary Shelley's classic with current technological debates, using the very tools that are the subject of the play. An evening of theater between science fiction and creation myth, between hope and fear.