Playwright's Perspective: MARJORIE PRIME

Breaking Character: When I started working on the play that became Marjorie Prime, I wanted it to be a collaboration with an artificial intelligence program. The idea was that I would have an extended conversation with a computer — a chatbot — and our exchange would become the dialogue of the play. It would then be performed by two human actors, and the audience would have to guess who was the computer and who was the human. I had recently read Brian Christian’s excellent book, The Most Human Human, about the Turing Test, originally devised by the British mathematician Alan Turing. It’s simple: you put a computer and a human being in another room, and you have to determine, from the way they answer your questions, which one is the human.