When Will All of This Have Been . . . Just Code?

ABSTRACT While tech billionaires, real and fictional alike, imagine artificial intelligence as ushering in a new era of transhuman, post-embodiment immortality and limitless cognitive and creative potential for the newly uploaded cyber-avatars of previously earthbound, mortal, organic humans, Tod Machover and Robert Pinsky’s “robot opera,” Death and the Powers (2012), read alongside Samuel Beckett’s short plays—particularly Play (1963)—suggests that play, that most fundamentally human impulse, demands embodiment. These dramatic works, themselves meta-theatrical in their focus on play, performance, and the contingencies of human agency in a theatrical context, show a limit to this utopian (or apocalyptic) vision of human value and the value of imaginative creation in the shadow of the rise of artificial intelligence.