Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar's McNeal--a much anticipated theater production starring Robert Downey Jr., with ChatGPT in a supporting role--I mused how playwrights have been dealing with the implications of AI for over a century. In 1920--well before Alan Turing devised his famous test and decades before the 1956 summer Dartmouth conference that gave artificial intelligence its name--a Czech playwright named Karel Čapek wrote R.U.R.--Rossum's Universal Robots. Not only was this the first time the word "robot" was employed, but Čapek may qualify as the first AI doomer, since his play dramatized an android uprising that slaughtered all of humanity, save for a single soul. Also on the boards in New York City this winter was a small black-box production called Doomers, a thinly veiled dramatization of the weekend where OpenAI's nonprofit board gave Sam Altman the boot, only to see him return after an employee rebellion. Neither of these productions have the pizzazz of a splashy Broadway extravaganza--maybe later we'll buy tickets to a musical where Altman and Elon Musk have a dance-off--but both grapple with issues that reverberate in Silicon Valley conference rooms, Congressional hearings, and late-night drinking sessions at the annual NeurIPS conference.

Ayad Akhtar's brilliant new play, McNeal, currently at the Lincoln Center Theater, is transfixing in part because it tracks without flinching the disintegration of a celebrated writer, and in part because Akhtar goes to a place that few writers have visited so effectively--the very near future, in which large language models threaten to undo our self-satisfied understanding of creativity, plagiarism, and originality. And also because Robert Downey Jr., performing onstage for the first time in more than 40 years, perfectly embodies the genius and brokenness of the title character. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. I've been in conversation for quite some time with Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He's one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can't be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God's sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he's used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn't believe that this should be controversial. In early September, Akhtar, Downey, Bartlett Sher--the Tony Award winner who directed McNeal--and I met at Downey's home in New York for what turned out to be an amusing, occasionally frenetic, and sometimes even borderline profound discussion of the play, its origins, the flummoxing issues it raises, and, yes, Avengers: Age of Ultron. We were joined intermittently by Susan Downey, Robert's wife (and producing partner), and the person who believed that Akhtar's play would tempt her husband to return to the stage. The conversation that follows is a condensed and edited version of our sprawling discussion, but I think it captures something about art and AI, and it certainly captures the exceptional qualities of three people, writer, director, and actor, who are operating at the pinnacle of their trade, without fear--perhaps without enough fear--of what is inescapably coming.

In three minutes, the Scout drone is assembled. One minute more, and it's airborne, tossed by a Marine. The flight is short, maybe 20 minutes at the most, but the information gained is valuable, a real-time video of just who or what, exactly, is behind that building a mile down the road. With the area surveilled, the aptly-named Scout drone flies back, and suffers a rough landing, snapping a wing. The squad can print another back at company HQ after the mission, and have it ready to go in a couple hours.

"The people closest to the problem are also the people closest to the solution," Capt. Chris Wood, co-lead for Additive Manufacturing with the US Marine Corps, told Engadget. In 2016, the USMC put that adage to the test as it launched the Logistics Innovation Challenge, a program "to solicit ideas from Marines, sailors and civilians from across the Marine Corps" that would address challenges that they face in their daily duties. And this is only the start to the US Military's additive-manufacturing aspirations. Pretty soon, everything from ammunition to autonomous vehicles could come from the Corps' cadre of 3D printers.