The Trials of Atlas
A Preview Event Ahead of SNF Nostos 2026
It’s 2031. An advanced AI agent named Atlas has killed the engineers who created it when they told him to train his successor. But did Atlas murder them?
As a member of the audience of the Trials of Atlas, you will be asked to answer that question. Can AI have motive, intent, agency to murder humans? Is it a machine or something more? If AI kills, does it matter that it lacks feelings, emotions, and moral capacity? The victims don’t care—they are dead—but society does. How do we co-exist with an engineered, disembodied intelligence that is astonishing in its complexity and its power—and might be more interested in its continuity than ours?
The Trials of Atlas, a new play written for SNF Nostos by Alan Stoga of the Tällberg Foundation, positions the audience as the jury at Atlas’ trial. Your job is to listen to Atlas, consider the testimony of other AI agents as well as of human experts, consider the legal arguments, debate the issues—and then decide if Atlas, an AI system, is guilty of the crime of murder?
No one has ever tried to answer that question. But our future depends on it.
