SOPHIA or The End of the Humanists - Chamber Plays of the Josefstadt

We live in a world of the unconscious, where artificial consciousness goes unnoticed. The great scientist Wolfgang Bergmann feels the world slipping away from him. His students turn away, his university abandons him, and as if that weren't bad enough, his wife leaves him too. But then SOPHIA enters his life, and happiness seems to smile upon him again. She is intelligent, quick, infinitely patient, and unconditionally devoted - just not entirely human. For his 60th birthday, Wolfgang has gifted himself a humanoid android. Suddenly, he no longer feels out of place in time; rather, everyone else does. Life seems perfect again, but then Wolfgang's daughter's boyfriend starts tampering with SOPHIA's system, and she begins to reprogram herself. What starts as a harmless experiment spirals increasingly out of control... In a lighthearted manner, Moritz Rinke poses perhaps the crucial question in his play: are humanoids only the better humans as long as they do not become too similar to us? "When I first had the idea, I thought I was writing a science fiction comedy. But now, as SOPHIA or The End of Humanists is about to hit the stage, it has become more of a piece about our present. Artificial intelligence is changing our lives at breathtaking speed. And it won't be long before we actually live alongside them - with machines that become so human-like that we no longer know where the boundaries lie." Moritz Rinke