He Studied Cognitive Science at Stanford. Then He Wrote a Startling Play About A.I. Authoritarianism.

When I saw “Data,” a zippy Off Broadway play about the ethical crises of employees at a Palantir-like A.I. company, last month, I was struck by its prescience. It’s about a brilliant, conflicted computer programmer pulled into a secret project — stop reading here if you want to avoid spoilers — to win a Department of Homeland Security contract for a database tracking immigrants. A brisk theatrical thriller, the play perfectly captures the slick, grandiose language with which tech titans justify their potentially totalitarian projects to the public and perhaps to themselves.

“Data is the language of our time,” says a data analytics manager named Alex, sounding a lot like the Palantir........

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