He Studied Cognitive Science at Stanford. Then He Wrote a Startling Play About A.I. Authoritarianism.

by Michelle Goldberg

https://archive.ph/AXzdk

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/opinion/play-ai-authoritarianism.html


" ... last week, Mrinank Sharma, a safety researcher at Anthropic, quit with the sort of open letter that would have seemed wildly overwrought in a theatrical script. “The world is in peril,” he wrote, describing constant pressure at work “to set aside what matters most.” Henceforth, said Sharma, he would devote himself to “community building” and poetry. Two days later Zoë Hitzig, a researcher at OpenAI, announced her resignation in The New York Times, describing the way the tool could use people’s intimate data to target them with ads.

I reached out to the writer of “Data,” Matthew Libby, because I was curious about how he got so much so right, and learned that before he worked in theater, he studied cognitive science at Stanford. More specifically, he has a degree in symbolic systems, an interdisciplinary program that combines subjects including computer science, philosophy and psychology. He always intended to be a writer, he said, but wanted to make sure he had something to write about.

Not surprisingly, Libby, who graduated in 2017, felt the pull of Silicon Valley, at one point interviewing for an internship at Palantir. He was heartbroken when he didn’t get it. But when he came across a 2017 Intercept story headlined “Palantir Provides the Engine for Donald Trump’s Deportation Machine,” he wondered what he would have done if he’d worked there, which is how “Data” was born.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about “Data” isn’t its insight into those who leave companies making dangerous A.I., but into the majority who stay, and the stories they tell themselves about what they’re building. “My experience of the tech industry is just that there’s always this air of inevitability,” said Libby. “You know, ‘We can’t pause any of this because it’s coming no matter what, and don’t you want to be the person doing it?’” .... "



Wish I lived in NYC.