“What do you want, my human friends, from your machines?” Ethan Lipton asks at the top of We Are Your Robots, a one-act musical performance that’s presented as a live demo of the latest in AI-assisted automation technology. (The show, a co-production of Theatre for a New Audience and Rattlestick Theater, opened Sunday at Brooklyn’s Polansky Shakespeare Center.)

With his receding hairline, deep-set eyes, and salt-and-pepper beard, Lipton has a rumpled charisma that makes the impending rise of the machines seem far less threatening. He’s joined on stage by his regular bandmates — Eben Levy on guitar, Ian Riggs on bass, and Vito Dieterle on sax — all dressed in matching blue-gray suits with cartoonish circuitry figures stitched onto the jackets as a decorative embellishment (costumes by Alejo Vietti). The look recalls an early ’60s boy band like the one featured in That Thing You Do, a retro approach that’s replicated in Lee Jellinek’s set design, which features a giant screen whose animated projections (by Katherine Freer) consistently feature vintage-looking robots.

Through a thoughtful monologue as well as a series of catchy, jazz-inflected original songs, Lipton addresses our technological anxieties with plenty of TED-talk style citations (Noam Chomsky is quoted more than once) as well as sly, absurdist humor. He credits Silly-Putty for their lifelike appearance, makes multiple non-sequitur references to former baseball legend Reggie Jackson, and introduces a Roomba-like remote-control device named Morrie as his grandfather.

The songs are foot-tapping delights, which supplement a monologue that raises surprisingly deep questions about what it means to be human in a tech-centric era. Will robots take our jobs? Yes, but mostly “the ones that are difficult and painful.” Will they murder us all in our sleep? Probably not, unless we program them to do so. “Please know that whenever you’re ready to make your exit, robots will be glad to help you do it,” Lipton says in a voice that’s more deadpan than robotic.

Until that apocalyptic moment when we give into our appetite for self-destruction, Lipton suggests, we have to accept that we humans are all little robots who undergo years of programming to join an “artificially intelligent problem-solving system” that involves collaboration with others. Nowhere is that more evident, he adds, than in the “ancient technology” of the theater, which “moves the species forward by creating small collaborations across communities, and by bringing people together and making them sit way too close to each other, so they can feel each other’s breath and warm each other’s wicked little hearts.”

We Are Your Robots will warm your wicked little heart even as it engages your intellect with its cunningly delivered Big Ideas.

WE ARE YOUR ROBOTS
Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn
Running time: 80 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Dec. 8