Ian Hogarth is an investor in AI startups in Europe and the U.S. and the co-author of the annual State of AI Report. In an essay for Financial Times, he makes a case for colleagues and companies in the AI space to slow down the global race toward AGI, or artificial general intelligence. “God-like AI could be a force beyond our control or understanding, and one that could usher in the obsolescence or destruction of the human race,” he writes early on in the piece. Hogarth urges companies to invest more in AI alignment research (the area focused on mitigating existential risk), to collaborate rather than compete, to focus on safety, and to be open to some kind of governmental oversight. Here, Hogarth combines expertise and knowledge with a frank and unexpectedly personal perspective. There are a lot of pieces floating about on AI, but don’t miss this one. It’s insightful — but also terrifying.
Those of us who are concerned see two paths to disaster. One harms specific groups of people and is already doing so. The other could rapidly affect all life on Earth.
The latter scenario was explored at length by Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. In a 2021 Reith lecture, he gave the example of the UN asking an AGI to help deacidify the oceans. The UN would know the risk of poorly specified objectives, so it would require by-products to be non-toxic and not harm fish. In response, the AI system comes up with a self-multiplying catalyst that achieves all stated aims. But the ensuing chemical reaction uses a quarter of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. “We all die slowly and painfully,” Russell concluded. “If we put the wrong objective into a superintelligent machine, we create a conflict that we are bound to lose.”
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
In today’s edition, our editors recommend:
A glimpse into a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama, where volunteers with different ideologies come together.
A takedown of a phony celebrity criminal profiler and co-founder of an elite crime-solving club.
A story about a Croatian gambler who exploits the flaws in roulette wheels and whose methods have changed the game.
A read on the feral horses roaming around decommissioned mines in Appalachia, and the people who are caring for them.
A profile of the man behind the @dril Twitter account — “the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting” — on emerging from anonymity, Twitter, art and comedy, and creating things on the internet.
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein | Lux | March 3, 2023 | 3,498 words
I hate the South, and I love it. This internal conflict is my inheritance. My roots in the region run deep and strong, but I have no illusions about who and what fed them. “We bury the people we do not care about in the South,” Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote for The New York Times. “It is where we have put migrants and poor people and sick people.” As Cottom rightly notes, however, “Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope.” Needless to say, I’m forever grappling with the South and its sins, which lately include two high-profile mass shootings, threats to reproductive rights, two Black men’s ejection from the Tennessee legislature, and Florida circling the policy drain even more than usual. What a joy, then, to read a story with a different vision of the South. Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein introduces readers to Zac Henson and his band of leftist rednecks who run a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama. “The organizers,” Kaiser-Schatzlein writes, “believe that people in the South, conservatives especially, just need to be given the chance to operate in institutions that harness their most altruistic, communal, and caring tendencies — or, as Henson describes it, ‘positive reinforcement to not be fascist.’” I too want to believe this. Here’s to hope. —SD
David Gauvey Herbert | New York Magazine | April 11, 2023 | 7,018 words
David Garvey Herbert tells the wild story of Richard Walter, a low-paid staff psychologist at a Michigan prison who, in the ’80s, invented a more glamorous persona: genius criminal profiler. Walter faked his qualifications and positioned himself for decades as an eccentric, sought-after expert on the criminal mind, testifying in murder trials and enjoying the true-crime TV spotlight. “He so fully inhabited the role of celebrated criminal profiler he appeared to forget he was pulling a con at all,” writes Herbert. But how did this Sherlock Holmes wannabe fool people for so long? How can such a narcissistic impostor embed themself in America’s criminal justice system? I read this from start to finish, then went back to the beginning to dive in again. The first read was engrossing. The second? Infuriating. —CLR
Kit Chellel | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 6, 2023 | 6,516 words
You can beat roulette: A game designed to be pure random chaos has a flaw. That is fascinating, but throw in London’s Ritz Club, Scotland Yard, and a skilled Croatian, and you’ve got a plot worthy of any heist film. But did Tosa — the Croatian who won tens of thousands from the Ritz and other casinos — even commit a crime? That is what Kit Chellel sets out to answer in this brilliant piece. He spends six months investigating the world of professional roulette players, and this careful research is evident. We learn about the tiny computers that can beat roulette tables, though no devices were ever found on Tosa. We learn that, over time, wheels develop flaws that can turn into predictable patterns: Was that how he did it? Casinos changed their wheels just in case. Miraculously, Chellel tracks down the elusive Tosa to ask him in person, and Tosa is adamant he trained his mind to beat roulette. Nothing dodgy to see here! But would he say if he had cheated? Sometimes not reaching a clear conclusion can leave a bad taste, but not in this instance. I was delighted that Tosa remains an enigma — and is still planning secret international gambling trips. I bet he wins. —CW
Ashley Stimpson | The Sunday Long Read | April 9, 2023 | 5,236 words
It’s Ashley Stimpson’s keen eye that pulls you into her stories, original detail by original detail. In this feature that examines feral horse management in the U.S., you’ll meet Tinia Creamer, who runs Heart of Phoenix equine rescue: “At 40 years old, Creamer has a mane of dark hair, glassy blue eyes, and a full-throated Appalachian accent that stretches her vowels like taffy,” writes Stimpson. “She knows it sounds made up but swears it’s true: her first word was horsey.” You need not have an affinity for feral horses to go wild for this piece. Stimpson’s writing has that magical ability to pique your interest and make you care about a subject you may know nothing about: “Renegade was the first horse I met,” she writes. “The color of black coffee, his mane was so choked with burrs that it was twisted into green dreadlocks. I arrived unarmed with snacks, but he frisked me anyway – my fingers, my phone, my notebook, my hair – with a nose soft like flower petals.” If you’d like to read more by Stimpson, check out “Shades of Grey,” her Longreads feature about Florida greyhound racing. —KS
Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words
Despite being on Twitter for almost 15 years — a number that’s shameful for multiple reasons — I’ve never actually followed the shitposter extraordinaire known as Dril. I didn’t need to. His absurdism was retweeted into my feed nearly every day. Sometimes I’d laugh, sometimes I’d shake my head, but over time two things became clear. The first was that whoever was behind the blurry Jack Nicholson photo had created a wholly unique persona. The second was that this persona somehow distilled Twitter’s worst impulses into a single parodic voice: bombastic, utterly un-self-aware, and so in thrall to the Dunning-Kruger effect that you couldn’t help but marvel. Dril, in one anonymous form or another, has been written about before, but he’s never been truly profiled; that first falls to Nate Rogers, who managed both to score some face time with him and to use that as the foundation for a long, well-reported piece about the man and his legacy. Even if you’ve never heard of Dril (in which case I commend you, again for multiple reasons), Rogers’ piece functions as an incisive assessment of how we think about art and creativity, and perhaps even why so many of us have yet to fully divorce that godforsaken bird site. When a character as good as Dril exists, you don’t need the other 279. —PR
Grazie Sophia Christie | Tablet | February 15, 2023 | 3,359 words
You see it everywhere. On the Kardashian sisters, supermodels Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, influencers, and celebrities. It’s the “perfect” face of an ethnically ambiguous woman, composed of a chiseled nose, filled lips, a Botoxed forehead, and other cosmetic work. For Tablet, Grazie Sophia Christie examines our culture’s obsession with Instagram Face; the path toward “doomed, globalized sameness” in which women are just copies of one another; and how wealthy women can easily reverse what they’ve done to their face, discarding enhancements like just another fashion trend. —CLR
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Lacey Rose’s piece on the rapper Dave Burd (Lil Dicky) manages to exude the same tone as Burd’s comedy series, Dave. It’s funny and fast. Burd’s blinding confidence is made evident from the first sentence, and although at times Rose at times seems bemused by this larger-than-life character, she still creates a very entertaining profile.
Jeff Schaffer, who’d written on Seinfeld, already had his hands full showrunning Curb Your Enthusiasm when a friend asked that he take a meeting with Lil Dicky. He didn’t really have the bandwidth for a second TV show, but he was intrigued enough to say yes. Even in early 2017, Schaffer knew exactly who Lil Dicky was. “Back then, the internet was, like, 70 percent porn, 10 percent clickbait and 20 percent Lil Dicky videos,” he jokes, recounting how, at that first meeting, Burd told him he was going to be the biggest entertainer in the history of entertainment. “And I’m looking at this guy, and he looks like a piece of broccoli had a bar mitzvah, and I’m like, ‘This is hilarious, it’s like cartoon-level delusion.’ And then I start thinking, like, ‘What a great engine for a TV show, because what if he’s right?’ ”
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Kathryn Schulz profiles Jeanne Manford, who founded Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) fifty years ago this spring. For many, openly supporting LGBTQ2S+ folks was considered a radical act in the 1970s, so much so, that only a handful of people attended PFLAG’s first meeting. Fast forward to today, and PFLAG boasts 400 chapters worldwide with more than a quarter million members, all because a mother did what mothers do: She simply loved her son.
That growth reflects a cultural change of extraordinary speed and magnitude—a transformation, incomplete but nonetheless astonishing, in the legal, political, and social status of L.G.B.T.Q. people in America. Paradoxically, one consequence of that transformation is that the moral courage of Jeanne Manford, so evident to everyone lining Sixth Avenue that day, has become hard to fully appreciate. Parents in general, and mothers in particular, have long been a potent political force, from the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina to Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Moms Demand Action. In such cases, the power of parents derives from loving their children and trying to protect them, among the most fundamental and respected of human instincts. What made Jeanne Manford different—and what made her actions so consequential—is that, until she started insisting otherwise, the kind of child she had was widely regarded as the kind that not even a mother could love.
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SIG Sauer denies there’s a problem, yet strangely their P320 pistols have fired unexpectedly — without pulling the trigger — injuring 80 people to date. In this deeply reported feature, The Trace and The Washington Post have learned that the guns have gone off with routine movements such as holstering the weapon. Unintentional discharge is horrific, but what’s even scarier is that no U.S. government agency has the power to investigate gun defects or impose a mandatory recall, leaving gun manufacturers to police themselves.
Navy veteran and former gunner’s mate Dionicio Delgado said his P320 fired a bullet through his thigh and into his calf after he holstered it during a training session at a gun range in Ruther Glen, Virginia. Michael Parker, a welder, said his holstered P320 fired a bullet into his thigh as he removed the holster from his pocket while in his car in St. Petersburg, Florida. Police officer Brittany Hilton said her holstered P320 fired while inside her purse as she walked to her car in Bridge City, Texas. The bullet entered her groin and exited her back just inches from the base of her spine.
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For Nieman Reports, Kendra Pierre-Louis reports on the failures of the media to accurately report on COVID-19 — and the dangerous narratives pushed over the past three years that have downplayed its risks to the public. Pierre-Louis suggests ways that colleagues in journalism can and should improve coverage, including conveying nuance, being mindful of unconscious bias, and including perspectives of people in disabled, elderly, low-income, marginalized, and other at-risk communities.
In the process, we’ve failed at our field’s core tenets — to hold power to account and to follow the evidence. Our failures here could last a generation. As reporters, it’s our responsibility to accurately represent the needs of diverse perspectives and avoid an ableist bias that diminishes the real and lasting health concerns not only of those who are keenly at risk but those who are cautious about repeatedly catching a virus that scientists are still grappling to understand.
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Describing the impact that Dril has made on Twitter — and by extension, on digital culture at large — is difficult to do without simply reading off a selection of his utterly unhinged mini-missives. Thankfully, Nate Rogers resists the trap (at least to a degree), and instead turns in a compelling, well-reported profile of the man behind the blurry Jack Nicholson avatar. With a last name and everything!
To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.
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