For 30 years, Henrietta Swan Leavitt flooded notebooks with meticulous data nested inside hand-drawn tables. She and her fellow female “Harvard computers” earned 25 cents an hour to track the minutest details about thousands of stars. She studied Cepheids, or stars that cycle through dim and bright pulsation periods. Leavitt shoveled her data into equations computed by hand. The work was exhausting and about as easy as emptying the desert of sand using a kid’s shovel and pail. Nonetheless, she prevailed. A Cepheid’s pulse revealed its distance and for the first time, the endless vastness of space was measurable. Humans could construct accurate, three-dimensional maps of the universe!
Incredible as her discovery was, Leavitt did not choose her topic; it was assigned to her. In the 1900s, women in the sciences were not scientists, but rather tools that crunched data and generated solutions. In response to a prompt, they delivered results – just like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
This winter, Merely Players will bring to life Leavitt’s harrowing and inspiring story in “Silent Sky,” a luminous play by Lauren Gunderson. Depicting the painstaking work of the Harvard computers using the technology of the time is central to the story, and modern audiences may find themselves thinking: If only Leavitt had AI ... Our society tosses endless prompts and commands into AI chat boxes so that super processors can voilà us any answer, any image or video, or any conversational companion we desire. Perhaps Leavitt could have instantly achieved her breakthrough discovery had she possessed an artificial intelligence tool. In a similar vein, Gunderson could have used AI to not only compose a play, but also to create a performance with utterly lifelike digital actors.
But the longer we coexist with AI, the more we realize the question is not “can we do x, y, z with AI?” but rather “should we do x, y, z with AI?” Should we toss our greatest mysteries to a machine to solve? Should we deny ourselves the hunt for answers, the struggle to comprehend and the ultimate bliss of Eureka?
And the longer we work with AI, the more we realize where its capabilities run out. AI cannot run its digital performers through the emotional evolution Merely’s human actors undertake to fully embody their characters while Director Mandy Irons nudges them to explore and experiment until a scene feels true to the heart and soul. AI cannot produce the imaginative collaborations Designer Charles Ford weaves into a mesmerizing set that encases its audience, actors and the whole glimmering cosmos seemingly inside a telescope’s cylinder. Finally and thankfully, AI cannot replace the audience who resonates with the pulsating heart of Leavitt’s arduous path to a discovery that forever changed our understanding of and our eventual travels through space and time. Like Leavitt, AI receives and completes assignments. But unlike Leavitt, AI cannot and does not yearn to know what is beyond the twinkle-twinkle of the stars.
Jenny Mason, a children’s author and local writer-for-hire, is a technical assistant for Merely Players. “Silent Sky” runs Feb. 13 -22. Tickets are sold out, but there is a wait list at www.merelyplayers.org.
