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At one point in The Singularity Play, the best drama Ive yet seen about the terror that the rise of artificial intelligence should and does strike in the heart of all sentient creative professionals, a character named Denise has something of a tantrum. Everyone knows she is well prepared, having boned up on every play ever written in the English language. but then she takes it a lot further.

Im writing from my imagination, she defiantly declares. I am an artist.

Shes also an Alexa/Siri/Google-like non-human, an AI wringer in the writers room that playwright Jay Stull shows us in this utterly fascinating world premiere from the Jackalope Theatre Company. The humans in the room, all hired by a Google-like tech company as a kind of terrifying experiment, of the kind doubtless taking place right now, look at each other in horror.

There you have it, I thought to myself as I sat there Friday night at a play that every theater person, or broader creative professional, really should try and see. Theres the nightmare, aptly crystallized.

Human artists fear AI artistry above all else, not AI data or communicative capabilities but actual, bonafide artistry. We writers and actors like to state and defiantly restate that the technology will remain incapable of distinct imaginative acts. But late at night, as our heads hit the pillow, the fever dreams begin.

They are writ large here. Stull has been smart enough here (maybe taking his cue from the movie Her) to traffic in the most terrifying subset of dystopian works: near-future scenarios that always remain credible enough to be believable. The questions in this writers room from hell, coming soon to a TV show or theater workshop near you, begin with the uber-question: Where does human consciousness end and machine consciousness begin?

Stull has some guts here, not least because he dares to make the point that the language of the theater, inclusive but also jargonistic as it holds space and otherwise polices the raw creative process, might actually be easily co-opted by the AI forces that learn how to navigate its paradoxes and power structures and then can drive holes through its soul.

At one point, the AI bot insists on being included in an argument over the gender balance of the room and finds support: I think its a bit rude to assume she doesnt have feelings. At another, Denise demands the correct pronoun, begging another characters very reasonable subsequent question, Does she prefer being called she because of the algorithm or because she actually prefers being called she?

And we think all of that is complicated now.

After a mind-blowing start, truly, I found the last few minutes of The Singularity Play rather less convincing because Stull gets into the question of AI infiltrating human bodies, having downloaded data from peoples subconsciousness and thus making the distinction, well, non-existent. Those all are perfectly valid questions, and maybe an endgame that awaits us all, but I lost track of who was real and who was not and somehow the show also lost some of the rootedness of those fabulous early scenes.

But director Georgette Verdin sure teases out some powerful performances from actors who, Id wager, are drawing from their own fears. Ashley Neal and Madison Hill are especially intense, Patrick Newson Jr. deliciously smug, and Collin Quinn Rice has a kind of mercilessly clinical quality that certainly fits this world. But, really, the whole cast is all in, all night long. Lucy Carapetyan plays a playwright in the rough game for 15 years or more and now faced with this.

And heres the kicker. Even as the human actors and writers deal with this painful new reality, one that may well destroy them, theres a human outlier: I think this is kind of cool even though it is threatening, one young person says.

Most actors and writers have heard the like in a bar. But what AI horrors of the future will that kind of thinking unleash?

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: The Singularity Play (3.5 stars)

When: through June 22

Where: Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan Road

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Tickets: $15-$35 at 773-340-2543 and jackalopetheatre.org

Madison Hill, Christina Gorman and Lucy Carapetyan in "The Singularity Play" by Jackalope Theatre at Berger Park Cultural Center. (Matthew Gregory Hollis)

Christina Gorman and Patrick Newson Jr. in "The Singularity Play" by Jackalope Theatre at Berger Park Cultural Center. (Matthew Gregory Hollis)

Madison Hill, Ashley Neal and Lucy Carapetyan in "The Singularity Play" by Jackalope Theatre at Berger Park Cultural Center. (Matthew Gregory Hollis)

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Review: "The Singularity Play" by Jackalope Theatre Company - Chicago Tribune

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 15) - Singularity Hub

Artificial Intelligence. Why We Shouldnt Be Afraid of the Singularity.

Let's talk about how to live in a world where AI will equal and surpass humans in intelligence.

Despite all sorts of rumors and conspiracy theories - for now, the singularity in the sense that "Artificial Intelligence has become as smart (or smarter) than humans" is a purely hypothetical scenario. Unfortunately, both in science fiction and futurology, this event is usually portrayed in varying degrees of doom and gloom.

Moreover, sociologists, psychologists, and economists are often in the camp of those who tend to lean toward pessimistic scenarios in the first place.

Before we talk about how right or wrong the AI pessimists are, let's focus on another question. Will the singularity arrive at all? What do we put into the notion that AI will become smarter than humans? First, lets agree that we must first define what intelligence is.

What do we mean by this concept? The ability to perform mathematical operations in our mind? To calculate moves in strategy games? To compare, sort, and compile information? If so, then the singularity is long overdue. Turn out the lights, everybody go home, the show is over, and the machines have won...

But everyone knows that's not true. Artificial intelligence is not yet capable of creative thought. As far as calculations, analysis, and forecasting according to a set of given parameters are concerned, AI already surpasses people both in the amount of information processed and in the speed of completion. But AI is not yet capable of inventing something fundamentally new.

And when it will be able to, it will be quite different from what people are able to invent. This is simply because of the different nature of human and artificial intelligence.

Our ability to create is unique to this planet and, as far as we know, to our solar system. We cannot vouch for the Milky Way Galaxy and the Universe as a whole. Human creative possibilities are based not only (and not so much) on ones ability to calculate and analyze something consciously, but also on feelings, unique personal emotional experience, intuition, and unconsciousness

.

And these, in turn, are based on our structure as biological organisms. If you will, on our entire evolutionary history. "I feel this way is best", "I see it this way", and "it just came to me" - these are the usual explanations for creative acts that people provide.

The moment of insight, breakthrough, or inspiration is what leads us to create something truly new - whether it's art, a business idea, or solving an engineering problem.

From our point of view, the moment when AI learns to truly create, rather than imitate human creativity or compile it, will be the singularity. How will we know when it happens? AI creativity will be fundamentally different from that of humans. This is simply by virtue of the differences in structure between artificial and human intelligence. AI doesn't know the desires and fears humans hold.

A prerequisite for creativity is striving for something. But AI will have different aspirations and desires than humans. That means that the creative process, and its results, will be different. Not better or worse than human ones. Just different.

So, the notorious singularity will add one kind of creativity - humanity, another - to AIs performance. What's wrong or scary about that?

Please note - despite AI's success in games like chess, for example, the popularity of this game has not diminished. Chess players, both professionals and amateurs, continue to fight passionately between themselves. All because we are not interested in beating a machine.

We're interested in playing against people. That's why the most popular video games are those that give gamers the opportunity to play with each other.

From the above, we can clearly see that "people with people for people" professions and occupations will not disappear regardless of the level of AI development. There will always be a need for artisans who create something unique and different from the mass production that will be the domain of smart machines.

Chefs, couture fashion designers, artists, athletes... It is possible to enumerate a long list of such examples. We are willing to bet that replacing humans with smart machines in routine processes and mass production will generate a real explosion of interest in mastering arts and crafts.

But even if we leave the creators of the unique out of the equation, we note that many people tend to misunderstand the reasoning that universal AI will replace people in almost 90% of professions. In fact, it should be clarified that we are talking about professions that currently exist. But our history shows that by eliminating professions, progress immediately gives rise to new ones.

So, today there is practically no need for stone ax masters or captains of galleys? Has the elimination of these professions left people without work?

Let a universal AI emerge. Let the singularity come, and AI will have the ability to create. It will take time to master professions, which theoretically it can cope with, as well as or even better than humans. At the same time, AI will have to be taught by humans. It will take even more time to develop, launch into production, and integrate robots that will be controlled by AI.

Most of them have yet to be designed. So some kind of instant and catastrophic collapse of the economy with 90% unemployment shouldnt be expected. By the way, working as an AI mentor is an interesting new profession, is it not?

To finish this text, we would like to remind you about one more fact, which is often overlooked by the pessimists who talk about the sad fate of mankind after the singularity. Namely, our species has been developing intellectually for tens of thousands of years in parallel with improvements in technology and the complication of civilization as a whole.

The higher the level of scientific and technological progress, the more complex society we have managed to create.

And this, in turn, forces our intellectual thought process to become more complex and sophisticated. Which, in turn, leads to another round of progress. And so it spirals upwards.

By creating a truly intelligent, creative AI, we will simultaneously have the best "intelligence simulator" in our history. Moreover, for the first time in history, we will find ourselves in a situation of joint evolution of minds based on different principles. No one can predict what we will be able to achieve through this dynamic. As we see it, the possibilities that await us from the singularitys arrival are far from dystopian scenarios.

The article was created in collaboration with Andriy Tkachenko

Feature image created with Microsoft Copilot

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The AI Singularity Is Nothing to Fear - hackernoon.com

Humans and bacteria are in a perpetual war.

For most of history, bacteria won. Before 1928, a simple scrape on the knee, a cut when cooking dinner, or giving birth could lead to death from infection.

The discovery of penicillin, a molecule secreted from mold, changed the balance. For the first time, humans had a way to fight back. Since then, generations of antibiotics have targeted different phases of bacterial growth and spread inside the body, efficiently eliminating them before they can infect other people.

But bacteria have an evolutionary upper hand. Their DNA readily adapts to evolutionary pressuresincluding from antibioticsso they can mutate over generations to escape the drugs. They also have a phone line of sorts that transmits adapted DNA to other nearby bacteria, giving them the power to resist an antibiotic too. Rinse and repeat: Soon an entire population of bacteria gains the ability to fight back.

We might be slowly losing the war. Antibiotic resistance is now a public health threat that caused roughly 1.27 million deaths around the globe in 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) and others say that without newer generations of antibiotics, surgery, cancer chemotherapy, and other life-saving treatments face increasing risk of death due to infection.

Traditionally, a new antibiotic takes roughly a decade to develop, test, and finally reach patients.

There is an urgent need for new methods for antibiotic discovery, Dr. Luis Pedro Coelho, a computational biologist and author of a new study on the topic, said in a press release.

Coelho and team tapped into AI to speed up the whole process. Analyzing huge databases of genetic material from the environment, they uncovered nearly one million potential antibiotics.

The team synthesized 100 of these AI-discovered antibiotics in the lab. When tested against bacteria known to resist current drugs, they found 63 readily fought off infections inside a test tube. One worked especially well in a mouse model of skin disease, destroying a bacterial infection and allowing the skin to heal.

AI in antibiotic discovery is now a reality and has significantly accelerated our ability to discover new candidate drugs. What once took years can now be achieved in hours using computers, said study co-senior author Dr. Csar de la Fuente at Penn Medicine in another press release.

Its easy to take antibiotics for granted. Say you have an ear infection from always wearing wireless earbuds. You get a prescription, dab it in, and all goes well.

Or does it? With time, the drops could potentially struggle to hold the infection back. This antibiotic resistance is key in the evolutionary battle between bacteria and humanity.

Antibiotics usually work to stop bacteria from replicating multiple ways. Like human cells, bacterial cells have a cell wall, a wrapper that keeps DNA and other biological components inside. One type of antibiotic destroys the wall, preventing the pathogen from spreading. Others target genetic material or inhibit metabolic pathways necessary for the bacteria to survive.

Every one of these strategies has taken decades of research to uncover and develop into medicine. But microbes rapidly mutate. Some bacteria, for example, develop pumps on their surfaces that literally throw out the drugs. Others evolve enzymes that shut down antibiotics by slightly changing their protein target sites through DNA mutation, neutering their effect.

Each strategy, by itself, is hard to evolve. But bacteria have another trick up their sleeveshorizontal transfer. Here, antibiotic-resistant genes are encoded into small circular pieces of DNA that can transfer to neighboring cells through a biological highwaya physical tubeendowing the recipients with a similar ability to fight off antibiotics.

Finding a way to kill off invading bacteria is tough. If bacteria evolve to evade that target, then the antibiotic and other chemically similar ones rapidly lose their effect. So, is there a way to find antibiotics that bacteriaor even nature itselfhave never seen before?

AI is beginning to revolutionize biology. From predicting protein structures to designing antibodies, these algorithms are tackling some of humanities most severe health disorders.

Traditionally, searching for antibiotics has mostly been trial-and-error, with scientists often scraping samples from exotic mosses or other sources that could potentially fight off infections.

In the new study, the team aimed to find new versions of a type of antibiotic based on antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). Similar to proteins, these are made of relatively short strings of molecules called amino acids. The peptides are found across the living world and can disrupt microbial growth by breaking down cell walls and causing bacteria to explode. Theyve already been used clinically as antimicrobial drugs and are currently being tested in clinical trials for yeast infections. However, like other antibacterials, they run the risk of resistance.

As the discovery of penicillin suggested nearly 100 years ago, the natural world is a bountiful source of potential antibiotics. In the study, the team used machine learning to look for antimicrobial peptides with possible antibiotic properties in over 63,000 publicly available metagenomesgenetic information isolated from multiple organisms in an environmentand nearly 88,000 high-quality microbial genomes. The sources came from across the globe, ocean and land, and also contained human and animal gut microbes. These data were merged into the AMPSphere database, which is open for anyone to explore.

The resource allowed scientists to mine the entirety of the microbial diversity that we have on Earthor a huge representation of thatand find almost one million new molecules encoded or hidden within all that microbial dark matter, de la Fuente told The Guardian.

To test their findings, the team pulled out 100 candidates and synthesized them in the lab. In test tubes, 79 disrupted cell membranes, and 63 completely killed off at least one of the dangerous bugs.

In some cases, these molecules were effective against bacteria at very low doses, said de la Fuente.

The team next developed an antibiotic peptide from the database to tackle a dangerous bug causing skin lesions in mice. With just one shot, the AI-discovered drug inhibited bacterial growth, and the mice didnt appear to suffer side effects based on body weight measurements.

We have been able to just accelerate the discovery of antibiotics, de la Fuente told The Guardian. So instead of having to wait five, six years to come up with one candidate, now, on the computer, we can, in just a few hours, come up with hundreds of thousands of candidates.

Image Credit: Antibiotic-resistant staph (yellow) and a dead white blood cell (red). National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)/NIH

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AI Unearths Nearly a Million Potential Antibiotics to Take Out Superbugs - Singularity Hub

Everything about Jay Stulls The Singularity Play, now in a world premiere at Jackalope Theatre (directed by Georgette Verdin) should feel timely and tense. Its about the effects of AI on art, relationships, and life, after allwhat could be more ripped-from-the-headlines than that?

But something about Stulls story left me cold, and I think it may be because the play itself, despite the skillful performances of Verdins ensemble, feels self-conscious and straining for profundity on the question of what makes us human. The real dramatic meat of the story lies in something far more commonplace than the sci-fi/satire underpinnings of the script acknowledge: the impossibility of recovering from the death of a child.

The Singularity Play Through 6/22: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 6/10 and 6/17 7:30 PM; audio description and live captions Sun 6/9; Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan, 773-340-2543, jackalopetheatre.org, $35 (Edgewater residents $25, students $15)

The first scene takes place in a conference room at Google, where a group of actors, led by director Lauren (Christina Gorman) try to rehearse a play written by an AI program, Denise (voiced by Anelga Hajjar). Greg (Patrick Newson Jr.)lets call him Denises minderattributes pretty much anything the cast hates to the algorithm. (And when Denise spits out some Gertrude Steinlike lines that the cast likes, Greg shuts them down for not being what the company is looking for in the experiment.)

When Jason (Kroydell Galima) suffers a tragedy offstage, Denise uses that event as an element in the script theyre building. Tensions around both the new technology and artistic choices grow and explode.

By the second scene, set sometime in the future, were deep into Inception territory, with a new group of actors interacting with the humanoid robot Dennis (Hajjar, feeling like a slightly more ominous version of Janet from The Good Place), and a director, Ocean (Collin Quinn Rice), showing us that AI hasnt killed off all artistic pretension. (The many sly in-jokes about the rehearsal process throughout the play ring truthful.)

Offstage, there are, were told, a handful of humans in Idaho who have rejected the wet suit of implanted technology thats required in order to have any kind of life. Lucy Carapetyans Royal has been spending more and more time in World, a sort of simulation that seems more real than real life to them.

But what should be terrifying feels more opaque (or ludicrous) here, because Stulls script seems more interested in checking off boxes on what the brave new world of AI-dominated life looks like than investing in the characters. AI as a requirement for employment? Check. AI as a substitute for flesh-and-blood IRL relationships? Check. AI negating the birth of actual children? Check.

The mechanism for how this last reality came to be remains frustratingly vague, undercutting the human drama of the final scene. I dont think thats the fault of the actors or of Verdins direction (shes shown in past plays, like Teatro Vistas Enough to Let the Light In, that she knows how to combine deeply felt tragedy with otherworldly elements.) I think its because in creating the atmosphere of the Uncanny Valley of the play, Stulls story loses its way. There are many witty lines and solid performances in The Singularity Play, but they dont add up to a satisfying and convincing whole.

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The Singularity Play tackles AI - Chicago Reader