A couple’s intimate discussions about having a baby take place in a perspex cube, monitored by an apparently benign corporate entity. A mother helps her daughter with a homework assignment via virtual communication tools. And in a highly evolved care facility, a chronically ill woman tests the emotional limits of her robot nurse.

Welcome to Interference, a trilogy of near-future playlets curated and directed for the National Theatre of Scotland by Cora Bissett, whose musical memoir What Girls Are Made Of was one of the major hits of the 2018 Edinburgh fringe.

This “box-set”, says Bissett, offers the audience “a short, contained stab at an idea that leaves us with a lot of provocative thoughts.”

While the near-future setting can be liberating creatively, there’s a danger of getting caught up in the intricacies of imagined technology. “You have to just buy [into the fact] that we’ve created the rules for this world to exist,” she explains. “I’m more interested in the psychological journeys of the characters and the moral choices they have. It hasn’t felt like sci-fi at all because the technologies we are talking about are so close. It’s always a nudge away.”

Staged at City Park, a refurbished office development in Glasgow’s gently gentrifying Dennistoun, this is the company’s first site-specific show of 2019. NTS has excelled at placing work in unusual locations, be it a converted lorry on the streets of Paisley or a field in Perthshire at dawn.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cora Bissett. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

For Interference, an expanse of empty office space will be transformed by projected visuals and soundscapes to accommodate new writing from Elgin-born Morna Pearson, Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil and Romanian-born Vlad Butucea.

“We needed a space that’s very generic, polite, clean but not characteristic of any one thing,” Bissett says. “These are people working for companies or in environments where they never actually meet the person controlling or employing them, which is at the core of the plays as our world becomes more and more automated.”

In the care home scenario in particular, the story explores how artificial intelligence can become more human. But should we instead be asking how we rehumanise ourselves in these increasingly automated times?

Bissett believes we should to some extent be embracing technology: “I don’t think robots are going to take over the world right now. I’m more interested in the choices we make using technologies. It’s about how we make intelligent choices in how we use them. There’s incredible scope for connecting more broadly – I connect to my diaspora of a family across the world – but you can also be sitting on a train and not talking to the person next to you.”

“Even the piece set in a care home, where the woman is being cared for by a robot – this is something being piloted in England as an adjunct to human carers – I don’t have a kneejerk, panic-stricken reaction to it. We are on the brink of lots of new things being made possible and we need to make really clear decisions about how we protect the human role. Even if we could replace them, should we?”

Bissett harbours huge concerns about the use of data: “I am worried about how our information is used by artificially intelligent systems because that is how our rights can be eroded on a much more subtle level. I think that is a genuine anxiety about the speed that things are happening and the correct protections being in place.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Big dilemmas … Maureen Beattie in Darklands by Morna Pearson. Photograph: Eoin Carey

She also believes that theatre is the best format to unpick these anxieties, despite a seeming reluctance to do so. “I think theatre has been a bit shy of tackling this subject matter, perhaps because we feel film and television achieves it so well. But there are so many key moral dilemmas evolving that didn’t exist before. We can genetically modify babies, whereas 100 years ago that wasn’t on the table. Nobody has laid down any blueprint, so we’re all making up our responses to it and those are going to be very varied and oppositional.”

“Theatre has, since time began, dealt with the big dilemmas of being human and how we find solutions to the environments we find ourselves in. There’s something really profound about using the oldest form in the book to deal with the newest questions, and still bringing real human beings into a real space to sit and watch that together.”