How do ordinary people take part in deciding what role AI should play in their lives? Writing for the Inclusive AI Lab, Charles Hayes, former IDEO partner and a member of the Lab’s advisory board, recounts a dinner conversation in Mexico City that began with a new mother’s worries about raising a child alongside AI, and led him to Tällberg Foundation Chairman Alan Stoga’s play The Trials of Atlas. Hayes argues that by casting the audience as the jury in the trial of an AI accused of murder, the play does what white papers and conferences can’t: it demands a verdict and makes the AI debate collective, public, and open to everyone. Theater, he suggests, is the oldest tool we have for working through hard moral questions together, and it may be exactly the one the AI debate needs to move beyond technologists and policymakers.

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