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We Are Your Robots: Do Androids Dream of Electric Guitars?
Siri, show me a good play with music.
“What do you want, my human friends, what do you want?” sings Lipton, as Eben Levy (guitars), Ian Riggs (standup bass), and Vito Dieterle (sax) take their places on Lee Jellinek’s whimsically retro set — the band is backed by an enormous scenery robot of the beep-boop variety, its arms huge tubes of flexy ducting, its looming, affectless rectangle of a face a ready receptacle for Katherine Freer’s projections. “I think”—says Lipton Bot, quoting Noam Chomsky after finishing a heady, jazzy little number about the unknowable subjectivity of consciousness called “To Be a Bat”—“an objective observer, from Mars let’s say, looking at the human species, would conclude that they’re an evolutionary error, that they’re designed in such a way that leads them to destroy themselves.” After all, he’s read every Wikipedia entry there is, “as well as every digitized novel — except for My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgård, which I hear is great.” He’s also able to “navigate serious moral dilemmas”: “I know, for example, that if I were your friend, and I saw you in a stage play, that afterward, when greeting you on the street, my assignment would be to tell you that I loved it.” That laugh didn’t go into my lap; pretty sure the whole theater heard that one.
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