“Christ would agree.”
An MIT professor calculated a 90 percent probability that advanced artificial intelligence would someday pose an existential threat to humanity.
A weekly dispatch taking aim at the relentless absurdity of the 24-hour news cycle.
Across the world, online gamblers wagered $40 million on whom the College of Cardinals would select as its next pope; it was reported that ravioli had been banned from being served to the cardinals for fear that the stuffed pasta might contain secret messages; the cardinals selected a White Sox fan from Chicago as the first American leader of the Roman Catholic Church; and at the Roman Colosseum, an American tourist accidentally impaled himself on a spike.1 2 3 4 5 Afghanistan’s Ministry of Sports banned the game of chess due to gambling concerns, and the White House announced that it was considering suspending habeas corpus to expedite its deportations of U.S. residents.6 7 8 Eighty-three boxes of Nazi journals and propaganda shipped from the German Embassy in Tokyo in 1941 were discovered in the basement of Argentina’s Supreme Court, three Chinese men were arrested at a hotel in Japan for attempting to smuggle suitcases containing 160 kilograms of protected hermit crabs out of the country, and the U.S. national intelligence director was reported to have ordered the agencies under her control to spy on Greenlanders to learn how they felt about the United States extracting their resources.9 10 11 12 13
The premier of Alberta announced that she would hold a referendum on separating from Canada, and nuclear physicists used a particle collider to transmute microscopic amounts of lead into gold.14 15 A man in Kansas stole an 800-pound Spanish-American cannon from a park in Wichita to repay a $20,000 debt to his cocaine dealer, the U.S. military lost at sea a second F/A-18 fighter jet in less than two weeks, two animatronic dinosaurs were stolen from England’s Raptors World, and Dutch scientists calculated that the universe would perish in 1078 years rather than 101100 years.16 17 18 An MIT professor calculated a 90 percent probability that advanced artificial intelligence would someday pose an existential threat to humanity, it was reported that the Pentagon was funding research related to the use of artificial intelligence in diplomacy, and a judge in Arizona allowed an avatar of a murdered man to testify at his killer’s sentencing hearing.19 20 21 In Pinellas County, Florida, a man on trial for killing an attorney told a judge he needed more time to find legal representation.22
A man and woman were arrested for prostitution in the driveway of a Connecticut State Trooper station; a man in Beachwood, Ohio, checked out 100 books from the library and filmed himself lighting them on fire; and the Indonesian Social Affairs Ministry was reported to be considering requiring men in families who seek government assistance to undergo vasectomies.23 24 25 A mother in Sweden was fined for filming herself cracking an egg on her child’s forehead, an 8-year-old boy in Kentucky ordered 70,000 Dum-Dums with his mother’s phone, and a 68-year-old woman in Switzerland was accused by prosecutors of systematically feeding her neighbor’s cat so that it would not want to go home.26 27 28 Police in Ohio pulled over a woman and discovered in her vehicle a raccoon named Chewy who was holding a meth pipe.29 30 The brakes of a British Airways flight caught fire after its co-pilot confused his left and right directions during takeoff, and for the second time in as many weeks Newark Airport’s air traffic controllers briefly lost all information concerning the whereabouts of the airplanes in their skies.31 32 An Illinois man moved in with two people who unbeknownst to him had been squatting in his house; and the mayor of Toms River, New Jersey, announced that he planned to build a park upon a plot of riverfront land where an Episcopal church had been planning to build a homeless shelter.33 34 “Christ would agree,” the mayor said.35 —Joe Kloc