Excellent Reads

Crossposted from https://reddthat.com/post/60268518

Most remarkably, the surviving annotated copy of the Recueil in Ouro Preto’s Museu da Inconfidência allows us to watch this process of localization almost in real time. Ink and pencil notes, likely by Gonzaga, da Costa, Canon Vieira, and possibly others, mark passages on republican government, separation of powers, and colonial autonomy.

These marginalia reveal both sophisticated engagement with constitutional principles and fundamental misunderstandings shaped by translation errors and different political vocabularies. The conspirators didn’t grasp that Pennsylvania’s constitution would be revised within a decade, nor that American federalism emerged from practical compromise rather than theoretical design. Yet these very misreadings were productive, allowing them to imagine possibilities that more accurate understanding might have foreclosed.

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The Brazilian students themselves embodied transnational knowledge circulation. Post-Jesuit reforms at Coimbra, led by Domenico Vandelli and framed by the Pombaline project of scientific modernization following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, created a generation of Brazilian intellectuals trained in natural science, experimental philosophy, law, and political economy. The reforms deliberately sought to modernize Portugal by importing Enlightenment learning, creating an ironic situation where the imperial metropole educated colonial subjects in precisely the ideas that would inspire resistance to empire.

José Álvares Maciel personifies this mediating role with remarkable precision. After studying natural philosophy at Coimbra’s reformed curriculum, he spent eighteen months in Birmingham, the heart of the Midlands Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution where he absorbed industrial techniques, met circles around Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, and Josiah Wedgwood, and purchased the copy of the Recueil he later carried to Minas Gerais. His notebooks reveal a mind synthesizing industrial chemistry, revolutionary politics, and colonial development into a coherent vision for Brazil’s future. Through individuals like Maciel, North Atlantic constitutionalism, industrial modernity, and Luso-Atlantic slavery converged in a single social milieu.

Hudec, the Czech astrophysicist, who has visited more than 70 plate collections across the world, estimates that there could be 10 million plates still in existence. If all those plates were carefully digitized, they would amount to thousands of terabytes of data. They hold more than a century of astronomical observations. And though they are scattered around the world and unwieldy to work with, they’ve provided today’s researchers with more than 100 modern discoveries.

Photo courtesy of Christina Cauterucci

In January 2024, my wife and I agreed to host a birthday party for our friends’ 2-year-old in our child-free home. The scene was chaotic and joyful, with several young kids running around and scattering croissant crumbs on our sofa while their parents attempted adult conversation over mimosas.

Inevitably, the moment arrived when a child knocked over a drink on our coffee table. It was an old West Elm design with a panel on top and a storage area underneath. The spilled beverage was dripping into the seams, so a crowd of parents rushed to open the table and mop up the liquid pooling within. The first thing they saw when they lifted the panel was a padlocked gun case, helpfully identified by the Smith & Wesson user pamphlet sitting on top, which was now soaked in seltzer.

To be perfectly honest, I’d forgotten I had the gun. Ever since my wife and I moved into a place with more closet space, we rarely used the storage capacity of the coffee table. I was reminded of the firearm in my living room only when someone brought up the topic of recreational gun use—which, in our queer, left-leaning urban social circles, was next to never.

But there I was, facing a crowd of these wide-eyed friends, who were politely dabbing the seltzer off my gun. They were clearly shocked. I choked out some nervous laughter and assured them that the case was locked, the gun inside had another padlock, both keys were hidden, and I had no ammunition in the house. I then explained why I owned the gun, which I will also share with you shortly, and everyone made a few jokes at my expense. They finished cleaning up the mess and got back to watching their kids ruin my house.

Two years later, as anecdotal reports tell of record numbers of LGBTQ+ people seeking out firearms for self-protection, I think back on that moment as a foreboding encapsulation of the dissonant reality we now inhabit. We film ICE traffic stops outside queer parties before going back inside to dance. We use our gay group chats to plan outings to the bar, and also to share packing lists for go bags. In the morning, we get tipsy at a birthday brunch, letting our children defile our friends’ furniture. In the evening, we research golden-visa options in case the government tells us those children are no longer ours.

In the shadow of Donald Trump’s second term in office, and amid the clear threat and increasing reality of political violence, some queer friends are learning to handle firearms, purchasing new weapons, or researching rifles for defense. Together, we talk through worst-case scenarios that would have seemed fantastical just months ago, imagining ourselves into a million futures that seem possible and unthinkable in equal measure.

Sometimes we don’t even have to imagine. Last month, Renée Nicole Good, a queer mother and poet, was shot to death by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Afterward, another agent dismissed her as “that lesbian bitch.” The message was not subtle. Her sexuality was deployed to justify her killing, casting her as a queer agitator who had been put in her place.

If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would one day keep a handgun in my D.C. row house, I would have laughed in your face. If you would have told me five years ago that I might take reasonably seriously the possibility that a real-life scenario might someday incite me to use it, I would have called you insane. But the social and political conditions of American life are changing with alarming speed.

Some queer people have found their views on guns changing too. Unhappily, I’m one of them. My journey over the past 10 years is also the story of many other Americans facing a new reality. I shudder to think where it leads.

In a strange paradox, my lifelong aversion to guns is the very reason why I have one. Nearly a decade ago, an editor suggested a piece wherein a person who believed that all firearms should be melted down and turned into solar panels—i.e., me—would learn to use one, get licensed to carry it, and immerse herself in gun culture to try to understand it from a new perspective.

I gamely accepted the assignment, mostly for novelty’s sake. I gravitate toward new and scary things, and this would require me to do two of them: regularly handle a deadly weapon and fraternize with armed people wearing T-shirts that say “My Pronoun Is Patriot.”

After a four-hour, in-person class on firearm laws and safety, having never shot a handgun in my life, I received a permit that allowed me to carry a concealed firearm in almost every state. (Most states don’t require a permit at all.) Though my permit necessitated no actual shooting experience, I opted to join the other students at a firing range to hone my skills. In the shooting area, our instructor demonstrated how to rack, or “snap” back, the slide of a semiautomatic pistol to load a bullet into the chamber. “Snap with authority,” he said. “Do not snap like you watch Glee.”

The gun was heavier than I had expected. Every part of its preparation took more muscle than I’d anticipated, befitting a complex machine that would enable one of my fingers to send a piece of metal flying 800 mph across the room. My thumbs got torn up pressing the bullets into the rigid spring of the magazine. Feeling a little terrified, I planted my feet and pointed the pistol downrange.

When I pulled the trigger for the first time, it was clear that I had ignited an explosion. The gun jerked back in my hands, emitting a fearsome crack that tore through my ear protection and jolted my nervous system into gear. It took all my wrist strength and yogic belly breaths to keep the thing steady as it lurched in my grip. While I emptied the rest of the magazine into the zombie-clown target at the end of the room, I marveled at how unpleasant the experience was: the whirring ventilation system, the terrible lighting, the acrid smell, the earmuffs that deadened people’s voices but barely masked the gunshots. Every time I squeezed the trigger, I jumped at the blast. I couldn’t believe that people did this for fun.

But in spite of my discomfort—and in spite of (or maybe because of) the nagging awareness that I could easily maim anyone in the room, and vice versa—I felt exhilarated by the power I held in my hands. When the instructor informed me that I had surprisingly accurate aim for a first-timer, the depths of my A-student brain lit up, thrilled by the possibility of excelling at a new task, even this one.

I soon felt myself inhabiting the persona of someone with a riskier life than my own. Thirty years of pop-culture conditioning came bearing down on me, drenching my rented pistol in sex appeal. The act of racking the slide, along with the iconic chick-chick sound it produced, prompted an image of copaganda queen Mariska Hargitay from SVU to float into my mind unbidden. (I assume this is the queer millennial version of the Call of Duty fantasies that draw certain men to stockpile military-grade rifles in their TV rooms and wear tactical gear to Dunkin’ Donuts.) A week later, when I demonstrated my technique to a vehemently anti-gun friend, she conceded, “That’s hot.”

Over the next year, while my editors had me working on other projects, I made occasional progress on my gun research. I went shooting at the National Rifle Association headquarters in the Virginia suburbs. I studied ammunition types and learned that hollow-point bullets are the preferred option for self-defense because they expand and slow down when they hit something. (This makes them less likely to pass through a body and hit an unintended target, and more likely to cause maximum damage to a vital organ.) I was repulsed by the thought of all the scientific expertise that went into these designs, all the physicists and engineers who have lent their skills to the discipline of mutilation.

Around the same time, I could feel the political ground begin to shift. In the fall of 2018, a Trump supporter mailed pipe bombs to CNN and a handful of big-name Democrats. The day the news broke, my wife jokingly chatted me, “Now might be a good time to get that gun.”

When I finally made the purchase, I opted for a Smith & Wesson M&P 9 mm, a semiautomatic handgun I’d tried at the range. The M&P refers to the military and police units to whom the pistol line was originally marketed, an association I found suitably objectionable for the purposes of my project. The day I brought it home, I was already prepared to relinquish it. I bookmarked the “Voluntarily and Peaceably Surrendering a Firearm” page on the Metropolitan Police Department’s website, eager for the day when I could store a useless bundle of unidentified cables in my coffee table instead. A woman peering out her window, through blinds that look like the Pride flag, at an angry mob. Illustration by Hua Ye

As time went on and different coverage priorities emerged, my gun piece fell off my to-do list. I forgot about the firearm in my living room for months at a time. Occasionally, though, it resurfaced. On Jan. 6, 2021, when right-wing protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol—which we can see from our back deck—my wife wondered aloud if we should take out the firearm and keep it on the table by our front door, just in case.

The idea didn’t seem entirely paranoid. On TV, we were watching violent mobs in our city beat down police officers, climb walls, and crash through windows, chanting their intent to hang the vice president. We had no idea how far the riot would go. Parked on the streets around our house were a couple of out-of-state vehicles covered in menacing stickers, presumably belonging to demonstrators who would return to them in who-knows-what state of postrebellion fervor.

I told my wife that threatening hyped-up insurrectionists with an unloaded gun—when whatever they might be carrying would surely be loaded and wielded with skills superior to mine—was a reliable way to get killed. I was already humiliated by the potential headlines: “Pistol-Waving, Coastal Elite Lesbians Offed in One-Sided Firefight, Seemingly Unaware That Guns Require Bullets.” We shut our blinds instead, and kept the handgun hidden away.

It’s impossible to know how many LGBTQ+ people own firearms, but the data that does exist shows queer people keeping guns in much lower numbers than heterosexuals. According to a 2018 report from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, 19 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual American adults have a gun at home, compared to 35 percent of straight people.

The sociodemographic explanations for the gun gap are easy to fill in. Openly LGBTQ+ people tend to be younger, more progressive, and slightly likelier to live in urban areas than the average American, all of which correlate with lower rates of gun ownership. But ever since Trump’s first presidential win, surveys and reports have chronicled a rising interest in guns among left-leaning demographics. The Liberal Gun Club saw a bump in membership after the 2016 election. Black voters reporting gun ownership in their households spiked from 24 percent to 41 percent between 2019 and 2023, while the percentage of white voters saying the same rose just 3 points.

Discords and subreddits for queer and trans gun enthusiasts have boomed, especially as anti-LGBTQ+ violence has proliferated. In 2024, hate crimes targeting trans people were up 31 percent from 2021, and those targeting gay and bisexual people were up 14 percent. That year’s tally—1,950 crimes based on sexual orientation and 463 based on gender identity—was second only to 2023’s in all FBI-recorded history. Right-wing and white-nationalist agitators have become an increasingly reliable presence at Pride festivals and drag events, casting an intimidating pall over spaces that once seemed like safe havens.

This has all come amid a mounting assault on the rights of women and trans people to make their own medical decisions and govern their own lives. In May 2022, in response to the news that the Supreme Court was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, one of the most famous trans women in the U.S. issued a call to action. “If you are able to afford it, and if it is safe for you to do so,” Chelsea Manning wrote online, “you should consider arming yourselves, then finding others to train with in teams and learn how to defend your community—we may need these skills in the very near future.”

Others have likewise framed LGBTQ+ firearm ownership not as a value-neutral option, but as a responsibility. Earlier this year, signs wheatpasted around Baltimore advised passersby to “buy a gun” above an illustration of the transgender flag poking out from the barrel of a pistol. “You only lose the rights you are not willing to defend,” it read. “Inaction is a choice. Do not wait for it to be made for you.”

Some Republicans have used this shift in rhetoric to stoke anti-trans animosity, spreading vicious and easily debunked rumors about the prevalence of trans killers. After a transgender woman killed two children and injured many more at a Minneapolis Catholic church last year, the Department of Justice began looking into ways to curtail trans Americans’ right to own firearms. (I am forced to hand it to the NRA, which stood on business to oppose the proposal.)

The shift in my own social circles came suddenly, after Trump’s reelection, in 2024. For the first time, people who’d been bewildered and low-key disturbed by the choices of our friend Roxanna (a pseudonym), a lesbian who keeps a safe filled with firearms in her home just across the Maryland border, were asking for her advice on emergency preparedness. (She was more than equipped to provide it.) Several queer friends who had never expressed a prior interest in guns began taking classes to learn how to use them. I’d stopped thinking of the gun stashed in my coffee table as a loathsome liability and started considering it a potential asset.

One friend, Shane (also a pseudonym), who is transfeminine and nonbinary, once told me they’d never want a gun in their house. Their position has since changed. Last year, they purchased a 3D printer chosen specifically for its ability to make filaments that can be used to build a gun, just in case the political situation gets worse. As right-wing political leaders portray trans people as malicious or mentally ill sex criminals, Shane worries that they might be clocked as trans on the street and attacked, or followed home after using a public restroom. “It would not at all surprise me to see a fairly public and unbridled lynching of a trans person in the next year,” they said.

Shane has always supported stricter gun-control legislation, but they’ve come to the conclusion that America is unlikely to ever pass it. And if the country is overrun with firearms for the foreseeable future, “I am not interested in only people who think I shouldn’t exist having guns,” Shane said. They still don’t believe that guns keep people safe, even when kept for self-defense, “but when safety has been taken away, it can give you power.”

Sometime last spring, as the daily escalations of the Trump administration sent my mind spiraling, I realized that I’d stopped thinking of the gun stashed in my coffee table as a loathsome liability and started considering it a potential asset. A whole new set of disquieting possibilities felt as if they were opening up before me: mass civil unrest, white-nationalist militias welcomed by the president, an attack on D.C. If any of the worst came to pass, I thought, it could be useful to have this tool at my disposal.

Since I hadn’t touched my gun in six years, I made an appointment for a firearms refresher course at a shooting range in Virginia. When I arrived on a Thursday afternoon, I was instantly reminded of how, aesthetically and politically, gun culture and gay culture are at odds. A giant “Trump Vance” sign loomed over the parking lot; another one read “Only Jesus can save America.” My instructor, who resembled RFK Jr. with a goatee, smirked when I told him I made a living as a journalist. “I’ll try not to judge,” he said.

As we walked to the outdoor range, fake RFK presented me with a pair of pink earmuffs for hearing protection. I commented on the color, and he said he’d hoped I wouldn’t be offended, but he’d had to choose between pink or blue. “It’s like a gender-reveal party for my ears,” I joked. The instructor grinned. “We just had one of those yesterday,” he said.

Despite his enthusiasm for the gender binary, my guy had a welcoming presence, clearly thrilled to spread the gospel of gun ownership to all comers, even me. When he inquired about my home life, he referred to my “husband, wife, whatever”—a phrasing several degrees more affirming than what my wife and I sometimes get at hotel check-in desks. He also confirmed that when I racked the slide, I looked “so Hollywood.” My Mariska Hargitay complex gained strength.

Despite my lengthy neglect of the firearm, my aptitude hadn’t faded. Hitting bull’s-eye after bull’s-eye in the golden-hour sunlight, I felt unstoppable. RFK was impressed. The barest hint of a fantasy materialized in my head: holding my own in a queer militia, taking down an assailant bent on harming us, maybe nabbing some squirrel meat for the campfire.

My path from fearing guns to understanding their appeal is a common one. My friend Roxanna, the one with a small arsenal in the D.C. suburbs, grew up with federal-worker parents who never talked about guns. The first time she touched one, a little over a decade ago, she said, “I felt like I was holding, like, toxic waste in my hands—like if I made one small mistake, I was going to kill everyone around me.” But after Roxanna joined co-workers on a trip to a gun range, she started to enjoy shooting as a form of stress release. Now she owns five guns of her own.

She bought her latest last summer, a small, wearable semiautomatic for self-defense. In the Trump 2.0 era, she felt validated in her decision by a chilling bit of reporting she’d come across in an 1892 pamphlet by Ida B. Wells. Very few proposed lynchings of Black people had been averted that year, Wells wrote: “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.”

When Roxanna thinks about circumstances that might make her reach for a gun, she envisions MAGA mobs inciting mass civil unrest. Or, if the country devolves into deep authoritarianism, she and her wife will want protection as they flee to a sanctuary state or Canada. There’s also the remote possibility of some kind of mass roundup that would find armed government agents knocking at her door. I expressed doubt that Roxanna and her wife, a peacenik fashionista, could successfully fend off the Gestapo should they arrive. “Probably not, but they’re not going to take my Black ass alive,” she said. “I’m not going back to a plantation, and I’m not going to a concentration camp.”

A few days after my afternoon with RFK, I drove to an indoor gun range near Baltimore for a gathering of the D.C. and Maryland chapter of the Pink Pistols, an LGBTQ+ shooting group. Founded in 2000, with dozens of chapters across the country, the organization advocates for looser gun restrictions and provides opportunities for new gun users to learn to shoot. Pink Pistols also tries to spread the word that our people are no longer easy targets, because some of them are carrying concealed weapons. Its motto: “Armed Queers Don’t Get Bashed.”

Wayne Lerch, 67, co-founded the D.C. and Maryland chapter in 2022. For two years, it was mostly just him and two other guys in a Facebook group, posting up at a couple of lanes at the shooting range for occasional meetups. That changed with Trump’s election that November. Within months, the chapter drew hundreds of new Facebook group members. The meetups grew so popular that they now rent out the entire range every month for 15 to 25 people, many of them brand new to guns. Lerch estimates that up to 70 percent of the newcomers are trans. “A lot of them have not wanted anything to do with firearms before,” he said, but now feel “it’s necessary to get involved.”

When I joined the range day on a Sunday morning in May, about 15 people were gathered at the venue, listening to a safety briefing. A few sported attire that amended gun culture with homosexual flair: a set of protective earmuffs topped with pink cat ears; a shirt that read “My Little Pew Pew” above a pony with a handgun “cutie mark”; a patch on a gun case depicting an AR-15 over a trans flag and the words “Defend Equality.” The group was a bit awkward but friendly, eager to commiserate about the anxieties of living under Trump 2.0. About a third of them had never shot a gun before.

Once we took our places at the shooting lanes, the room erupted in controlled explosions. Gold bullet casings flew through the air, littering the ground like confetti on a dance floor. It was unlike any other queer mixer I’ve attended.

Still, the vibe wasn’t not flirty. One woman, an Air Force member who was there with her wife and a co-worker, approached me as I took a break between rounds and leaned in close so I could hear her over the gunfire. “I’m guessing you’ve done this a lot,” she said. “You walked up there like a pro.” I decided not to correct her. She told me her crew was trying out shooting for the first time—mostly for fun, but also thinking it might be a “good skill to have” in this moment.

Even Lerch, the Pink Pistols chapter coordinator who now works as a safety officer at the range we visited, is no longtime gun fanatic. He got interested around the time Trump entered the White House in 2017, when he felt newly vulnerable as an openly gay man in D.C. “Seeing Proud Boys and Christofascists running around my town, I started getting worried about my own safety,” he said. Under the guidance of a conservative friend, he purchased a gun for self-protection and developed a love of shooting. He’s even gotten into target competitions and long-range rifles. “Hearing that steel ring at 500 yards—I can’t describe it. It’s just an amazing feeling,” he told me. The fantasy embedded in queer firearm ownership is of a total transformation of self, from victim of circumstance to ready combatant.

Talking to Lerch and others that day, I was reminded of the reporting I’d done on left-leaning groups that had ballooned with newly minted activists during Trump’s first presidency. Those were individuals who still had faith that the system would work according to a set of preestablished rules, and that well-meaning people could make a difference. Now boatloads of left-leaning Americans have been driven to try something new in response to political outrage and fear. It is different from most anti-Trump activism, which tries to appeal to common American values and use the tools of democracy for political change. Guns are a personal answer to a collective problem. They embody a turning inward, a desire to look out for oneself rather than engage in the messy, corny, frustrating work of trying to make society better for everyone.

For many new LGBTQ+ gun owners, an embrace of firearms is not an expression of deeply held values but an abandonment of them—a capitulation to the worldview of institutions bent on our defeat. To whatever extent LGBTQ+ people are picking up guns in this moment, it speaks to their waning confidence in queer political power. American democracy no longer holds the same promise of potential progress.

So, in the absence of hope, there is resignation. The country is full of bigoted people who exhibit no concern for the welfare of anyone but themselves. They also happen to be stocked with deadly weapons. If we can’t beat them, we might be tempted to join them.

For the seven years that I’ve now owned a gun, I’ve used one fact to reassure friends, and myself, that it’s safe to be around: I don’t keep bullets in the house. Whenever I’ve bought ammunition, it’s been at a gun range, and I’ve used it all up before leaving.

In this arrangement, my gun seems inert and irrelevant to my life, like a snowboard in a Miami condo. Having bullets at home would take me into territory so foreign it would feel like an identity shift: from an incidental gun owner to a potential gun user. In the concealed carry class I took before I bought my 9 mm, the gun instructor told us never to point a gun at something we weren’t willing to shoot. It was a simple hallmark of firearm safety, but it made my skin prickle. As I’ve spent more time using my weapon, testing its lethal power on sheets of paper, I’ve asked myself whether I could ever bring myself to use it outside the range. What would I conceivably point my gun at? Who am I willing to shoot?

The prospect is sickening to me, but also seductive. Having an instrument of death that could make an assailant shit their pants might be a decent substitute for stability right now. Any potential use case for a gun still sounds like morbid make-believe, but so would have half the things in the news this week if we’d heard them three years ago.

The fantasy embedded in queer firearm ownership is of a total transformation of self, from victim of circumstance to ready combatant. In reality, though, this wave of new LGBTQ+ gun owners seems likelier to result in a wave of accidental gun deaths. A Washington Post article published last February profiled a trans woman who bought her first firearm after Trump’s reelection and now “demonstrates how to safely handle firearms for her friends.” In one of the photos accompanying the piece, she is depicted in her living room, flanked by trans pals, with her finger on the trigger of her revolver—a position every responsible gun owner knows not to adopt, even with an unloaded weapon, until ready to fire. It scares me to think of people bringing guns to queer events, believing they’re protecting the community when they’re actually putting us at risk.

I am also tormented by the death of Alex Pretti, shot in Minneapolis by ICE agents who may have been agitated by the gun Pretti carried on his waistband. The gun was legal and permitted, and Pretti made no moves to threaten the agents with it. They killed him anyway. His firearm offered no defense. Members of Trump’s personal militia clearly don’t need the excuse of a gun to justify killing a dissident, but neither would I want to give them one in their current state of trigger-happiness. It’s tempting to envision my gun solely in defensive contexts, when it could just as easily be a useless prop or, worse, a provocation.

It also bears mentioning that handgun ownership is associated with dramatically higher rates of suicide—more than three times as high for men and seven times as high for women. LGBTQ+ people are already at greater risk of self-harm. These statistics were ringing in my head as I read that Washington Post article, in which the new gun owner explained the rise in gun interest among her trans peers thus: “If our hormones are taken away, we’d rather just kill ourselves.”

This isn’t idle musing. One trans woman who offers free firearm courses to other trans people sells a patch in her online shop that bears the Latin translation of an increasingly popular phrase, “Death Before Detransition.” Meanwhile, prominent Republicans are trying to ban gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages, and affordable mental health care is hard to come by. I would never tell a trans person seeking a sense of safety to forgo a firearm if they want one. But I don’t love the idea of encouraging a population at high risk of suicide to load up on death machines at a moment of community crisis.

As for my own gun, I’m more worried about the potential for an accident, and for good reason: Tens of thousands of people suffer unintentional firearm injuries in the U.S. each year. Hundreds die. If I brought bullets into my home for the purposes of self-defense, I’d have to commit to regular training to be anything but a danger to myself and everyone around me. My RFK-look-alike gun instructor recommended going shooting twice a month to be a safe and skillful gun owner. Twice a month! There are people I consider my close friends whom I don’t see that often.

I came to an inflection point in my gun journey the day Charlie Kirk was killed. After I learned he’d been shot—his alleged shooter had texted “Some hate can’t be negotiated out” to a roommate and possible partner, referring to Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric—I struggled to imagine what might come next. For a moment, I was glad to have my gun. It felt like a security blanket as I worried about escalating political violence and calls for retribution against the left. But as my social feeds surfaced video after nauseating video of the shot that killed him, I lurched toward the opposite conclusion. The reality of gun violence is so gruesome, so devastating, so antithetical to a good human life. I could not watch that video and visualize myself behind a gun.

It got me thinking about one of the only case studies we have of someone actually stopping a violent assault on a queer event. In 2023, 45-year-old Richard M. Fierro was watching a drag show at Club Q, in Colorado Springs, when a man came in and shot 24 people, killing five. He might have killed more had Fierro not tackled, disarmed, and restrained him. Though Fierro is an Army veteran, which he credits with his combat instincts, he had no weapon on hand. Still, he subdued the shooter, likely saving lives in the process.

If I’m going to spend precious hours of my life learning skills for a future in peril, I’d rather they be Fierro’s. In countless real-life scenarios, pepper spray, de-escalation tactics, or a tourniquet would be more useful than a quick-drawn pistol. These are things I could readily integrate with my existing identity without the sense of forsaking my own humanity. The person I want to be in this era of persecution and conflict is one who mitigates harm, not inflicts it.

And yet—the 9 mm still sits in my living room.

I no longer need it for a work assignment. All I would have to do is call 311, and a D.C. police officer would come to take it away. But every time I entertain that option, I get stuck. The firearm is a ghastly contradiction: It terrifies me, and it brings me comfort. The very thing that makes it terrifying is also what makes it feel like an instrument of safety.

Will I ever take that next step and buy a box of bullets? I don’t know, and I’m not entirely certain what my tipping point would be. I hope and believe it will never come. My gun is a depressing admission that our society is trending against my well-being. Statistically and symbolically, it brings me one step closer to death. I’m still not ready to give it up.

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#society #futurism #longread

The Origins of Technocracy

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was going through the pains of its industrial transformation. Cities were booming in population, and politics was rife with discord over what would become of American life. New ideas began to circulate over who would helm this path forward. Some were moved by the plight of workers, while others found a cause in battling corruption. But above all, this generation desired reform. They were loosely called the Progressive movement. As one of its leaders, Herbert Croly, argued, now was the time for a “New Nationalism.” Yet few agreed on what the nation’s needs exactly were.

A growing subset of Progressives found their cause within science and technology. Because it had made the Industrial Revolution possible, it was easy to assume its experts should also lead. These Progressives believed society was growing too complex to be left to insular self-interest and politics. Intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Louis Brandeis, Charles McCarthy, and Frederic Howe put forward arguments that any future administration of experts needed a clear separation from politics.

This was the seed of what would later become technocratic thinking: the idea of a state of appointed experts. Yet, it was not only politics that was increasingly viewed with suspicion. Businessmen, too, were becoming suspect because of their narrow interests. This argument was most famously made by economist Thorstein Veblen, who was a leading influence on the early technocrats. Although initially more sympathetic to industrial workers, by the 1910s Veblen shifted toward a belief in rule by engineers. A critic of capitalism himself, he viewed business managers as incapable of understanding the system they were handling. They were poorly educated in the “industrial arts,” and distorted what should be industrial society’s priorities. These “ignorant businessmen with an eye single to maximum profits” had to be replaced by a new class of people, the technicians.

By 1919, Veblen began publishing a series of magazine essays that would be compiled in The Engineers and the Price System (1921). A “soviet of technicians” had to be established where engineers, not workers, would take over from the capitalists, he argued. This new philosophy would be given a name that year—“technocracy”—and then give rise to a short-lived organization named the Technical Alliance. Veblen was one of its founding members and its intellectual anchor.

The ideological coordinates of these early days of technocracy were confused. The Technical Alliance brought together a group of very different individuals, united only by the belief that technology now dominated social progress. The alliance worked on research with the radical left-wing union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but many of its members remained non-committed politically. While fellow travelers of left causes, there was no focus on the proletariat, class struggle, or workplace organizing. Their only point of agreement was that capitalism was inefficient and holding back industrial society’s potential.

If, Chesterton speculated, you had asked Browning ‘Is life worth living?’ and asked him to give ‘the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul’, then Browning would have said, ‘as likely as not: “Crimson toadstools in Hampshire”’. Chesterton sounds quite mad, but he is thinking of some lines from Browning’s ‘By the Fire-Side’:

By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged

Last evening – nay, in to-day’s first dew

Yon sudden coral nipple bulged,

Where a freaked fawn-coloured flaky crew

Of toadstools peep indulged.

That would seem a very good instance of what James called an ‘each-form’. Browning doesn’t think the toadstools stand for or symbolise anything, let alone the totality of the one: what matters is merely that they are one of what Chesterton calls ‘the great concrete experiences’.

When Cabot saw her own image, and his, on the Jumbotron, it was like “someone flipped a switch,” she said. “I’ll never be able to explain it in any articulate or intelligent way,” she said. What an instant before felt like “joy, joy, joy” turned to terror.

...certain fundamental questions about the Fourier transform have remained stubbornly, and mysteriously, unanswerable.

In 1965, the mathematician Sarvadaman Chowla(opens a new tab) posed one such question. He wanted to know how small an extremely simple type of Fourier transform — a sum of cosine waves — could get. His problem sounded straightforward. But somehow, it wasn’t.

...

Last summer, two sets of graph theorists — Jin, Milojević, and Tomon in Europe, and Zhang at Stanford University — were enthusiastically making progress on one of graph theory’s most central questions. The “MaxCut” problem is about the optimal way to cut a graph into two parts so that there are as many edges as possible connecting the parts. It’s a basic question about the structure of a graph, with real-world applications: A graph’s MaxCut might represent an efficient circuit design, for instance, or the lowest-energy state of a system of particles.

...

For now, “it is a little bit, I think, like the moon landing or the 4-minute mile,” Sanders said. “It’s not clear ahead of time what this is going to open up.”

The role that graphs played in the story is particularly intriguing. This isn’t the first time that graph theory and Fourier analysis have met. But so far, the links between the two fields have been one-offs. Now, Jin hopes that the specific connection between Chowla’s cosine problem and MaxCut hints at something broader. “Whatever is predicted in the Chowla problem, that phenomenon is more general,” he said. “It works in graphs.”

“We now have more problems that are in the same spheres of influence,” Sawhney said. “Knowing that things are living in the same world is very useful information. It’s very powerful.”

If we believed in bears more, would they exist more in the world?

I hope so.

Came across this article a while back, and its a really interesting read. Since today is MLK day it seems like an appropriate day to share this. It's an especially important moment in history to remember and honor an American patriot who refused to be silent even when he became the target of a man who abused his powerful position in the federal government while hiding behind lies about protecting liberty and justice.

Acknowledging the ugly reality behind the myth of a man like J. Edgar Hoover also shouldn't be used to erase the truth about the good that was accomplished because a federal government used its powers to right injustices for all Americans, following the civil rights act. It should simply remind us that downplaying the difficult truths of our history only leaves us at risk of repeating our worst mistakes again in the future.

The legend is crumbling: the squat, bulldog features, set fiercely in tenacious pursuit of the TEN MOST WANTED CRIMINALS. The gangbuster nemesis of “Baby Face” Nelson, John Dillinger, Ma Barker. The scourge of would-be spies and saboteurs. The alert sentinel and fearless fighter holding back the tide of the Red Menace. The stubbornly independent guardian of evenhanded law enforcement, highmindedly fending off Congressmen and Presidents who sought to use his agency for political purposes.

J. Edgar Hoover deserved some of that billing, although it was overblown from the start. Now, just three years after his death, a sharply different portrait is emerging of the man who built the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the world’s most reputable police organization through 48 years as its famed Director. To be sure, there had always been a few blemishes—some from scattered revelations through the decades, some from his own reckless conduct as he grew older and fought to retain the power he felt slipping away. But now, under congressional and journalistic scrutiny, as well as in the writings of his once fearful agents, a darker picture is coming into view.

In these new shades Hoover is seen as a shrewd bureaucratic genius who cared less about crime than about perpetuating his crime-busting image. With his acute public relations sense, he managed to obscure his bureau’s failings while magnifying its sometime successes. Even his fervent anti-Communism has been cast into doubt; some former aides insist that he knew the party was never a genuine internal threat to the nation but a useful, popular target to ensure financial and public support for the FBI.

Even more serious flaws in the Hoover character and official performance have come to light:

Instead of insulating his bureau from politically sensitive Presidents, Hoover eagerly complied with improper requests from the men in the White House for information on potential opponents. If a President failed to ask for such information, the Director often volunteered it. He tapped the telephones of Government officials on request, perused files of politicians unasked, volunteered tidbits of gossip.

He was a petty man of towering personal hates. There was more than a tinge of racism in his vicious vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. He had to be pushed into hiring black agents for the bureau.

His informers, infiltrators and wiretappers delved into the activities of even the most innocuous and nonviolent civil rights and antiwar groups, trampling on the rights of citizens to express grievances against their Government. His spies within potentially dangerous extremist groups sometimes provoked more violence than they prevented.

As an administrator, he was an erratic, unchallengeable czar, banishing agents to Siberian posts on whimsy, terrorizing them with torrents of implausible rules, insisting on conformity of thought as well as dress.

The fact that such a man could acquire and keep that kind of power raises disturbing questions not merely about the role of a national police in a democracy, but also about the political system that tolerated him for so long. The revelations show too that those political dissidents in years past who complained they were being harassed and spied upon were not so paranoid after all.

As the pendulum of public esteem swings away from the old Hoover reputation, the correction seems necessary, though it could also go too far. The Director’s defenders, at least, are outraged. “When the lion dies, the rats come out,” sneers Efrem Zimbalist Jr., longtime star of the once top-rated television series The FBI. Insists William Ruckelshaus, one of the victims of Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre: “Really, the man had only one motive. That was to make the FBI the finest investigative agency in the world.”

Certainly the post-Watergate morality casts a harsher light on official conduct that once was not questioned. In the cold war period, the Communist threat from abroad, if not at home, did look—and was—dangerous. Such FBI-infiltrated groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Weatherman did proclaim violence.

Mainly by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI was able to act swiftly in the early 1960s to solve several murders of civil rights workers in the South. But, as King charged, the bureau did little about enforcing civil rights laws that did not involve such sensational crimes. One reason: the FBI was concentrating on catching auto thieves and fugitives so as to keep its Southern bureaus’ arrest and recovery statistics on Hoover’s mandated upward curves.

It was King’s criticism that led Hoover to call him “the most notorious liar in the U.S.” and to launch an ugly vendetta against him. Hoover ordered one tape from a bugged Miami hotel room where King had been staying sent anonymously to King’s wife. The FBI sent word of King’s reported sexual activities to the Pope, trying to convince the Pontiff not to receive him.

One of Hoover’s men recalls discussing with the Director and another aide the FBI’s crusade against King. The aide claimed that the black leader had not only associated with Communists but that there was “a sexual matter.” King was homosexual? “No, no,” said the aide. “King isn’t queer.” “Then what’s the big problem?” the man asked. “King isn’t the only married guy who sleeps with other women.” Replied the aide as Hoover nodded agreement: “He sleeps with white women.”

Tldr: J Edgar Hoover was a real pizza shit and he bore a striking similarity to several modern day pizza shits who seem to have modeled themselves after him.

“People just kind of relegated [bioelectricity] to ‘This is just neurons.’ No — it’s all of our bodies,” said study author Jody Rosenblatt, an epithelial cell biologist at King’s College London and the Francis Crick Institute. “There are electrical currents going through your body all the time, and they’re doing things.”

https://archive.ph/6zchY

On the 31st of January 2003, a huge four-engine Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane crashed just short of the poorly developed airstrip in the town of Baucau, Timor-Leste, killing all six crewmembers. The crash was briefly noted by the world press but never made headlines, nor would it have been likely to do so, because accidents like it happen all the time.

Cargo flights into remote and impoverished warzones on behalf of short-lived paper companies form a dangerous but essential underworld of the global aviation industry, bringing crucial supplies and humanitarian aid into some of the most desperate places on earth, while simultaneously supporting a shadow industry of arms trafficking, human smuggling, tax evasion, and other criminal enterprises. These flights crash with alarming regularity, but almost all of these accidents are never properly investigated and very little is known about them — sometimes basic facts such as the number of people killed, their identities, and even whether the crash happened at all are left up for debate.

I say this in part, I confess, because I have always been and will always be, I hope, a terrible note taker.

“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies… At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on X.

Miller’s assumption about the “great lie of mass migration” was dead wrong. When I saw the suspect’s name, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, I immediately recognized that he used to work as a U.S.-trained militiaman, and it was the United States that destroyed his childhood, his life, and his home country. Lakanwal came to the United States in 2021 as a longtime member of one of the CIA’s own paramilitary forces in Afghanistan: the Zero Units. For years, Lakanwal was treated as a U.S. ally and equipped with many resources from the U.S. military and intelligence service to do some of the most brutal work on behalf of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

The Zero Units were among the most aggressive instruments of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. Though some units were formally tied to Afghan intelligence, they were in practice created, trained, armed, and directed by the CIA. They operated outside Afghan law and far beyond any realistic oversight. And they became known inside the country as some of the most feared armed actors of the war.

In 2019, Human Rights Watch documented at least 14 major cases of abuse committed by these forces between 2017 and 2019 alone, including unlawful killings, disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities. The real number is almost certainly higher; many areas where the Zero Units operated were inaccessible to journalists and rights monitors due to massive restrictions and repression.

Before the return of the Taliban in 2021, Afghan officials told me repeatedly that their government had no authority over these CIA-built militias. This was widely understood inside Afghanistan: If Zero Unit fighters arrived at your home at night, no Afghan court, police officer, or ministry could protect you.

On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”

Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.

Saudi Arabia has been ranked one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, and is frequently placed among the “worst of the worst” in Freedom House’s survey of political and civil rights. Amnesty International says that despite a massive global “image laundering” campaign, “the human rights situation in the Kingdom has deteriorated exponentially.” It has no national elections, and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) uses imprisonment, torture, and execution to quash even mild dissent against the government. People can be sentenced to death over their tweets, and women who protest being kept as chattel by men can be thrown into prison and tortured. The resulting climate of fear can result in absurdities—the Financial Times recently reported that Saudi engineers and designers have been too afraid to tell MBS that his ludicrous plan for a utopian city is literally physically impossible.

No country that values freedom, democracy, and basic human rights should want anything to do with the Saudi government. Yet over the last quarter century, American presidential administrations (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump) have warmly embraced the repressive Saudi state, helping to ensure that there is no meaningful pressure on it to reform, and no punishment for torturing and killing dissidents. This shameful American posture means that blood is on our hands, including that of Washington Post columnist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, extrajudicially executed by the Saudi regime in 2018.

Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, where he was strangled and dismembered by a team of special operatives that reported directly to the Crown Prince. U.S. intelligence quickly concluded that there was no way that the killing could have occurred without MBS’s instruction, in part because in an absolute monarchy, the killing of a prominent dissident would only occur with authorization from the top.

The killing of Khashoggi was so lurid, and he possessed such social status in the United States, that the murder actually became a scandal. But he’s far from the only victim. In fact, the Saudi regime executes people routinely. The killings reached a new height last year, with 345 people being put to death, usually by beheading. Human Rights Watch warns that there have been “a terrifying number of executions in 2025” as well, including the killing of Turki al-Jasser, a journalist who “exposed corruption and human rights abuse linked to the Saudi royal family.” Al-Jasser was accused of “terrorism,” the go-to smear of state propagandists looking to demonize their political opponents. Most of those killed by the Saudi state are foreign nationals, with the most common offense being nonviolent drug crimes. Khashoggi is also not the only dissident the Saudi state has kidnapped abroad, with even princes being captured, brought back to the country, and disappeared if they get out of line. (I have only touched on the misdeeds of the Saudi state, which also include sabotaging climate talks to protect the monarchy’s right to get rich off the destruction of the planet, and horrific war crimes in Yemen.)

Saudi Arabia should be an international pariah. The United States, certainly, should totally cut off relations with any country that murders our newspaper columnists in cold blood—although it also shouldn’t matter morally whether an executed dissident does or does not possess a tie to the Washington Post. And yet MBS recently received a warm welcome from Donald Trump at the White House. Asked directly about the killing of Khashoggi, Trump waved away the murder, choosing to smear Khashoggi as someone “a lot of people didn’t like” who was “extremely controversial.” “Things happen,” Trump said, but MBS “knew nothing about it.”

Trump’s comments were heinous. He has long boasted that he protected MBS’s reputation after the Khashoggi killing and helped shield the Saudi leader from accountability. It will surprise nobody that Trump cares far more about business deals than about human rights, but it was still a little shocking to see the president deny MBS’s guilt when his own intelligence agencies had confirmed that MBS ordered the killing, and to see a principled dissident slandered after his death.

Still, we shouldn’t single out Trump for sole blame here. Joe Biden did almost as much to help ensure that the killing of Khashoggi wouldn’t be a lasting stain on the Saudi regime. It was Biden who decided not to punish MBS for the murder with sanctions or a travel ban, and Biden who successfully pushed a U.S. court to dismiss a lawsuit against MBS over the killing. It was Biden who, having previously called MBS a “pariah,” went and fist-bumped him, an image that the Saudi government proudly shared. Of course, it didn’t begin with Biden, either. It was Barack Obama who agreed to provide the Saudi government with $115 billion in weapons, and the Bush family had extensive, friendly ties to the Saudi royal family.

There are real consequences to this chumminess. Human rights campaigner Josh Cooper explained to Middle East Eye that the record level of executions would be unthinkable without the rehabilitation of MBS by world leaders. It’s quite simple: the fewer consequences there are for MBS’s abuses of human rights, the more Saudi dissidents will suffer. If the U.S. president sets clear standards for allies (freedom of the press, freedom of political speech, basic elections, due process), then a country wanting to do business with the U.S. will have no choice but to improve internally. If, on the other hand, the U.S. president makes it clear that who dictators kill is simply their own business, we can expect to see the repression escalate.

Are you feeling it?

I hear it’s close: two years, five years—maybe next year! And I hear it’s going to change everything: it will cure disease, save the planet, and usher in an age of abundance. It will solve our biggest problems in ways we cannot yet imagine. It will redefine what it means to be human.

Wait—what if that’s all too good to be true? Because I also hear it will bring on the apocalypse and kill us all …

Either way, and whatever your timeline, something big is about to happen.

We could be talking about the Second Coming. Or the day when Heaven’s Gaters imagined they’d be picked up by a UFO and transformed into enlightened aliens. Or the moment when Donald Trump finally decides to deliver the storm that Q promised. But no. We’re of course talking about artificial general intelligence, or AGI—that hypothetical near-future technology that (I hear) will be able to do pretty much whatever a human brain can do.

This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.

For many, AGI is more than just a technology. In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, it’s talked about in mystical terms. Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings. And he feels it more than most: In 2024, he left OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, to cofound Safe Superintelligence, a startup dedicated to figuring out how to avoid a so-called rogue AGI (or control it when it comes). Superintelligence is the hot new flavor—AGI but better!—introduced as talk of AGI becomes commonplace.

Sutskever also exemplifies the mixed-up motivations at play among many self-anointed AGI evangelists. He has spent his career building the foundations for a future technology that he now finds terrifying. “It’s going to be monumental, earth-shattering—there will be a before and an after,” he told me a few months before he quit OpenAI. When I asked him why he had redirected his efforts into reining that technology in, he said: “I’m doing it for my own self-interest. It’s obviously important that any superintelligence anyone builds does not go rogue. Obviously.”

He’s far from alone in his grandiose, even apocalyptic, thinking.

Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen—a before and an after that they are privileged (or doomed) to live through.

For us, that’s the promised advent of AGI. People are used to hearing that this or that is the next big thing, says Shannon Vallor, who studies the ethics of technology at the University of Edinburgh. “It used to be the computer age and then it was the internet age and now it’s the AI age,” she says. “It’s normal to have something presented to you and be told that this thing is the future. What’s different, of course, is that in contrast to computers and the internet, AGI doesn’t exist.”

And that’s why feeling the AGI is not the same as boosting the next big thing. There’s something weirder going on. Here’s what I think: AGI is a lot like a conspiracy theory, and it may be the most consequential one of our time.

I have been reporting on artificial intelligence for more than a decade, and I’ve watched the idea of AGI bubble up from the backwaters to become the dominant narrative shaping an entire industry. A onetime pipe dream now props up the profit lines of some of the world’s most valuable companies and thus, you could argue, the US stock market. It justifies dizzying down payments on the new power plants and data centers that we’re told are needed to make the dream come true. Fixated on this hypothetical technology, AI firms are selling us hard.

Just listen to what the heads of some of those companies are telling us. AGI will be as smart as an entire “country of geniuses” (Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic); it will kick-start “an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy” (Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind); it will “massively increase abundance and prosperity,” even encourage people to enjoy life more and have more children (Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI). That’s some product.

Or not. Don’t forget the flip side, of course. When those people are not shilling for utopia, they’re saving us from hell. In 2023, Amodei, Hassabis, and Altman all put their names to a 22-word statement that read: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Elon Musk says AI has a 20% chance of annihilating humans. Related Story What is AI?

“I’ve noticed recently that superintelligence, which I thought was a concept you definitely shouldn’t mention if you want to be taken seriously in public, is being thrown around by tech CEOs who are apparently planning to build it,” says Katja Grace, lead researcher at AI Impacts, an organization that surveys AI researchers about their field. “I think it’s easy to feel like this is fine. They also say it’s going to kill us, but they’re laughing while they say it.”

You have to admit it all sounds a bit tinfoil hat. If you're building a conspiracy theory, you need a few things in the mix: a scheme that’s flexible enough to sustain belief even when things don’t work out as planned; the promise of a better future that can be realized only if believers uncover hidden truths; and a hope for salvation from the horrors of this world.

AGI just about checks all those boxes. The more you poke at the idea, the more it starts to look like a conspiracy. It’s not, of course—not exactly. And I’m not drawing this parallel to dismiss the very real, often jaw-dropping results achieved by many people in this field, including (or especially) the AGI believers.

But by zooming in on things that AGI has in common with genuine conspiracies, I think we can bring the whole concept into better focus and reveal it for what it is: a techno-utopian (or techno-dystopian—pick your pill) fever dream that got its hooks into some pretty deep-seated beliefs that have made it hard to shake.

This isn't just a provocative thought experiment. It’s important to question what we’re told about AGI because buying into the idea isn’t harmless. Right now, AGI is the most important narrative in tech—and, to some extent, in the global economy. We can’t make sense of what’s going on in AI without understanding where the idea of AGI came from, why it is so compelling, and how it shapes the way we think about technology overall.

I get it, I get it—calling AGI a conspiracy isn’t a perfect analogy. It will also piss a lot of people off. But come with me down this rabbit hole and let me show you the light. How Silicon Valley got AGI-pilled It had a ring to it

A typical conspiracy theory usually starts out on the fringes. Maybe it’s just a couple of people posting on a message board, gathering “evidence.” Maybe it’s a few people out in the desert with binoculars waiting to spot some bright lights in the sky. But some conspiracy theories get lucky, if you will: They start to percolate more widely; they start to become a bit more acceptable; they start to influence people in power. Maybe it’s the UFOs (ahem, sorry, “unidentified aerial phenomena”) that are now formally and openly discussed in government hearings. Maybe it’s vaccine skepticism (yes, a much more dangerous example) that becomes official policy. And it’s impossible to ignore that artificial general intelligence has followed a pretty similar trajectory to its more overtly conspiratorial brethren.

Let’s go back to 2007, when AI wasn’t sexy and it wasn’t cool. Companies like Amazon and Netflix (which was still sending out DVDs in the mail) were using machine-learning models, proto-organisms to today’s LLM behemoths, to recommend movies and books to customers. But that was more or less it.

Ben Goertzel had far bigger plans. About a decade earlier, the AI researcher had set up a dot-com startup called Webmind to train what he thought of as a kind of digital baby brain on the early internet. Childless, Webmind soon went bust.

But Goertzel was an influential figure in a fringe community of researchers who had dreamed for years of building humanlike artificial intelligence, an all-purpose computer program that could do many of the things people can do (and do them better). It was a vision that went far beyond the kind of tech that Netflix was experimenting with.

Goertzel wanted to put out a book promoting that vision, and he needed a name that would set it apart from the humdrum AI of the time. A former Webmind employee named Shane Legg suggested Artificial General Intelligence. It had a ring to it.

A few years later, Legg cofounded DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. But to most serious researchers at the time, the claim that AI would one day mimic human abilities was a bit of a joke. AGI used to be a dirty word, Sutskever told me. Andrew Ng, founder of Google Brain and former chief scientist at the Chinese tech giant Baidu, told me he thought it was loony.

So what happened? I caught up with Goertzel last month to ask how a fringe idea went from crackpot to commonplace. “I’m sort of a complex chaotic systems guy, so I have a low estimate that I actually know what the nonlinear dynamic in the memosphere really was,” he said. (Translation: It’s complicated.)

Goertzel reckons a few things took the idea mainstream. The first is the Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, an annual meeting of researchers that he helped set up in 2008, the year after his book was published. The conference was often coordinated with top mainstream academic meetups, such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. “If I just published a book with that name AGI, it possibly would have just come and gone,” says Goertzel. “But the conference was circling through every year, with more and more students coming.”

Next is Legg, who took the term with him to DeepMind. “I think they were the first mainstream corporate entity to talk about AGI,” says Goertzel. “It wasn’t the main thing they were harping on, but Shane and Demis would talk about it now and then. That was certainly a source of legitimation.”

When I first talked to Legg about AGI five years ago, he said: “Talking about AGI in the early 2000s put you on the lunatic fringe … Even when we started DeepMind in 2010, we got an astonishing amount of eye-rolling at conferences.” But by 2020 the wind had changed. “Some people are uncomfortable with it, but it’s coming in from the cold,” he told me.

The third thing Goertzel points to is the overlap between early AGI evangelists and Big Tech power brokers. In the years between shutting down Webmind and publishing that AGI book, Goertzel did some work with Peter Thiel at Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital. “We talked a bunch,” says Goertzel. He recalls spending a day with Thiel at the Four Seasons in San Francisco. “I was trying to drum AGI into his head,” says Goertzel. “But then he was also hearing from Eliezer how AGI is going to kill everybody.” Enter the doomers

That’s Eliezer Yudkowsky, another influential figure who has done at least as much as Goertzel, if not more, to push the idea of AGI. But unlike Goertzel, Yudkowsky thinks there’s a very high chance—99.5% is one number he throws out—that the development of AGI will be a catastrophe.

In 2000, Yudkowsky cofounded a nonprofit research outfit called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (later renamed the Machine Intelligence Research Institute), which pretty quickly dedicated itself to preventing doomer scenarios. Thiel was an early benefactor.

At first, Yudkowsky’s ideas didn’t get much pickup. Recall that back then the idea of an all-powerful AI—let alone a dangerous one—was pure sci-fi. But in 2014, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, published a book called Superintelligence.

“It put the AGI thing out there,” says Goertzel. “I mean, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—lots of tech-industry AI people—read that book, and whether or not they agreed with his doomer perspective, Nick took Eliezer’s concepts and wrapped them up in a very acceptable way.”

“All of these things gave AGI a stamp of acceptability,” Goertzel adds. “Rather than it being pure crackpot stuff from mavericks howling out in the wilderness.” STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | PUBLIC DOMAIN

Yudkowsky has been banging the same drum for 25 years; many engineers at today’s top AI companies grew up reading and discussing his views online, especially on LessWrong, a popular hub for the tech industry’s fervent community of rationalists and effective altruists.

Today, those views are more popular than ever, capturing the imagination of a younger generation of doomers like David Krueger, a researcher at the University of Montreal who previously served as research director at the UK’s AI Security Institute. “I think we are definitely on track to build superhuman AI systems that will kill everybody,” Krueger tells me. “And I think that’s horrible and we should stop immediately.”

Yudkowsky gets profiled by the likes of the New York Times, which bills him as “Silicon Valley’s version of a doomsday preacher.” His new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, written with Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, lays out wild claims, with little evidence, that unless we pull the plug on development, near-future AGI will lead to global Armageddon. The pair’s position is extreme: They argue that an international ban should be enforced at all costs, up to and including the point of nuclear retaliation. After all, “datacenters can kill more people than nuclear weapons,” Yudkowsky and Soares write.

This stuff is no longer niche. The book is an NYT bestseller and comes with endorsements from national security experts such as Suzanne Spaulding, a former US Department of Homeland Security official, and Fiona Hill, former senior director of the White House National Security Council, who now advises the UK government; celebrity scientists such as Max Tegmark and George Church; and other household names, including Stephen Fry, Mark Ruffalo, and Grimes. Yudkowsky now has a megaphone.

Still, it is those early quiet words in certain ears that may prove most consequential. Yudkowsky is credited with introducing Thiel to DeepMind’s founders, after which Thiel became one of the first big investors in the company. Having merged with Google, it is now the in-house AI lab for the tech colossus Alphabet.

Alongside Musk, Thiel was also instrumental in setting up OpenAI in 2015, sinking millions into a startup founded on the singular ambition to build AGI—and make it safe. In 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X: “eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else. certainly he got many of us interested in AGI.” Yudkowsky might one day deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for that, Altman added. But by this point, Thiel had apparently grown wary of the “AI safety people” and the power they were gaining. “You don’t understand how Eliezer has programmed half the people in your company to believe in that stuff,” he is reported to have told Altman at a dinner party in late 2023. “You need to take this more seriously.” Altman “tried not to roll his eyes,” according to Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey.

OpenAI is now the most valuable private company in the world, worth half a trillion dollars.

And the transformation is complete: Like all the most powerful conspiracies, AGI has slipped into the mainstream and taken hold.
The great AGI conspiracy

The term “AGI” may have been popularized less than 20 years ago, but the mythmaking behind it has been there since the start of the computer age—a cosmic microwave background of chutzpah and marketing.

Alan Turing asked if machines could think only five years after the first electronic computer, ENIAC, was built in 1945. And here’s Turing a little later, in a 1951 radio broadcast: “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.”

Then, in 1955, the computer scientist John McCarthy and his colleagues applied for US government funding to create what they fatefully chose to call “artificial intelligence”—a canny spin, given that computers at the time were the size of a room and as dumb as a thermostat. Even so, as McCarthy wrote in that funding application: “An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.”

It’s this myth that’s the root of the AGI conspiracy. A smarter-than-human machine that can do it all is not a technology. It’s a dream, unmoored from reality. Once you see that, other parallels with conspiracy thinking start to leap out. It’s impossible to debunk a shape-shifting idea like AGI.

Talking about AGI can sometimes feel like arguing with an enthusiastic Redditor about what drugs (or particles in the sky) are controlling your mind. Each point has a counterpoint that tries to chip away at your own sense of what’s true. Ultimately, it’s a clash of worldviews, not an exchange of evidence-based reason. AGI is like that, too—it’s slippery.

Part of the issue is that despite all the money, all the talk, nobody knows how to build it. More than that: Most people don’t even agree on what AGI really is—which helps explain how people can get away with telling us it can both save the world and end it. At the core of most definitions you’ll find the idea of a machine that can match humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks. (And remember, superintelligence is AGI’s shiny new upgrade: a machine that can outmatch us.) But even that’s easy to pull apart: What humans are we talking about? What kind of cognitive task? And how wide a range?

“There’s no real definition of it,” says Christopher Symons, chief artificial intelligence scientist at the AI health-care startup Lirio and former head of the computer science and math division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “If you say ‘human-level intelligence,’ that could be an infinite number of things—everybody’s level of intelligence is slightly different.”

And so, says Symons, we’re in this weird race to build … what, exactly? “What are you trying to get it to do?” Related Story Artificial general intelligence: Are we close, and does it even make sense to try?

In 2023, a team of researchers at Google DeepMind, including Legg, had a go at categorizing various definitions that people had proposed for AGI. Some said that a machine had to be able to learn; some said that it had to be able to make money; some said that it had to have a body and move about in the world (and maybe make coffee).

Legg told me that when he’d suggested the term to Goertzel for the title of his book, the hand-waviness had been kind of the point. “I didn’t have an especially clear definition. I didn’t really feel it was necessary,” he said at the time. “I was actually thinking of it more as a field of study, rather than an artifact.”

So, I guess we’ll know it when we see it? The problem is that some people think they’ve seen it already.

In 2023, a team of Microsoft researchers put out a paper in which they described their experiences playing around with a prerelease version of OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4. They called it “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence”—and it polarized the industry.

It was a moment when a lot of researchers were blown away and trying to come to terms with what they were seeing. “Shit was working better than they had expected it to,” says Goertzel. “The concept of AGI genuinely started to seem more plausible.”

And yet for all of LLMs’ remarkable wordplay, Goertzel doesn’t think that they do in fact contain sparks of AGI. “It’s a little surprising to me that some people with a deep technical understanding of how these tools work under the hood still think that they could become human-level AGI,” he says. “On the other hand, you can’t prove it’s not true.”

And there it is: You can’t prove it’s not true. “The idea that AGI is coming and that it’s right around the corner and that it’s inevitable has licensed a great many departures from reality,” says the University of Edinburgh’s Vallor. “But we really don’t have any evidence for it.”

Conspiracy thinking looms again. Predictions about when AGI will arrive are made with the precision of numerologists counting down to the end of days. With no real stakes in the game, deadlines come and go with a shrug. Excuses are made and timelines are adjusted yet again.

We saw this when OpenAI released the much-hyped GPT-5 this summer. AI stans were disappointed that the new version of the company’s flagship technology wasn’t the step change they expected. But instead of seeing that as evidence that AGI wasn’t attainable—or attainable with an LLM, at least—believers pushed out their predictions for how soon AGI would come. It was coming—just, you know, next time.

Maybe they’re right. Or maybe people will pick whatever evidence they can to defend an idea and overlook evidence that counts against it. Jeremy Cohen, who studies conspiracy thinking in technology circles at McMaster University in Canada, calls this imperfect evidence gathering—a hallmark of conspiracy thinking.

Cohen started his research career in the Arizona desert, studying a community called People Unlimited that believed its members were immortal. The conviction was impervious to contrary evidence. When its members died of natural causes (including two of its founders), the thinking was that they must have deserved it. “The general consensus was that every death was a suicide,” says Cohen. “If you are immortal and you get cancer and you die—well, you must have done something wrong.”

Cohen has since been focused on transhumanism (the idea that technology can help humans push past their natural limitations) and AGI. “I am seeing a lot of parallels. There are forms of magical thinking that I think is a part of the popular imagination around AGI,” he says. “It connects really well to the kinds of religious imaginaries that you see in conspiracy thinking today.” The believers are in on the AGI secret.

Maybe some of you think I’m an idiot: You don’t get it at all lol. But that’s kind of my point. There are insiders and outsiders. When I talk to researchers or engineers who are happy to drop AGI into the conversation as a given, it’s like they know something I don’t. But nobody’s ever been able to tell me what that something is.

The truth is out there, if you know where to look. Conspiracy theories are primarily concerned about revealing a hidden truth, Cohen tells me: “It’s a really fundamental part of conspiracy thinking, and that’s absolutely something that you see in the way people talk about AGI,” he says.

Last year, a 23-year-old former OpenAI staffer turned investor, Leopold Aschenbrenner, published a much-dissected 165-page manifesto titled “Situational Awareness.” You don’t need to read it to get the idea: You either see the truth of what’s coming or you don’t. And you don’t need cold, hard facts, either—it’s enough to feel it. Those who don’t just haven’t seen the light.

This idea stalked the periphery of my conversation with Goertzel, too. When I pushed him on why people are skeptical of AGI, for instance, he said: “Before every major technical achievement, from human flight to electrical power, loads of wise pundits would tell you why it was never going to happen. The fact is, most people only believe what they see in front of their faces.”

That makes AGI sound like an article of faith. I put that to Krueger, who believes AGI’s arrival is maybe five years out. He scoffed: “I think that’s completely backwards.” For him, the article of faith is the idea that it won’t happen—it’s the skeptics who continue to deny the obvious. (Even so, he hedges: No one knows for sure, he says, but there’s no obvious reason that AGI won’t come.)

Hidden truths bring truth seekers, bent on revealing what they’ve been able to see all along. With AGI, though, it’s not enough to uncover something hidden. Here, revelation requires an unprecedented act of creation. If you believe AGI is achievable, then you believe that those making it are midwives to machines that will match or surpass human intelligence. “The idea of giving birth to machine gods is obviously very flattering to the ego,” says Vallor. “It’s an incredibly seductive thing to think that you yourself are laying the early foundations for that transcendence.”

It's yet another overlap with conspiracy thinking. Part of the draw is the desire for a sense of purpose in an otherwise messy world that can feel meaningless—the longing to be a person of consequence.

Krueger, who is based in Berkeley, says he knows people working on AI who see the technology as our natural successor. “They view it as akin to having children or something,” he says. “Side note: they usually don’t have children.” AGI will be our one true savior (or it’ll bring the apocalypse).

Cohen sees parallels between many modern conspiracy theories and the New Age movement, which reached its peak of influence in the 1970s and ’80s. Adherents believed humanity was on the cusp of unlocking an era of spiritual well-being and expanded consciousness that would usher in a more peaceful and prosperous world. In a nutshell, the idea was that by engaging in a set of pseudo-religious practices, including astrology and the careful curation of crystals, humans would transcend their limitations and enter a kind of hippie utopia.

Today’s tech industry is built on compute, not crystals, but its sense of what’s at stake is no less transcendent: “You know, this idea that there is going to be this fundamental shift, there’s going to be this millenarian turn where we end up in a techno-utopian future,” says Cohen. “And the idea that AGI is going to ultimately allow humanity to overcome the problems that face us.”

In many people’s telling, AGI will arrive all at once. Incremental advances in AI will stack up until, one day, AI will be good enough to start making better AI by itself. At which point—FOOM—it will advance so rapidly that AGI will arrive in what’s often called an intelligence explosion, leading to a point of no return known as the Singularity, a goofy term that’s been popular in AGI circles for years. Co-opting a concept from physics, the science fiction author Vernor Vinge first introduced the idea of a technological singularity in the 1980s. Vinge imagined an event horizon on the path of technological progress beyond which humans would be fast outstripped by the exponential self-improvement of the machines they had created.

Call it the AI Big Bang—which, again, gives us a before and an after, a transcendent moment when humanity as we know it changes forever (for good or bad). “People imagine it as an event,” says Grace from AI Impacts.

For Vallor, this belief system is notable for the way that a faith in technology has replaced a faith in humans. Despite the woo-woo, New Age thinking was at least motivated by the idea that people had what it took to change the world by themselves, if they could only tap into it. With the pursuit of AGI, we’ve left that self-belief behind and bought into the idea that only technology can save us, she says.

That’s a compelling—even comforting—thought for many people. “We’re in an era where other paths to material improvement of human lives and our societies seem to have been exhausted,” Vallor says.

Technology once promised a route to a better future: Progress was a ladder that we would climb toward human and social flourishing. “We’ve passed the peak of that,” says Vallor. “I think the one thing that gives many people hope and a return to that kind of optimism about the future is AGI.”

Push this idea to its conclusion and, again, AGI becomes a kind of god—one that can offer relief from earthly suffering, says Vallor.

Kelly Joyce, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina who studies how cultural, political, and economic beliefs shape the way we think about and use technology, sees all these wild predictions about AGI as something more banal: part of a long-term pattern of overpromising from the tech industry. “What’s interesting to me is that we get sucked in every time,” she says. “There is a deep belief that technology is better than human beings.”

Joyce thinks that’s why, when the hype kicks in, people are predisposed to believe it. “It’s a religion,” she says. “We believe in technology. Technology is God. It’s really hard to push back against it. People don’t want to hear it.” How AGI hijacked an industry

The fantasy of computers that can do almost anything a person can is seductive. But like many pervasive conspiracy theories, it has very real consequences. It has distorted the way we think about the stakes behind the current technology boom (and potential bust). It may have even derailed the industry, sucking resources away from more immediate, more practical application of the technology. More than anything else, it gives us a free pass to be lazy. It fools us into thinking we might be able to avoid the actual hard work needed to solve intractable, world-spanning problems—problems that will require international cooperation and compromise and expensive aid. Why bother with that when we’ll soon have machines to figure it all out for us?

Consider the resources being sunk into this grand project. Just last month, OpenAI and Nvidia announced an up-to-$100 billion partnership that would see the chip giant supply at least 10 gigawatts of ChatGPT’s insatiable demand. That’s higher than nuclear power plant numbers. A bolt of lightning might release that much energy. The flux capacitor inside Dr. Emmett Brown’s DeLorean time machine only required 1.2 gigawatts to send Marty back to the future. And then, only two weeks later, OpenAI announced a second partnership with chipmaker AMD for another six gigawatts of power.

Promoting the Nvidia deal on CNBC, Altman, straight-faced, claimed that without this kind of data center buildout, people would have to choose between a cure for cancer and free education. “No one wants to make that choice,” he said. (Just a few weeks later, he announced that erotic chats would be coming to ChatGPT.)

Add to those costs the loss of investment in more immediate technology that could change lives today and tomorrow and the next day. “To me it’s a huge missed opportunity,” says Lirio’s Symons, “to put all these resources into solving something nebulous when we already know there’s real problems that we could solve.”

But that’s not how the likes of OpenAI needs to operate. “With people throwing so much money at these companies, they don’t have to do that,” Symons says. “If you’ve got hundreds of billions of dollars, you don’t have to focus on a practical, solvable project.”

Despite his steadfast belief that AGI is coming, Krueger also thinks the industry's single-minded pursuit of it means that potential solutions to real problems, such as better health care, are being ignored. “People have a long list of complaints about both the concept of AGI and the idea that it should be a goal,” he says. “I think it's pretty unpopular in the field.”

And there are consequences for the way governments support and regulate technology (or don’t). Tina Law, who studies technology policy at the University of California–Davis, worries that policymakers are getting lobbied about the ways AI will one day kill us all, instead of addressing real concerns about the ways AI could impact people’s lives in immediate and material ways today. Inequality has been sidetracked by existential risk.

“Hype is a lucrative strategy for tech firms,” says Law. A big part of that hype is the idea that what’s happening is inevitable: If we don’t build it, someone else will. “When something is framed as inevitable,” Law says, “people doubt not only whether they should resist but also whether they have the capacity to do so.” Everyone gets locked in.

The AGI distortion field isn’t limited to tech policy, says Milton Mueller at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who works on technology policy and regulation. The race to AGI gets compared to the race to the atomic bomb, he says. “So whoever gets it first is going to have ultimate power over everybody else. That’s a crazy and dangerous idea that really will distort our approach to foreign policy.”

There’s a business incentive for companies (and governments) to push the myth of AGI, says Mueller, because they can then claim that they will be the first to get there. But because they’re running a race in which nobody has agreed on the finish line, the myth can be spun as long as it’s useful. Or as long as investors are willing to buy into it.

It’s not hard to see how this plays out. It’s not utopia or hell—it’s OpenAI and its peers making a whole lot more money. The great AGI conspiracy, concluded

And maybe that brings us back to the whole conspiracy thing—and a late-game twist in this tale. So far we’ve ignored one popular feature of conspiracy thinking: that there’s a group of powerful figures pulling the levers behind the scenes and that, by seeking the truth, believers can expose this elite cabal.

Sure, the people feeling the AGI aren’t publicly accusing any Illuminati or WEF-like force of preventing the AGI future or withholding its secrets.

But what if there are, in fact, shadowy puppet masters here—and they’re the very people who have pushed the AGI conspiracy hardest all along? The kings of Silicon Valley are throwing everything they can get at building AGI for profit. The myth of AGI serves their interests more than anybody else’s.

As one senior executive at an AI company said to us recently, AGI always needs to be six months to a year away, because if it’s any further than that, you won’t be able to recruit people from Jane Street, and if it’s closer to already here, then what’s the point?

As Vallor puts it: “If OpenAI says they’re building a machine that’s going to make corporations even more powerful than they are today, that isn’t going to get the kind of public buy-in that they need.”

Remember: You create a god and you become like one yourself. Krueger says there’s a line of thinking running through Silicon Valley in which building AI is a way to seize huge amounts of power. (It’s one of the premises of Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness,” for example.) “You know, we’re going to have this godlike power and we’re going to have to figure out what to do with it,” says Krueger. “A lot of people think if they get there first, they can basically take over the world.”

“They're putting so much effort into selling their vision of a future with AGI in it, and they’re having a pretty good amount of success because they have so much power,” he adds.

Goertzel, for one, is almost lamenting how successful the maybe-cabal has been. He’s actually starting to miss life on the fringes. “In my generation, you had to have a lot of vision to want to work on AGI, and you had to be very stubborn,” he says. “Now it’s almost, like, what your grandma tells you to do to get a job instead of being a business major.”

“It’s disorienting that this stuff is so broadly accepted,” he says. “It almost gives me the desire to go work on something else that not so many people are doing.” He’s half joking (I think): “Obviously, putting the finishing touches to AGI is more important than gratifying my preference to be out on the frontier.”

But I'm no clearer on what exactly they’re putting the finishing touches on. What does it mean for technology in general if we fall so hard for the fairy tales? In a lot of ways, I think the whole idea of AGI is built on a warped view of what we should expect technology to do, and even what intelligence is in the first place. Stripped back to its essentials, the argument for AGI rests on the premise that one technology, AI, has gotten very good, very fast, and will continue to get better. But set aside the technical objections—what if it doesn't continue to get better?—and you’re left with the claim that intelligence is a commodity you can get more of if you have the right data or compute or neural network. And it’s not.

Intelligence doesn’t come as a quantity you can just ratchet up and up. Smart people may be brilliant in one area and not in others. Some Nobel Prize winners are really bad at playing the piano or caring for their kids. Some very smart people insist that AGI is coming next year.

It’s hard not to wonder what will get its hooks into us next.

Before we ended our call, Goertzel told me about an event he’d just been to in San Francisco on AI consciousness and parapsychology: “ESP, precognition, and whatnot.”

“That’s where AGI was 20 years ago,” he said. “Everyone thinks it’s batshit crazy.”