Breakfast Plays: Tech Will Tear Us Apart(?)

In March Microsoft released Tay, a Twitter chatbot. Within 24 hours it essentially it became a Nazi, spewing horrifically racist tweets. You see, it learned from real people and Twitter sometimes isn’t a very nice place. 

Sure, it’s the thinnest end of the wedge, but the rise of tech is a concern that echoes through this year’s Breakfast Plays. The Traverse’s four associate artists—Stef Smith, Morna Pearson, Tim Price and Rob Drummond—were asked, ‘Will technology tear us apart, or will it save us from ourselves?’ From that question they each developed short script-in-hand plays. 

Rob Drummond’s response, The Conversation, bears similarities to Tay. After attending his friend’s funeral a drunk man named Rob tries to have a conversation with a chatbot. Disconnection, depression, disenfranchisement fill Rob’s life; he goes online to find consolation. 

The frustrated communication, filled with gags, seems contrived, scripted, and yet we find out that ‘character’ Rob is a playwright and this seems to be some kind of verbatim piece. It’s a simple idea with complex things to say about that unpluggable gap between human and AI.

From a drunk man to a drunk woman, Morna Pearson’s offering Bin Heid has the funniest outright conceit: Jean stumbles across a man with his head in a wheelie bin. He’s not very talkative, but Jean more than compensates.

Pearson’s is an almost old fashioned view of tech, featuring cyborgs and the fear that automation makes manual labour obsolete. It’s humanity, however, rather than machinery that gives the play its substance. Because we’ve seen these fears before: the possibility that the man is schizophrenic, or clinically depressed, lingers in the ether and lends the humour a more bitter edge. 

In fact, a slightly sinister sense of humour runs through all the plays. None more so than Tim Price’s How to Ruin Someone’s Life From the Comfort of Your Own Beanbag, an anti-TED Talk with a tantalisingly irresponsible streak. Cristian Ortega plays hacker Darren Davidson as he describes ‘life ruining’, which involves using the internet to screw with people. Davidson got annoyed by a user on a golfing forum, so had him certified dead.

The lecture format, complete with PowerPoint presentation full of GIFs, is a great way of starkly explaining some pretty horrendous stuff. Price’s play extols the value of anonymity and privacy in an age when that seems impossible. It’s a thrilling, frightening and plugged-in take on tech. 

But the piece that fits the brief to the letter is Stef Smith’s The Girl in the Machine, a juicy sci-fi story about an app that can create new music by dead musicians. Want to hear a new Nirvana album? No problem. The app, however, has another feature too – something much more terrifying. 

Smith’s two-hander turns our addiction to tech into something more like religious cult and plays with the fact that we don’t actually know how the machines in our pockets actually work. That using them is an act of faith. What’s so exciting about this play is how huge it could be. If it’s expanded, and hopefully it will be, the possibilities it offers for staging are incredibly exciting. 

The worry’s always been there, a sci-fi staple from H.G. Wells to Terminator, that machines will one day take over, and it’s fascinating to see one theme filtered through four brilliant minds.