Before I was a science journalist, I was a history of science grad student. I like to joke that I transitioned from the olds to the news.  

One of my grad school gigs was at a university museum that housed tens of thousands of historical scientific instruments and technological artifacts. While the catalogue boasted many a rockstar item (the type of microscope that Leeuwenhoek used to see a red blood cell for the first time in 1674! a prototype for the first Polaroid instant camera!), my job was humdrum, bordering on mind-numbing. I had to look at each object one at a time and write a hyper-detailed physical description of it to upload to the publicly available online database. As I did this, day after day, I realized that the vast majority of the objects were actually kind of boring – do we really need this many cathode ray tubes? – and, to me, kind of cryptic and opaque – wait, what even is a cathode ray tube? At my desk, I would regularly zone out, pondering why anyone would pay to store this junk or pay me to write about it. The whole enterprise started to feel like sentimental institutional hoarding.

Or at least it did until I read this one book. Not one of the dense jargony grad school books assigned to me on a syllabus. But instead, a silly short picture book called The Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay. It’s set in the year 4022, when an amateur archaeologist named Howard Carson falls down a shaft and happens upon a sacred burial ground from an ancient society called Usa. Except it’s not a sacred burial ground, it’s a Motel 6. And every object he finds and details, he misinterprets. For example, the Sacred Headdress he finds is actually a toilet seat cover. The Great Altar is a TV set. It’s all quite funny, as if Amelia Bedelia switched jobs with Indiana Jones. But reading that book helped me see my job, the art of history, and even my own life differently. It helped me realize how the act of imagining the past from objects – trying to resurrect their stories, trying to find traces of the people who used them, trying to find clues about the society they belonged to, and even potentially why that society got snuffed out – is at best, hard, at worst, futile, but despite all that, supremely creative and oddly fun. Life is just more interesting if you can mentally vault above all the surface-level noise, and try to discern a bigger picture (even if it’s just one that you yourself made up).  

Jordan Harrison’s play, The Antiquities, is another Motel of the Mysteries for me. A piece of art that reframes how I look at, well, things. And in doing so, how I look at the humans who make and use and interpret those things.

Especially now, in the age of AI. When we’re all aswirl with anxious questions about what AI can do, what AI should do, and most of all, where that leaves the rest of us. It’s funny. People ask me a lot about AI. My 90-year old neighbor, waiting for an ambulance after a fall, asked me: “What’s the deal with AI?” My kid’s school asked me to join a task force on the subject. And it’s not like I have much expertise here, I studied the history of science. But it’s clearly on everyone’s mind. And people are searching everywhere, anywhere for some kind of crystal ball into the future to see what’s going to happen. 

And look. I don’t know. I’ve done AI stories that are beautiful and hopeful and hilarious and inspiring. And I’ve done AI stories that are bleak and horrible and terrifying.

But what I love love love about this play is: Even if I fed this premise into ChatGPT (and trust me, I’ve fed some great prompts into ChatGPT): There’s no way it could have written this. The structure alone is so creative and, well, Jordan. The nose job storyline? How perversely counter-intuitive and hilarious! And of course it’s a slippery slope from cosmetic surgery to a new brain. And the ending! [Spoiler alert!] What a twist! Who but Jordan would cap off a series of touching vignettes about humans being snuffed out by machines with a monologue – a convincing monologue, even? – from the machines about why they are so grateful for us, the transitional species that birthed them? All these choices are so… human. In the best possible way.

And maybe that’s the point. That Jordan knew this all along. (As I’m typing this I’m realizing, of course he did). Quick confession here: I’ve been a Jordan Harrison fan for years. I read a stolen copy of Kid-Simple: A Radio Play before I even worked in radio. I saw Doris to Darlene multiple times. And so I shouldn’t be surprised that his ultimate stunt here is to create a play about AI, where AI wins, but that win is undercut by how funny, smart, weird, and human the play actually is. That only a human – a human who happens to love Mary Shelley, who thinks dial-up modem noises are funny, who cares about queer history, who loves clever dramatic structures – could have written The Antiquities. 

I rate this play four toasters out of four. My only note: it needed more cathode ray tubes.