“The Jury Experience: An Immersive Courtroom Case"
Gem Theatre
Detroit, Mich.
July 20, 2025
The emergence of artificial intelligence is enabling technological advances like we’ve never experienced before, and with that comes an entirely new set of ethical questions that need to be addressed. What better way to do that than with a literal jury trial?
That’s the premise of “The Jury Experience: An Immersive Courtroom Case,” an interactive theater performance where the audience witnesses a trial on stage and votes for a final verdict.
The show is being offered in cities across the world, including performances at Detroit’s Gem Theatre, whose 450-seat main theater was mostly full.
The one-hour show was a condensed, liberty-taking trial experience. It opened with a screen challenging audience members to question their beliefs about morality and justice, followed by a charming, cheesy “Welcome to Jury Duty” video. The judge entered, we rose, took an oath to serve justice, and off we went.
In this case, the person on trial was the CEO of the AI company that made the technology used in a self-driving taxi that killed a bicyclist. The taxi had been carrying one passenger and had swerved into the cyclist lane to avoid a head-on collision with a vehicle that had been trying to pass another car.
After opening statements, we were asked to follow a QR code on our phones to make an initial assessment: guilty or not guilty?
79 percent of us said not guilty, including me.
Throughout the next hour, we listened to the CEO’s testimony as both an expert technological witness and as a defendant, plus the wife of the cyclist. We heard audio recordings from the driver of the oncoming vehicle and the CEO’s former boss at his previous company, who questioned his integrity.
In between, lawyers sparred, sometimes to the point of reprimand by the judge. A couple of times we were asked to use our phones to determine whether a piece of evidence should be submitted and what final question should be asked.
After closing statements, we had about five minutes to make our final call. This time, 62 percent of us voted not guilty, still including me.
I loved the premise of the experience and its entertaining yet educating blend of civics, philosophy and modern technology. For anyone who snoozed through government or philosophy class, it’s more engaging than learning than through lecture and in a way that makes it relevant to the modern day.
One of my favorite parts was when the defense attorney made a comparison to the famous philosophical “trolley problem”: if a runaway trolley was headed on a track that would kill five people, would it be ethical for someone to proactively switch gears to redirect the trolley to a track that would kill only one person? The scenarios are then tweaked to make the dilemmas even more morally questionable. In this case, the defending attorney asked whether it was OK for the taxi – designed to protect the lives of its passengers – to choose to kill an innocent life in order to save three others. We were not given information about the speeds of the vehicles or their safety features to know for sure if the other three would have died.
While I think the cause of "The Jury Experience" is noble, the staging of the trial itself could have been more effective. Frankly, I was surprised that the percentage of “not guilty” voters went down to 62 percent from the initial assessment. After the trial, I thought that number would have risen closer to 90 percent. To me, the case was not as morally ambiguous as perhaps the creators thought it to be, but given the right changes, I think it could be.
For one, I couldn’t understand why the tech CEO was on trial and not the human driver who misjudged the time and space he’d need to pass safely. Through the audio recording, the friendly-sounding middle-aged man said he and his wife were in a rush to help their injured daughter. Though it was a close call, he said he would have been able to make the pass safely, a judgment he said a human driver would have been able to assess and, therefore, not have swerved and hit the cyclist. It was a convenient explanation (without proof) that seemed to have absolved him of responsibility. There’s certainly a counter-argument that a self-guided taxi would not have taken such a risk, especially since the defense argued that AI tech could prevent 3,000 deaths a day.
A lot of the prosecutor’s arguments were based on emotional appeal, highlighting what a wonderful husband and father the cyclist was, questioning the CEO if he’d feel differently about his decision if it was his loved one who had been killed, which were irrelevant to me (though a little worrisome how much of the audience succumbed). Would we still be upset if we found out the cyclist that died was a single, childless asshole?
The prosecutor tried to make the case that the technology wasn’t advanced enough and was – against safety recommendations – released too early out of corporate greed. He tried to make the case that waiting six months (per the recommendation) would have made a difference, which was more compelling but still not strong enough. If there was a way to prove that case, it would have made for a much tougher decision.
While I know of what happened in my group’s verdict, I’m very curious about the results they’re finding in different sessions and trends they’re seeing across the world. I was also disappointed they didn’t ask us to give our basic demographics when we registered. I’d love to see data trends in how different people across ages, sex, location, etc. approach these burgeoning ethical dilemmas with advancing technology. It seems like a missed opportunity.
Although the jury trial was far from perfect, I enjoyed the experience (as did the pair of lawyers I met after the show who elaborated on its legal errors). I’d love to see this style of theater tackle all kinds of moral dilemmas, and even last longer to more thoroughly make their cases. They could perhaps even add in a more jury-style deliberation for people to discuss with each other. Alas, I am nerdier than most, and I can’t say many others would agree. But these conversations are important, and if it takes an entertaining theater show to make them happen, I’m all for it.
