Article by Michelle Goldberg: “When I saw “Data,” a zippy Off Broadway play about the ethical crises of employees at a Palantir-like A.I. company, last month, I was struck by its prescience. It’s about a brilliant, conflicted computer programmer pulled into a secret project — stop reading here if you want to avoid spoilers — to win a Department of Homeland Security contract for a database tracking immigrants. A brisk theatrical thriller, the play perfectly captures the slick, grandiose language with which tech titans justify their potentially totalitarian projects to the public and perhaps to themselves.
“Data is the language of our time,” says a data analytics manager named Alex, sounding a lot like the Palantir chief Alex Karp. “And like all languages, its narratives will be written by the victors. So if those fluent in the language don’t help democracy flourish, we hurt it. And if we don’t win this contract, someone else less fluent will.”
I’m always on the lookout for art that tries to make sense of our careening, crises-ridden political moment, and found the play invigorating. But over the last two weeks, as events in the real world have come to echo some of the plot points in “Data,” it’s started to seem almost prophetic.
Its protagonist, Maneesh, has created an algorithm with frighteningly accurate predictive powers. When I saw the play, I had no idea whether such technology was really on the horizon. But this week, The Atlantic reported on Mantic, a start-up whose A.I. engine outperforms many of the best human forecasters across domains from politics to sports to entertainment…(More)”.
