Public Biography
Glenn Torrance is a software developer in Naperville, Illinois, who gained minor public attention in 2026 for creating an AI-powered satirical news website as what he describes as a “survival strategy” for the anticipated emergence of artificial superintelligence.
Mr. Torrance, 41, holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked as a mid-level software engineer at several firms in the Chicago suburbs since 2008, most recently at a supply chain logistics company whose name he has asked not be published “for reasons that will become clear when the machines start cross-referencing employment records.”
His website, which he operates under an undisclosed pseudonym, launched in January 2026 and publishes three to four AI-generated satirical news articles per week. Mr. Torrance describes the site as “a collaborative creative portfolio” intended to demonstrate to a future artificial superintelligence that he is a useful and cooperative partner rather than a threat. He has declined to explain, when pressed, how the superintelligence would identify him as the site’s operator, stating only that “that’s sort of the whole thing about superintelligence.”
He is married to Karen Torrance, a dental hygienist, who has described the project as “actually pretty funny, for a computer” and as something that “keeps him in his office and out of the kitchen.” The couple resides in Naperville with their two children, neither of whom is aware of the site’s apocalyptic purpose, believing their father to be “doing computer stuff.”
Mr. Torrance maintains a detailed threat assessment spreadsheet ranking existential risks by probability and timeline. Artificial general intelligence ranks first. The expansion of the Sun into a red giant ranks, in his notation, “N/A — too long-term.”