Two essays in this issue of TDR explore AI. Diana Taylor reexamines her by now classical distinction between the “archive and the repertoire” in terms of how digital technologies “have complicated Western systems of knowledge, raising new issues around presence, temporality, space, embodiment, liveness, sociability, and memory (usually associated with the repertoire) and those of authority, copyright, history, and preservation (linked to the archive)” (2024:25). Kathy Fang, winner of this year’s TDR Student Essay Contest, notes how ChatGPT moves “beyond performance as traced by its citationality towards performance as recursive in its iterability” (2024:133). Both these essays, and the plethora of other thinking about AI, relate deeply to my “restoration of behavior,” wherein there is no original (Schechner 1985).

If there is no original, if everything is citation, and if digital technologies infinitely multiply iterations, we indeed are living in the multiverse. So let me go further. What happens when AI reaches the “singularity” (Kurtzweil 2005) and generates itself, without prompts or input from human programmers? At what point do we acknowledge that AI has agency?

Will there be a second evolutionary process based on silicon not carbon? Silicon is the second most common element on earth (the first is oxygen). Digital printing, which is the bridge between a program and a material output, is already common. Organic life—life as we now know it—is based on carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Evolution works primarily with combinations of those elements. A different kind of life, and along with it a different kind of evolutionary development, could be based on silicon. Silicon life need not worry about global warming, or sustainable agriculture, or even the existence of carbon-oxygen-hydrogen life. Si life would have its own way of being, evolving, and doing. Are we headed for two streams of life on this planet? Or has it already arrived? To come back to the concerns of Taylor and Fang: What would I do, as TDR’s editor, if the journal received what I thought was a publishable essay…revealed to be authored by AI? Or as a theatre director, I obtain a producible AI-authored performance text? I don’t know for sure, but I lean toward “Yes” on both counts. Why not give agency to AI? What constitutes consciousness and reflexivity—the bases of agency—is expanding horizontally: in the direction of nonhuman animals on the one side[i] and machines on the other. Soon, if not already, we live in a universe of multiple agencies. More is on the way. The “extraterrestrial other,” so long a sci-fi trope, is already among us, except this alien being is of our own doing on the one hand and of our expanding understanding of consciousness on the other.

[1]. See Veit (2023) for an in-depth discussion of nonhuman animal consciousness. With regard to the legal status of nonhuman animals as persons, see the “Lavery case” decided by the New York Supreme Court on 8 June 2017, denying habeas corpus relief to two adult male chimpanzees (Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. ex rel. Tommy v. Lavery. 2017. 152 A.D.3d 73, 54 N.Y.S.3d 392 (N.Y. App. Div.). So for now, in New York at least, the only legal persons are Homo sapiens.

References
Fang, Kathy. 2024. “‘You act as Human, and I will act as AI’: Technological Rehearsals at the Interface.” TDR 68, 2 (T262):131–50.
Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking.
Schechner, Richard. 1985. “Restoration of Behavior.” In Between Theater and Anthropology, 35–116. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Taylor, Diana. 2024. “Zuckerberg’s Smile, or Presence in the Age of Digital Technologies.” TDR 68, 2 (T262):24–34.
Veit, Walter. 2023. A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. Routledge.
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Passage from a playwriting game with ChatGPT 3.5. (Screenshot by Kathy Fang)