Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There\u2019s nothing remarkable about the grey, carpeted interview room in which East Is South is set. Nothing, that is, except the curious metal ring protruding from the table. What\u2019s it for, Lena, a young coder, enquires of the woman sitting opposite her? \u201cDon\u2019t worry about that,\u201d she replies. \u00a0Handcuffs, it turns out. And Lena should be worried. Beau Willimon\u2019s new drama is set in a secret facility dedicated to developing a powerful self-educating AI that looks set to outstrip human intelligence and possibly become sentient. But it appears that Lena and her colleague (and lover) Sasha, two programmers brought in to work on the \u201ckill-code\u201d that would halt it if it ever escaped, may have overridden the system and \u201cliberated\u201d the AI onto the internet. Ungoverned, who knows what it might do. So we\u2019re in a cat and mouse game between Lena, Sasha and two National Security Agency operatives \u2014 Samira (good cop) and Tom (bad cop).Willimon has a great writing pedigree \u2014 he created the US version of House of Cards, for example \u2014 but this new piece is a curious, stubbornly inert beast: part police procedural, part philosophical enquiry. It\u2019s packed with fascinating debates about AI, consciousness, the divine, meaning, paradox \u2014 and about our instinct to anthropomorphise entities beyond our understanding. Questions swirl and bubble. Would a super-consciousness be a threat to humanity or a saviour? Does it matter?\u201cMaybe biological evolution is just the precursor to technological evolution, right?\u201d says Lena at one point. \u201cWhat if this? God didn\u2019t create the universe. It\u2019s the universe\u2019s project to create God.\u201dThe trouble is, these richly interesting ideas come packaged in dense flashbacks, digressions and break-out scenes, weighty with debate and jargon, that hold up progress in the plot. Tension keeps dissipating and Willimon\u2019s very smart use of a thriller format to express the momentous point we have reached keeps getting bogged down.His characters neatly embody ideas and contradictions, not least the urge to believe in something bigger than ourselves and the way lived experience and emotions impact our thinking. Lena (Kaya Scodelario) grew up in a strict Mennonite community and is clearly haunted by both her traumatic personal life and the loss of a defining belief; Sasha (Luke Treadaway) is a Russian dissident who gave up piano when he realised he couldn\u2019t be perfect and who plays Bach\u2019s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to Lena as an example of reaching for the divine. Their interrogator Samira (Nathalie Armin) is of Sufi heritage and project manager Ari (Cliff Curtis) a complex mix of Jewish and M\u0101ori. The desire for meaning is common to all of them \u2014 except perhaps Tom (Alec Newman) who mainly believes in not quitting.But despite strong performances in Ellen McDougall\u2019s production, with Scodelario and Treadaway in particular bringing a mix of wariness, defiance and intense vulnerability to Lena and Sasha, they struggle to achieve real definition. So much potential here and such an important subject, but sadly the play feels as though it got stuck in \u201cloading\u201d mode.\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606To March 15, hampsteadtheatre.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There\u2019s nothing remarkable about the grey, carpeted interview room in which East Is South is set. Nothing, that is, except the curious metal ring protruding from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":211435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-211434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211436,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211434\/revisions\/211436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}