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Ten minutes into a post-performance talk with the opening night audience for his boardroom drama “Doomers,” playwright Matthew Gasda revealed his “incredibly classical idea” for the play.
It would be about royalty in the tech world, “who’s on the throne, and… pushed off the throne, and it’d be very high risk, life or death.”
“This is our version of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth,’” he said. “These are the kings and queens in my opinion.”
Onstage at Pallas Gallery in San Francisco and co-produced by the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, where Gasda teaches a playwriting workshop, the two-act “Doomers” reimagines scenes from the weekend in 2023 when Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was ousted by the board of directors of the company he cofounded, only to be restored to power days later.
“Doomers” is a work of Gasda’s imagination, but if it were a movie, it would be “inspired by a true story.” It’s about the high-stakes poker game between the board and management of OpenAI (lightly fictionalized as the artificial intelligence company “MindMesh”) that played out in November 2023.
The opening scene is in a conference room filled with junk food litter, where Seth (Sam Hyrkin), CEO of MindMesh, and four senior people are creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine intelligence smarter than humans in almost all areas and a precursor to “artificial superintelligence” that will be hundreds of times smarter.
The group reels from the abrupt firing of Seth and the project’s lead engineer. Their astonishment and outrage are palpable; a chaotic, high-volume, strategy session in which they try to figure out how to respond to the board follows. They are aligned on the promise of the technology, envisioning abundance, empowerment and the end of poverty, hunger and disease. They also realize its risks, including rogue bioterrorists, massive job loss, social upheaval, even the relegation of humans to the category of pets.
We gradually learn that MindMesh was formed as a nonprofit, a decision Seth regrets, with a board selected to oversee (and perhaps put the brakes on) the team developing AGI.
But despite the team’s agreement on the components of benefit and the risk, a strategic direction requires they be put into balance. And there’s the rub. Team members are wildly out of synch when it comes to the weight to be given to the components. All five are deeply invested, passionate and emotional, but they do not listen well. At times the meeting is like a series of angry posts on a Reddit thread.
Seth, a damn-the-torpedoes leader, is stunned, angry and desperate to fight fire with fireworks. Alina (an excellent Emily Anderson), MindMesh’s chief safety officer, feels the weight of the technology’s risk, recounting vivid dreams that illustrate her terror of what’s being created. Having read transcripts of conversations between MindMesh engineers, she found aberrant, troubling messages—not bugs to squashed by programmers, as Seth assures the team—but fundamental characteristics of the intelligence.
Among ordered-in food and shots from a bottle of Hendricks, the team debates questions about the primacy of the human species; the possibility of creating alignment between machine intelligence and human values; and how to balance the promise of super abundance against existential risk.
Directed by Ash Baker, the cast’s rapid-fire delivery is funny, moving, and occasionally both. They tee up the big questions without pompousness.
Act 2 is set in a meeting room—also with signs of late-night meetings and dysfunction —where MindMesh board members stew. They vent, turn on each other, and, as they receive messages about negative public reaction to Seth’s firing, determine a strategy to fight back.
Their views come from a perspective consistent with their responsibility to the nonprofit’s mission. Their occasional over-inflation of the importance of their role is punctured by Richard (played with fine comic timing by Evan Sokol), vaguely identified as an investor with observer status on the board. His view is that MindMesh’s technology sucks and all it will create in the end is outstanding pornography.
While Gasda does not overdo the parallels between MindMesh and when OpenAI’s nonprofit board stunned the tech community by firing Altman, the San Francisco audience on opening night was well aware that Altman and Microsoft, a huge investor in OpenAI’s technology through a for-profit subsidiary, engineered a countercoup that returned Altman to his position.
“Doomers” does not mention the real-life story of OpenAI, but it does include references to Elon Musk, an original founder of OpenAI and now the plaintiff in litigation against Altman in federal court in Oakland.
While the OpenAI story continues to be full of drama, Gasda interestingly focuses on important questions surrounding technology: Are these coming intelligences controllable? Can they be controlled without disemboweling their development? Are the benefits so profound that we just should stand back and let it do its thing? (When Alina asks Seth why AGI is the goal, Seth says, “because it will be awesome.”)
Gasda doesn’t show his own cards, though he offers perspective using a parable derived not from the wisdom of ancient teachings, but from MindMesh’s musings.
“Doomers” is at 7 p.m. March 14-16 and March 20-22 at Pallas Gallery, 1111 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $34 to $15 at eventbrite.com/e/doomers.
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