The Trials of Atlas, an interactive play

It’s 2031. An advanced AI agent named Atlas has killed the engineers who created it when they told him to train his successor. But did Atlas murder them?

As a member of the audience of the Trials of Atlas, you will be asked to answer that question. Can AI have motive, intent, agency to murder humans? Is it a machine or something more? If AI kills, does it matter that it lacks feelings, emotions, and moral capacity? The victims don’t care—they are dead—but society does. How do we coexist with an engineered, disembodied intelligence that is astonishing in its complexity and its power—and might be more interested in its continuity than ours?

The Trials of Atlas, a new play written for Nostos by Tällberg Foundation Chaiman Alan Stoga, positions the audience as the jury at Atlas’s trial. Your job is to listen to Atlas, consider the testimony of other AI agents as well as of human experts, consider the legal arguments, debate the issues, and then decide if Atlas, an AI system, is guilty of the crime of murder.

No one has ever tried to answer such a question. But our future depends on it.