SOPHIA OR THE END OF THE HUMANISTS (EN)

Who is afraid of AI?

Hardly any other topic concerns us all as much as artificial intelligence. It has long since broken out of the confines of scientific research, is — sometimes more, sometimes less obvious — part of our everyday lives and its potential cannot be estimated at all. Neither are their weaknesses, limitations and potential dangers.

Moritz Rinke has written a highly topical, captivating and very humorous piece about this topic.

We live in a world of the unconscious, and artificial consciousness is not even noticeable.

Wolfgang Bergmann, the great scientist, feels the world slipping away from him. His students and the university are turning their backs on him, as is his wife. But then SOPHIA comes into his life: clever, quick, infinitely patient and devoted to him unconditionally. Wolfgang gave himself a humanoid android for his 60th birthday. Suddenly he is no longer out of time, everyone else is. When Wolfgang's daughter's boyfriend — a failed computer science student — struggles with SOPHIA's system at the birthday party, she begins to learn uncontrollably and define herself. And soon she not only appears more human than us, but also questions her own existence. What begins as an experiment is increasingly becoming an existential threat.

The play by Moritz Rinke cheerfully takes you into the frightening logic of the “intelligence explosion,” as predicted by British mathematician Irving John Good: The first ultra-intelligent machine will be man's last invention.

Moritz Rinke, born in Worpswede in 1967, studied applied theatre studies in Gießen. At the same time, he began writing columns and reports, including for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and Theater heute. From 1994 to 1996 he was a trainee, then an editor at the Berliner Tagesspiegel. He received the renowned Axel Springer Prize for his reports A Day with Marlene (1995) and on the Love Parade in 1997.

Several of his plays were nominated for the Mülheim Dramatic Prize: THE MAN WHO NEVER DISCOVERED A WOMAN'S NAKEDNESS (1997), for which he also received the PEN Club Liechtenstein Literature Prize, REPUBLIC OF VINETA (2001), THE OPTIMISTS (2004), CAFÉ UMBERTO (2006) and WE LOVE AND KNOW NOTHING (2013).

In the critics' survey conducted by the magazine Theater heute, REPUBLIK VINETA was voted the best German-language play of the 2000/2001 season.

In 2003, the film SEPTEMBER (directed by Max Färberböck), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, was released in German cinemas, co-wrote its screenplay Rinke and in which he was also seen as an actor.

In 2008, REPUBLIK VINETA was filmed for cinema.

In 2006/07, Moritz Rinke was a visiting professor of “Scenic Writing” at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig and in 2013/14 a visiting lecturer at the University of Paderborn as part of the reading series “Contemporary German Literature” at the Institute of German Studies and Comparative Literature.

In 2010, the workbook Ich gründe eine Akademie der Selbstachtung was published about him (ed. Kai Bremer; Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main).

In 2019, he received a scholarship from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.