J. Craig Wheeler

Although there were tendrils of my interest in topics that I discussed in The Path to Singularity winding back into my past, the concrete seeds were planted in Fall 2012 when I organized a session of Reading Roundup. These seminars are sponsored by the UT Academy of Distinguished Teachers as a way of introducing incoming freshman to the university. A professor picks a book. If they are interested, students sign up to read the book and attend the discussion the day before classes start. I did many of them over the years, picking a different book every time. For reasons I describe in the Preface to "Path," this year I had the students read Darwin. I was blown away to find that many of the freshmen were very aware that we knew enough biology — DNA, genes, etc. — to design our own evolution. The idea had never occurred to me, but I thought this notion could be the basis of a full-fledged course. I was given permission to teach a course, The Future of Humanity, and did so regularly until I retired in 2019 with a set of notes that were the basis of the book.

I stopped volunteering for the Reading Roundup when I retired, but when the call came out this year, I realized I had to do it, using "Path" as my text. I admit I was aware that I might sell a few books and perhaps glean some word-of-mouth support for the book, but I mainly did it because it just seemed right to close the loop the year the book came out; looking back to the origins of the book and to the future of the current crop of students who will have to negotiate our AI-addled environment.

Thirteen students signed up for the session on Sunday, August 24, 2025. I picked up blank nametags and some swag in the Reading Roundup offices in Jester Dorm and then got lost trying to find my assigned room in the Sanchez building. There were maps on the first floor, but none on the fourth floor of the sprawling building where I was assigned a classroom. I put out a hand-made sign pointing to the room and guided some students looking for my room or others.

My group was a delightful mix of backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. Some were engineers interested in AI; others were from liberal arts. We talked about the exponential rush of technology, AI, brain/computer interfaces, post-Darwinian genetics, climate change. We talked about jobs and how to keep up. One fellow confessed he talked too much and proceeded to do so. They had lots of questions, and it was a good discussion. Afterward, I signed a few books. I'm not sure I'll do this again, but I'm very happy I did so this year.

Two days later, I participated in an online book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum. We talked about Range, by David Epstein, a paean to the virtue of being a generalist in a specialized world.

I'm trying to switch my mindset from selling books in the post-release rush (only moderately successful) to promoting a "long tail." On Wednesday, 8/27/25, I had a minor outpatient surgery in the morning and gave the surgeon and his nurse my cards advertising "Path." They seemed genuinely interested not merely polite. That afternoon, I attended an online webinar sponsored by The Authors Guild on where and how to find readers. I filed some of those notes away and still need to absorb and implement the suggestions. In addition to "Path," that exercise might help with my dad's biography that I am dedicated to write, but with which I struggle to define exactly what my audience is. I dream of a biography with broad appeal. My son, Rob, and writer friend, Wayne Bowen, are beta readers for the biography. They are helping me try to come to grips with that issue.

On Saturday, August 30, I went to one of the irregular house concerts sponsored by my neighbor, Paul Barker. I was seated near a family: father, mother, and young adult son. The father remarked that I was a ringer for someone he knew, probably the mustache. The son elaborated that the reference was to his grandfather. He said that, like his grandfather, I have kind eyes. Wow! That was a new one on me. I had not intended to flog the book, but at the break I gave a "Path" card to the son and asked him to give it to his grandfather and tell him he has kind eyes. The son confessed that his grandfather had passed. I blustered and said, "then give this card to your father and tell him his father had kind eyes." Awkward, but all I could do in the moment.

I have had some thoughts of the possibilities of a long tail for "Path" since struggling with the proposal for the book encouraged by my Agent, Regina Ryan. One was to try to induce bulk sales in the businesses I discuss in the book, over a hundred of them. I also had the notion of encouraging its use in college courses. That idea had lain fallow in the rush of other stuff, but it occurred to me that I needed to resurrect it. I found that my colleague in computer science, Joydeep Biswas, was teaching a course this term, CS 304I, Essentials of AI for Life and Society. Perfect. I emailed Joydeep in early September, unfortunately after classes had started, describing the background and content of "Path." Joydeep said he would look at it. Best I could expect in the circumstances. I asked my jacket blurbers Brian Schmidt and Martin Rees for possible university connections in Australia and Great Britain. I asked ChatGPT for a list of relevant courses and instructors in the U.S. ChatGPT provided some possibilities, but I think I can do better. I need to refine my prompt, maybe focus on certain states, even specific universities. Anyone have suggestions?

I had a little adventure that began on August 14 when I received an email that read:

Dear Professor Wheeler,
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Richard Flanagan, a bestselling author with a deep passion for storytelling that connects intellect with heart. I recently came across your remarkable body of work both your scientific contributions and your novels—and I have to say, I'm genuinely inspired. The way you bridge rigorous astrophysics with accessible, compelling narratives is nothing short of masterful.
As a fellow author, I'm always seeking to connect with writers whose work pushes boundaries and stirs curiosity. Your career spanning hundreds of scientific publications, award-winning teaching, and thought-provoking fiction speaks to both precision and imagination, and that's a combination I deeply admire.
I'm reaching out because I believe in the power of shared inspiration and dialogue. I'd love to exchange ideas, explore the craft from both the scientific and literary perspectives, and have some real talk about scaling up books while still writing with heart. I'd also be glad to support your work however I can, whether through sharing your books, collaborating, or simply exchanging creative energy.
If this resonates, I'd be delighted to continue the conversation. Either way, please know that your work has found a fellow admirer who values the impact you've made in both science and storytelling.

Warm regards,
Richard Flanagan
Bestselling Author

I was, I admit, flattered. I mean, "The way you bridge rigorous astrophysics with accessible, compelling narratives is nothing short of masterful." I didn't know Richard Flanagan from Adam, but a quick browse revealed that he is a Booker Prize winner from Tasmania. On the other hand, the mail sent off scam alarm bells. It did not ask for money, but the tone was somehow off. I let it sit for a couple of days. The email had come through the "contact" button on my Authors Guild web site that does not reveal my actual email. If I wrote, that would reveal my email address, but that is not so hard to find, on the university web site, for instance. I decided to reply and wrote a brief email outlining my writing "career" such as it is. I mentioned my blog and asked if I could add him to the mail list. He wrote back with some gracious comments and said he would be happy to read the blog. I added him to the mail list of the previous one, #20.

That is where things sat until I got this email a few days later, on August 18:

Dear Professor Wheeler,
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Laura Restrepo, an international bestselling author, and I recently came across your work and impressive journey both in the sciences and in fiction. I'm genuinely inspired by how you've bridged rigorous research with storytelling that reaches wider audiences. As a writer myself, I'm always looking to connect with fellow authors who bring depth, vision, and heart to their work. I would love to exchange ideas with you on the art of writing, the scaling of books, and the inspiration that fuels our stories. Your career stands as a remarkable example of both intellectual achievement and creative courage, and I would be honored to learn more about your perspective. If you're open, I'd love to connect for a real conversation whether about your novels, your popular science writing, or simply the creative journey itself. I also believe in supporting fellow writers however I can, so please know I come with genuine interest in your work and respect for your career.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Warm regards,
Laura Restrepo
Bestselling Author

Whoops!

This changed the perspective completely. The emails are not identical, but clearly from some common template. Still no request for money, but scam bells were ringing louder. For what it is worth, Laura Restrepo is a respected Columbian author. Hope springing eternal, I labored to determine a way both could be legitimate.

My next step was to contact the Authors Guild, to get advice and because their web site was the catalyst for these emails. I wrote their legal department asking, "Can you give me any insight into what is going on, legit or not?" I got a prompt reply from staff@authorsguild.org saying it might take two weeks to respond. After that, I could follow up.

I waited three weeks and then did some exploring on my own. I asked ChatGPT. I'm trying to use ChatGPT a little just to get my hand in the AI LLM revolution. Even then, I exercise my paranoia and reticence to share data with OpenAI. I just use the browser version and don't login, never mind paying $20 per month. I'm also cheap.

I cut and pasted both emails into the prompt and asked for ChatGPT's perspective. The reply was swift and definitive. The gmail addresses were probably bogus, check with author's publishers or agents. Good that there was no request for money. Most likely solution, a case of "author imposter," which is apparently rather common. ChatGPT suggested I contact the Authors Guild. Contacting the legitimate authors was possible, I suppose, but there are practical walls even getting contact information on agents and publishers. That did not seem worth the effort.

It has now been nearly six weeks. Perhaps I'll ping the Authors Guild again. I've also, against common sense, considered writing "Richard Flanagan," telling him (I'll bet on a "him") I'm onto his imposterism, and that I would put him onto my blog mail list if he would tell me his real story.

On the positive side, someone is looking at my website. Also, the Bartz v. Anthropic class action lawsuit was settled in favor of authors whose work was pirated.

To remind you of the background (Blog #15), I had a successful book signing for The Path to Singularity at Austin's independent bookstore, Book People, last January. Book People put the signed but unsold books in some sort of display where they were spotted by Juan Serinyà, the Chief Technology Officer of Tory Technologies, Inc., of Houston. Tory was planning to have a "summit" where they invited the oil drilling and pipeline customers for their software to meet and discuss their efforts to implement AI in their product. They were planning to have a keynote speaker. Juan thumbed through my book and thought a keynote talk spanning the range of AI-related topics I cover in Path would be appropriate. He emailed me in late April, one thing led to another, and I accepted the invitation. I'd never given a keynote address, but I have lots to say on the related topics, so what the heck.

Tory calls themselves a "small software development company in Houston," but they have petroleum industry customers spread throughout the U.S. and South America, and their chief AI guy works in Paris: France, not Texas. The array of interconnected components and people in the drilling and distribution networks and the operation of the associated control rooms is very complex, worth trying to render more efficient with AI.

The summit was scheduled for August 20. I began drafting my talk in Powerpoint in June by adapting a talk I had given to our local Astronomy on Tap group where one speaks to the public about astronomy in a local brewpub. Juan said that they were planning to also have a panel discussion of AI software issues and asked if I would also participate in that. I agreed.

I proposed to drive rather than fly to Houston. I clarified that while I'm in generally good health and expected no problems, I am monitored for some health issues and am more comfortable having an aide along with me when traveling, a service an Uber driver couldn't provide. I asked to have my son, Rob, accompany me for a token amount for his time in addition to the price of the rental car. Juan agreed to that.

Juan proposed to buy some copies of Path to give as gifts to certain people at the summit and to give me the opportunity to sell and sign other copies to attendees. I decided I would give free bonus copies of my novel, The Krone Experiment, as an inducement to the latter. I have a lot of first edition hard copies that probably should have been remaindered long ago, but the story is still timely given Putin's war in Ukraine, and, as I have mentioned in previous blogs, I still retain a hope of making it a film or TV series (Blog # 18).

Glutton for punishment, my ambition was to perhaps schedule other book signings. I also needed a bookstore to handle the book sales, a trick suggested to me by my cousin-in-law Bob Pyle, naturalist and prolific author and book signer himself. I contacted the one local bookstore in Bastrop through which we would pass on the way to Houston, but never heard back, so eventually gave that up, saving that potential extra hassle. I contacted a Barnes & Nobel near the site of the summit but really wanted to deal with an independent bookstore for the Tory sales as a matter of principle. I contacted the nearest independent bookstore to the summit but got a rather curt and peremptory reply that they were already booked for August 20. After a couple of days, I had an inspiration and wrote them again and asked whether they could suggest another bookstore that might handle sales at the summit. They put me in touch with Chris Hysinger and Violet Crain of the Good on Paper bookstore. Violet was an enthusiastic breath of fresh air, completely engaged with and enthusiastic about the project. She and Chris, the owner, set things up with the folks at Tory, attended the summit, handled sales, and organized a book signing in their store the afternoon after my part of the summit was over. What a deal!

I had a couple of calls with Juan and with Rene Veron, the CEO of Tory, to discuss details of my keynote and the panel discussion. I had another with them and with the other panelists. These were on Microsoft's TEAM which I had used before, but which gave me some problems. At the very least it had to be upgraded. For the panel discussion, I simply could not get it to connect. The Tory IT guy finally suggested I download the app in real time on my phone. That worked, but I was 10 minutes late to the call, to my chagrin.

Rob was my driver, kept an eye on me so I didn't walk off without my laptop, schlepped two heavy boxes of The Krone Experiment, and took some videos and photos during the summit. We picked up the Enterprise rental car at 2 PM Tuesday afternoon, loaded it, and set off for Houston about 3 PM. The trip down was smooth apart from a cloudburst in Katy, west of Houston, just where the traffic thickens. Rob handled that with smooth patience.

The meeting was in the Moran Hotel in the Moran City Center, a gentrified shopping/business district on the west side of Houston. We used the valet parking to be covered by Tory and checked in about 7 PM. There was a little confusion over the room. While Tory had made the reservation, Rob, not I, was listed as the person in charge of our billing. Foreshadowing. I determined to give modestly generous tips and did so to the car valet and the bellhop who wheeled the boxes of The Krone Experiment to the meeting room and then our luggage to the room. I did so again to the bellhop who patiently awaited our checkout the next day, the valet who delivered the car, a woman who delivered a spare blanket, and the woman at the front desk who sequestered our luggage after we checked out. I fully intended to leave a tip for the room service person but forgot and instead left a tip with the front desk, to be passed on. I hope that worked. Rob and I walked around the block looking for a place for dinner and ended up in a grill right across the street from the Moran. I had scallops, Rob trout, and we split a fancy layered mousse for dessert.

We checked out of the room at 8 AM before joining the meeting that formally started at 9 AM. My understanding was that Tory would cover the room, but the hotel presented a bill to Rob (see above) that included the valet parking. I paid it. It turned out that while the room was charged to Tory's card, the hotel expected payment with a current card upon checkout.

Everyone at the meeting, especially all the Tory personnel, were warm and welcoming. A special shout out to Mariana Bengochea, the Marketing Coordinator on whose capable shoulders all the meeting details fell. Mariana was brilliant in determining the confusion over the room billing. I added that charge to my invoice.

I had drafted my talk with my own personal Powerpoint background that had a mix of black and white lettering as appropriate to the position on the blue gradient background (sort of astronomical). As requested, I sent it a couple of days ahead to be pre-loaded, and Tory had reformatted it in their company format. That made me a little nervous, so I went through it with Juan, comparing to the version on my laptop. It was flawless.

I had carefully prepared the talk and timed it by talking through it out loud, not just reading. It went off bang on the scheduled 45 minutes. There was a clicker with a laser pointer, but I tend to hit the wrong button on those in my excitement, so I used my own laser and just used the buttons on the Tory podium laptop.

I covered the same broad range of topics as I do in Path, a focus on AI, but also brain/computer interfaces, genetics and designer babies, and the space program. I summarized my perceived ethical and socially disruptive issues. I also had advertised to Juan and Rene that while I would not preach or be obtrusive, I would mention climate change, knowing that could be a sensitive issue in this venue. I tried to soften the issue by commenting early that oil was discovered on my grandfather's farm near Oklahoma City in the opening days of the oil strike there in about 1928 to let audience know I was not unsympathetic to their enterprise. I wanted to mention climate change without harping on it, recognizing that people in the fossil fuel industry must work in this changing global environment where the reality is that there is a great push for renewable energy. I also raised the possibility that climate change was the leading edge of a Malthusian disaster. I don't know what everyone thought, but I received no direct negative feedback. Even Rob remarked that my cartoon image of the Earth with its hair on fire might have been a bit much for this audience.

While I was pretty confident about the keynote address, I was a little nervous about the panel discussion. We had talked about themes, but I was still worried about being blind-sided and resorting to the dreaded "I basically agree with everything the others have said." I had prepared enough that I had my own thoughts and pulled the panel discussion in those directions, including a possible slump after the recent peak in AI hype and pressing on the issue of when and how the other panelists could give evidence that AI is truly increasing efficiency and profits. One of the panelists sat with me at lunch and one of the first things me mentioned was "renewable energy." It's a complicated world out there.

Tory had the presentations filmed and photographed. During the afternoon session, the video guy leaned over and whispered a thanks to me. I couldn't quite make out what he was saying, but he might have been reacting to my comment that genetically we are all Africans. The name of his company was Beige, with a backwards "B."

Chris and Violet of Good on Paper handled sales during the lunch break. They sold 36 copies of Path to Tory and other attendees, a little less than half the assembled group. They sold some copies of Path before they remembered to hand out the freebie copies of The Krone Experiment, but they lightened my load of them by 17. We had brought 48.

After lunch, I listened to some of the Tory presentations. My sense was that they are employing best practices for incorporating AI into their software products. That entails keeping close ties with customer feedback, facilitating rapid learning response, and employing new implementation aided by AI. They are aspiring to be what I wrote about in Path as a "high reliability organization."

Violet had sent out a newsletter and various announcements, but she was faced with promoting a book signing at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon. Three employees, Rob and I, and one customer showed up. In an example of small-world-ism the customer had a personal connection to one of my book cover blurbers, Lord Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, through colleagues of her husband at Penn State. We sold one more Path and gave away one more Krone freebie. Rob and I agreed we had no regrets. We thoroughly enjoyed the interaction with Violet and the rest of the Good on Paper crew.

In the morning there had been a threat of rain all the way from Houston to Austin, but the drive back was clear and smooth. We left the car at Enterprise using the after-hours key drop and got a Lyft home by just after 8, just like scheduled.

Anyone need a highly experienced keynote speaker?

Keep on Keepin' on.

I've been staying busy with various things, some astronomy, some writing related, but late July and early August have, understandably, been pretty quiet.

On July 15, I attended a meeting of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society to hear a talk by Eric Salwan of Austin area rocket company Firefly Aerospace. Firefly just scored a coup by nailing the first successful commercial mission to the Moon, their Blue Ghost lander. Eric was an original founder of Firefly, but they went broke and got resurrected by others. He is still deeply engrained in the Firefly operation and gave a great presentation. I had met the first founder of Firefly, Tom Markusic, at a previous Austin Forum presentation years ago and was sufficiently taken with his story that I wrote about it in The Path to Singularity. I had a mild hope that I might get Firefly to bulk order some copies of the book to give to employees and customers. I gave Eric an autographed copy before his talk. I'm not sure he managed to retain it through the evening and the meet-and-greet at a local pub afterwards (which I skipped).

For decades I have written little summaries of my travels around the world. These stories try to capture the ironies and cultural differences one finds that make life interesting. On Monday July 28, I sent a proposal for this travel memoir tentatively entitled Tales from a Small Planet to the University of Texas Press. I got a prompt reply saying my chosen acquisition editor went on vacation the previous Monday and won't be back for two weeks. Great timing.

On July 30, I attended a Zoom call with the Austin Forum book discussion group. The topic was Measure What Matters by venture capitalist John Doerr on the business goal-setting technique of Objectives and Key Results, OKR, espoused by Andy Grove of Intel and employed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they built Google. As it so happened, the prospective leader of the discussion, Austin Forum Director Jay Boisseau, was out of pocket and the group just self-organized. Many of the attendees were very familiar with the OKR technique, and we had a rousing discussion.

On August 7, I attended yet another Austin Forum presentation on robotics by UT's Peter Stone. He's the Director of Robotics at UT and a Vice President for Robotics at Sony. His team has taught little robots to cooperate and play (slow) competitive soccer, an amazing technical feat. I also wrote about that in Path and had previously given Peter an autographed copy.

August 8th, I had a call with the CEO and CTO of Tory Industries to talk about the specifics of the panel discussion in which I had agreed to participate after my keynote address on August 20 (see #18). We used Microsoft's Teams, which I don't much like. In this case, I could not get my video to work, although it had worked when I first did a call with them. They liked the notion of my talking about how the European Southern Observatory is wrestling with issues of using AI to handle proposals without violating proprietary issues, a parallel to the issue Tory faces with customers of its software who share business plans. I had another Teams call with Tory and the other panelists on August 15. In this case, I could not get Teams to work at all. It sent me from browser to app that wouldn't connect. It needed a code I didn't have. Finally, one of the Tory people suggested I download the Teams app on my phone and plug in the meeting ID and login code. Amazingly, that worked in real time, and I joined the discussion on the phone only about 10 minutes late. 

During these doldrums, I have worked steadily on absorbing and rendering a thick stack of notes my dad left on our years in Idaho where I cut my teeth on school science projects and he worked on a proposed nuclear airplane. This all boiled down to three pretty much finished chapters in the biography. I am still wrestling with how much to try to capture his voice from these notes and how much to boil this material down to keep the story moving. Not easy.

Twenty-odd years ago, my son, Rob, and I wrote a screenplay based on my novel, The Krone Experiment. Rob made it into a full length, microbudget film. One of the best experiences of my life was watching the enthusiastic volunteer film crew turn my ideas into a movie. The film did not go anywhere at the time. One of the fantasies I harbor is that someday, somehow, I will strike a deal to remake the film with a proper budget, maybe with a streaming service. Last December, I listed the project with an online outfit called The Blacklist that makes screenplays available to professionals. I recently got the faintest whiff of interest from a young graduate of a film production school. That led me to wonder if my rights were properly protected. That, in turn, led me to wonder whether it is worth my while to set up a limited liability corporation, LLC, to protect and pass down the rights to my books and the screenplay. On June 23, my sons and I had an hour long Zoom call with a friend, a lawyer who handles such things. We decided that my current meager book income is too small to warrant such a step. My will is probably adequate, and if lightning should strike, we can cobble up an LLC in a couple of weeks.

I griped in a previous blog (#15) about my Prometheus publicist leaving and not hearing who her replacement would be. After another couple of weeks, I checked the Marketing and Sales information that Prometheus had originally provided to me and confirmed that after a certain interval, my book would be put on a backlist. I wrote to my agent, Regina Ryan, asking her opinion of the matter on June 24 and got a typical honest blunt reply. She was not sure about the formalities of a backlist but said that publishers often give books about three months to see whether they are going to flourish. We have not sold out the initial hardback print run - no one's idea of flourishing - a disappointment to me and those who supported and depended on me. I may have been lucky to get six month's support from Prometheus. On July 12, I realized that the Prometheus link to "Path" had been broken or removed. It turns out you can find the publisher's link to the book by tunneling into the Globe Pequot web site, but that means that the QR code on the special business cards that I have been handing out don't link directly to the book.

I had another idea to promote the book, a local TV appearance, and wrote to my editor again on July 14 about publicist assistance. The mail bounced. I then wrote to Regina and got a revised email, higher up the corporate structure at Globe Pequot rather than the Prometheus imprint, and wrote again on July 15. No response yet. I may forge ahead on my own.

In late June, I nominated myself and The Path to Singularity for a Chambliss Writing Award sponsored by the American Astronomical Society. I shared the award with my friend and colleague David Branch in 2017 for our book Supernova Explosions. The AAS is looking primarily for textbooks and may not want to duplicate an award. We'll see. On July 17, David and I got a note from our editor at Springer Verlag saying that the book was still doing remarkably well for a technical book of its sort and inquiring whether we might do a second edition. It's not that clear to either of us that much has changed in the intervening eight years.

I attended a webinar on June 26 presented by futurist Peter Diamandis on research progress on extending lifespans. Some have the goal of living long enough to live forever as aging is "cured." There were 785 people on the call. I was a little naughty. After Diamandis gave his pitch I wrote in the chat "In case you are interested, in The Path to Singularity (I embedded the link), I discuss some of the possible ramifications of extending lifetimes." At least one person DM'd me that she would buy my book.

I've been working on the logistics of delivering a keynote address to Tory Technologies in Houston in August (see also #15). Tory wanted to buy some books to hand to certain people and arrange to sell books to others that I could sign at the symposium. My cousin-in-law, naturalist and author Bob Pyle, told me that he tries to arrange local independent bookstores to handle book sales at his signings. I contacted one Houston bookstore that explicitly advertised that they handled such sales opportunities, but they declared they were already booked in August. I contacted a Houston Barnes and Noble but after a couple of days I had the insight to ask the first bookstore for another suggestion and they referred me to Good on Paper, which embraced my suggestion enthusiastically. If things work out, I'll do a book signing at their store after doing the Tory gig. I spoke to the CEO and CTO of Tory on a Zoom call. We agreed I would participate in a panel discussion as well as giving the keynote address and reviewed the coordination with Good on Paper for book sales. I've drafted my keynote in PowerPoint but still need to think about the panel discussion.

Bob Pyle recently read The Krone Experiment and the sequel, Krone Ascending (both available on Amazon). Then he read The Krone Experiment again and sent compliments which I deeply appreciated from an accomplished wordsmith. He also had a brilliant suggestion for a plot device for the third book in the series, Krone Triumphant, which remains on my bucket list.

I have a friend, John Tonetti, whom I met when he first serviced our rudimentary solar-boosted water heater 30 years ago. Shameless shill that I am, I had told him about "Path" on one of his recent service visits. On June 30, he emailed to say that he had listened to an Audible copy of the book as he drove his service truck, which he found to be "as stimulating, fascinating, and humiliating an experience as I have had since my days in Social Theory Seminars at the UT Austin Graduate School of Sociology some fifty years ago." He then listened again sitting at his desk and taking notes. I am deeply flattered.

I'm plugging away on my dad's biography: hydrogen bombs, nuclear airplanes, Moon landings. One of the issues with which I'm dealing is that I have a raft of recorded material, letters among family members, and my dad's notes-to-self about both personal and professional things. If I use too much of that, it bogs down the story. On the other hand, there is something to say for incorporating the original voices of the participants. The question is one of balance. In the first draft, I think I have overdone in trying to capture the original voices.

I had the thought that I could and should consult with an expert. I've had the pleasure of the acquaintance of the historian H. W. Brands for a long time. He taught my kids at a local private school while he was working on his PhD in history at The University of Texas at Austin. He taught for a while at Texas A&M, commuting from Austin to College Station, then got a faculty position at UT. He has been a prolific producer of well-received historical biographies. I attended a panel discussion at the Texas Book Festival last November in which Brands was one of the participants. I gave him one of my business cards for The Path to Singularity and asked whether he might meet with me at some point to talk about the art of writing biographies. He said yes!

It took me another six months to work up the courage. I finally emailed him and inquired whether we might meet up in late May. He was on his way out of town for a couple of weeks but graciously agreed to meet on June 5th at the Starbucks on the corner of Lamar and Barton Springs Road. We had a delightful hour chatting. He agreed that original material can be useful but argued that one needs to be ruthless in boiling it down to only the essence. I confessed to having a great problem flushing my words once I had written them. Brands said he left behind more words than he published. He thought my tentative title, Airplanes, Rockets, Satellites, and the Eniwetok Bomb: The Saga of a Twentieth Century Engineer, "needed polishing." I'm not sure I learned anything from him that I didn't already know in my gut, but I was glad to have had the conversation. Ruthless.

Over the years, I have written some stories of my travels around the world, trying to capture the interesting contrasts of cultures and the little ironies that make life interesting. It was that collection of stories, tentatively called Tales from a Small Planet, that I originally pitched to my agent, Regina Ryan. She did not think it marketable and responded, "what else you got?" from which question The Path to Singularity was born. Given the delay between getting "Path" published and the long timeline for my dad's biography, I thought I would try again now that Regina knows who I am and what I do. I emailed her again on May 15 and renewed the query. I put her in a bit of an awkward spot. She responded on June 9 in a gentle but blunt way. She said my sample story was "charming," but that the collection was "not really strong enough or earthshaking enough to attract a publisher." She's a straight shooter. Still, I would like to publish the collection. I could turn to Amazon, but I may try contacting the University of Texas Press or the Texas Tech Press where I might have a contact. For my astronomy colleagues, many of these stories involve people you know, some identified and some not for obvious reasons. You are welcome to try to figure out who the latter are.

On June 11, I finally got around to registering The Path to Singularity as Human Authored with the Authors Guild. I added my novels, The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending and my popular astronomy book, Cosmic Catastrophes, as well. The Authors Guild grants to Licensees a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, revocable, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the Human Authored mark in connection with Licensee's marketing, publication, distribution, sale, and offering for sale of Licensee's book, provided that it is Human Authored.

On the seventeenth, the Austin Forum for Science and Society organized a presentation on the current status of quantum computing at the Google building downtown. I knew that Google had a shiny new sail-shaped building right on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake. What I didn't know was that Google also owned another tall building just a block away. That is where we convened; the 22nd floor had a terrific view to the south across the river. I toted a copy of a new book on the technological future of humanity written by a member of the Austin Forum, Mike Ignatowski, that I had really enjoyed and hoped to get Mike to sign. He was a no-show at that particular meeting. The speaker had a lot to say about the current status of quantum computing and its future prospects, especially when combined with the power of AI to address crucial ultra complex issues, curing disease and climate change.

Two days later on June 19, the Austin Forum sponsored its monthly Zoom book discussion with Mike Ignatowski leading the conversation about his own book. I had hoped to get my copy signed before this discussion. The title of the book is Navigating Our Future Challenges: Facing the Dangers of Collapse and Paths to a Hopeful Future. Mike self-published it on Amazon with the notion that as things exponentially accelerate, he can easily edit the book and republish. Whereas I tend to overwrite (and then am unable to trash my excess words, see above), Mike writes spare powerful prose. I appreciated that he stressed the fact that we are shaped by our human evolutionary history, something that will always differentiate us from our machines that are born in a lab or factory. Mike captured this by saying we did not evolve to be scientists. Exercising the scientific method does not come naturally; we must work hard at it. We did evolve to be lawyers. Strongly espousing our point of view despite apparent facts to the contrary does come naturally to our evolution-guided brains. I said at the Zoom call that there were only two things I liked about Mike's book: the writing style and the content.

There are still about 300 million people in the U.S. who have not read The Path to Singularity. If you liked it, tell a friend. Even give it as a gift.

For a while in May I contemplated making a serious run at soliciting keynote speaking opportunities. My agent, Regina Ryan, and my independent publicist, Joanne McCall, both pointed out that many authors make their real income in that way, not from book sales. A woman at an Austin Forum on Science and Society meeting pointed out that doing keynotes is a "real job." I ended up voting with my body. I turned back to writing on my father's biography. It's always been writing that centers me. Still, if another keynote opportunity fell into my lap, I would pursue it. Just saying.

On May 7, I attended a dinner meeting of the Austin Forum Board, of which I am a lowly member. I fell into an interesting conversation with William Fitzgerald and Stephanie Scales of Bárd, a technical writing consulting company. They are trying to compile a catalog of human intelligence which they have provisionally titled "Human Documentation." At a previous board meeting, I had teased William by saying that Human Documentation was a rather meh title. I rashly promised to come up with a better one. At this dinner, William teased me back, pointing out that I had not done so. A long discussion ensued.

That night, I awoke in the middle of the night with various thoughts racing through my sleep-addled brain. I thought that a catalog of human intelligence does not capture the breadth and depth of the topic. In pondering this, it seemed to me that Homo sapiens are a way point, not the end of human intelligence. One can consider where and how human intelligence will go in the future, by pure biological evolution or by melding with machines. It roiled in my head that a while a catalog of human intelligence is not an infinitesimal point, it is a very small dot in the continuum of intelligence that begins with stromatolites, bacteria, and continues to plants, trees, animals, humans in the past and present and humans beyond in the future, other biological intelligence, extraterrestrial of all sorts, biomarkers less intelligent than us but also the possibility of hugely advanced biological intelligence and biological/machine melds. How, my sleepy mind asked, can one establish clear boundaries between human and "other" intelligence. What is the difference between machine ASI and biological ASI? That led me to sleepily ponder the question of the meaning of human. Human as opposed to what? "Inhuman" does not intrinsically mean evil but could encompass alien as well as machine. I also found myself thinking about the relationship between "intelligence" and "creativity." Creativity seems to involve thinking things that have never been thought before, but of course much creativity involves extrapolating things that have been thought or done before. How, I asked myself, do you encompass art in the context of intelligence? A popular exercise is to think of things that humans do that machines cannot, an increasingly small set. Machine thinking may involve things that no human can or has done. Already we have machines that can strategize in a manner that no human has or can do. Prime examples are the products of DeepMind like AlphaGo Zero or AlphaFold. I fuzzily concluded that the dimensions of intelligence are huge, less than, comparable to, or greater than current human intelligence, and, that there is diversity even among humans. I found myself conflating intelligence, thinking, and creativity, never mind consciousness.

What a jumble.

I wrote a summary of this sleep infested core dump to William and Stephanie the next day. Who knows what they will make of it? What I did not do was come up with a better name than "Human Documentation."

On May 19, I finally formally registered my novels, The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending and The Path to Singularity with Created by Humans. Created by Humans is an organization that promises to handle licensing that ensures that some sort of royalty is paid by firms that use an author's work to train their AI LLM models. I don't know whether this will work or not, but it seemed a useful experiment. I had vetted the notion of registering with Created by Humans with Regina Ryan. The registration process required some to-ing and fro-ing by email, but I got it done.

On May 29, I participated in another Austin Forum book discussion, this time on Reid Hoffman's new book, Superagency. Hoffman is a tech titan who founded LinkedIn. He has an optimistic view of what AI will do for humanity, as long as we avoid all the existential threats.

I spent most of my writing time in May working on father's biography. I discovered a bunch of correspondence dating back to the mid 1920's and am trying to incorporate that into what I've already written of that era up into the 1950's when he witnessed the first hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike. One challenge has been the correspondence from my beloved Grandmother Wheeler, Vernie. Vernie had the charming but frustrating habit of dating her letters with just the day of the week. A typical entry would be "Sat. P.M." I engaged in considerable detective work using other correspondence and the text and context of her mail to see where it fit chronologically. One letter was sent on a Tuesday after she returned from voting. I checked the calendar. Aha! Elections always happen on Tuesdays in November, and I deduced we were talking about midterm elections on November 2, 1942. I went on to other things, but this rattled around in my head. There were some things that didn't quite fit. Finally, I went back and realized that she was talking about Tuesday November 2, 1936. I'd been off by six years.

I'm posting examples of technology advances every weekday on X and LinkedIn, my quest to document the exponential growth of technology. Spoiler alert. It's still growing.

The last week of April was packed with various activities.

Chloé Hummel, my publicist at Prometheus/Global Pequot, emailed that she was moving on, as ambitious young women in the book business are wont to do. I enjoyed working with her and wish her luck. We were just starting a project to try to promote bulk sales to companies. I waited a decent interval to see if Prometheus would provide a new publicist, then wrote my editor. No response. After a month, I wrote to my only other contact, a fellow in productions. He did not know the situation but linked in a marketing director. It has been another couple of weeks. No response from anyone. My book is six months old, there is a new season, I'm being dropped.

I got a wonderful note from Neil DeGrasse Tyson saying that I had a standing invitation to be on his podcast, Star Talk, if I were sometime in New York. I replied that I would get myself there if we could line up a time. I'm awaiting that development.

Before I retired, I was a member of The University of Texas at Austin Academy of Distinguished Teachers. I still attend their weekly conversational lunches when I can. The Academy sponsors a program called Reading Roundup wherein faculty meet with incoming freshmen just before the start of their first term to discuss a book chosen by the Academy member. The seeds of The Path to Singularity were planted in such a get together, as described in the preface. I stopped doing Reading Roundup when I retired, but when I got the invitation to Reading Roundup this year, I realized that it would be great fun to talk about The Path to Singularity, so I signed up to do so in the fall. I'll report on that in a future post.

In an interesting surprise, I received an email from Juan Serinyà, Chief Technology Officer of Tory Technologies, a Houston company that writes control room management software, primarily for the petroleum business, with clients in the US, Brazil, Columbia and elsewhere. Juan has Catalonian roots, was trained in Venezuela, and has been in US for 30 years. He was in Austin for a conference and ran across The Path to Singularity in our independent bookstore, Book People, a remnant of my doing a book signing there. Juan said he was interested in the topics of my book and wondered if I might be willing to give a keynote address at his client meeting in August. Hey! Is the Pope Italian? Despite the prospect of Houston in August, I replied with an enthusiastic yes. He asked about my fee. I have never done such a thing but recognizing that while Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a friend of mine, I'm no Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I named a number that seemed neither embarrassingly small, nor overambitious. Juan said, "we can handle that." I should have asked for more. We've signed a contract that spells out what Juan would like to hear me talk about and that is exactly what I would like to say. They will pay my expenses and agreed to cover the cost of a rental car and the time of my son, Rob, to drive me, the equivalent of an Uber. I'm shy of driving long distances by myself these days. They will set up a table where I can sell and sign books. There will be 50 clients, so I'm trying to think how many books I'd need. I'm exploring getting a Houston bookstore to provide the books and handle the sales and romancing the notion of setting up a book signing in an independent bookstore in Bastrop which is on the way to Houston from Austin.  I'm really looking forward to it, including gently raising climate issues to a bunch of oil people. I'll do a blog on that when it happens.

I went to a talk by Dr. Aubra Anthony, a Senior Fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She spoke on "responsible AI," asking "responsible on whose terms?" She stressed the cultural differences around the world that complicate the topic, pointing out that AI LLM models developed in the Global North might not be totally appropriate in the Global South.

I attended a Zoom call book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. The book was Artificial Integrity: The Paths to Leading AI Toward a Human-Centered Future by Hamilton Mann. This book also addressed cultural differences with regard to AI and social issues, arguing that AI Integrity involves culture and is context dependent and that given the complexity of both machines and people, perfection is hard to reach.  The author advised accepting that society will lag technical status and to be practical about what is most doable in policy and regulation, given that perfect will not be possible. The goal should be minimizing the severity of the technology/society dislocation. He called for avoiding systems that can manipulate and deceive. To that I say, too late! Recent LLMs lie and deceive. I advocated the Golden Rule for AI I invented for The Path to Singularity, "Do unto AI as you would have it do unto you." The author asked how to prevent malicious use of AI but did not answer the question directly. A small technical quibble. The author claimed that the global market size for AI is expected to be $2,575.16 billion by 2032; 6 significant figures? Really?

I read a longish online essay by Dario Amodei, the founder and CEO of the AI company Anthropic that produced the LLM AI, Claude. The essay covers many of the same topics I do in The Path to Singularity, but with interesting, complementary insights. You might find the second section on neuroscience and mind especially interesting. I also started reading a long amusing, cartoon illustrated presentation on why Elon Musk created his brain/computer interface company, Neurolink. I bogged down despite being entertained and even a little educated. I need to get back to it.

I joined an online MIT-sponsored webinar with Sherry Turkle. She discussed the issues with having chatbot friends. She regards this as an existential threat, arguing that children developing their own sense of empathy should not use chatbots that have no true inner life. People have an inner life, chatbots don't. Among her admonitions and declarations: Don't make products that pretend to be a person. Require/request engineers to write a memoir to connect them to their own inner life. No good therapist asks a patient, are you happier after our interaction as chatbots do. Criticize metrics of the use of chatbots. Effect on civil society – terrible, terrible, terrible. To make people angry and keep people with their own kind; could not be a worse algorithm. Guardrails – companies invite people to invent their own AI. Pretend empathy is not empathy. Chatbots don't have a body, don't have pain, don't fear death. Chatbots are alien. Not human. The woman has opinions. I share many of them.

What a week that was!

In my previous blog on my Active April, I omitted one event that I thought was worth its own post.

On Friday, 4/11/25, I attended a session of the Mountains and Plains Independent Book Sellers Association (MPIBA) SpringCon 2025 that my Prometheus publicist, Chloé Hummel, had arranged. MPIBA represents independent bookstores throughout the west, so this was a good chance to raise awareness of the book. The hope is that the bookstore representatives will go home and order, stock, and sell a mess of books throughout the western US. Rob drove me down, served as health care checker in case I had conniptions, and as ad hoc publisher representative. We drove down Friday morning (about 2 hours) and returned later that afternoon.

The conference was in the Menger Hotel, one of the oldest in the city, even in the state. Grand old place. It is right across the street from the Alamo, which is under reconstruction and a bit of a mess. The bar in the Menger was one place where Teddy Roosevelt recruited Rough Riders and the bar to which Carrie Nation took her ax during Prohibition. Unfortunately, I learned this history later and did not think to check out the bar at the time.

The conference lasted for three days. The day we attended, there were workshops in the morning. I listened in on one and learned a new vocabulary word, "shelf talker." That's what bookstore staff call the little "staff recommends" tags on the shelves. I asked whether it is appropriate for an author to promote such things or whether that violated some bookstore staff prerogative. The answer seemed to be "it depends."

Then we had a box lunch in the banquet hall, sitting at a set of round tables holding one author and five other people. That kind of discouraged the authors from meeting one another, so I went around and introduced myself to a few of my fellow authors before we ate. 

During lunch, each of 10 authors got four minutes to promote their book. The woman who was hosting, Heather Duncan (from Oklahoma, Executive Director of the MPIBA), sat at my table as did two representatives from Austin's Book People where I had done my book signing earlier. They had not met me then.

Heather introduced the authors, calling author's names off a list, and she was chagrined when she skipped me. No big deal. I had written out my single page of notes (below), rehearsed, edited, and timed them several times and was confident I could go through them in a little over three minutes. I gave my spiel which felt like only a minute. Rob gave me two enthusiastic thumbs up and then informed me that I had taken 5 minutes. My turn to be chagrined, although others also ran over. Despite the stern written instructions, Heather did not rigorously enforce the four-minute limit. I ad-libbed a little, and I guess my cadence in front of a live audience was a little slower than speaking at my computer screen. 

I introduced myself as an emeritus professor of astronomy, The Path to Singularity, Prometheus, and the foreword by Tyson (always an attention getter) and began with this challenge: "Virtually everyone in this room is anxious about Artificial Intelligence. This book is aimed at addressing that anxiety." I ended with: "How do we stay in control? First, be aware! Developing awareness is the aim of this book. Then vote!" Pretty punchy stuff, I thought.

After the author presentations, people queued up to get the books signed. It took me a while to figure out how this worked. It turns out the publishers, beside paying the author registration fee, also send 60 copies of the book (which doesn't count toward author royalties). The attendees at the conference than get the books of their choice for free and can get the authors to sign them. I did that for 20 minutes or so, having fun chatting with people. Some wanted generic signatures, some personalized for themselves, others personalized for husbands, sons, friends (rarely for women, now that I think about it). I lost track of how many books I signed, but the pile of leftovers was about 20, so maybe 40 copies got claimed while I was there. 

One particularly interesting interaction was with a woman who has just started her own bookstore in a little town west of Fort Worth, if I have the story straight. She asked if I would talk to her reading group. As I was pondering a drive to Fort Worth, she hastened to say it would be by Zoom, and I said I would be delighted. Then she went on to say, she wanted to give a copy of Path to her boss. Turns out her day job is working for United Health Care. United Health Care is "democratizing" AI by insisting that all employees should learn to use AI in their work. She wanted to convince her boss that Path should be given to a bunch of high-level managers at United Health Care. I said "excellent," and explained that Chloé and I have been talking about how to promote bulk sales to companies I mention in the book, over 100 of them. United Health Care was not on my radar screen. I gave the woman a book card and my regular business card (at Rob's urging) to make sure she knew how to contact me. Dumb of me to not make sure I had her contact info. At this writing (5/3/25), I've not heard from her.

After realizing that the meeting attendees were snapping up free books, I asked whether authors could also take books of other authors. The answer was an enthusiastic "yes!" because otherwise the MPIBA staff would have to pack up the extras and ship them back to publishers, a headache for them. I got two signed, one from Texas naturalist Steve Ramirez to whom I'd introduced myself before lunch. He's an ex-soldier turned nature promoter who gave a powerful presentation. The other was by Constance Fay, whom I had also met before the lunch, and who also gave a great presentation. She writes science fiction romance. Rob also snagged a book. 

Five o'clock traffic was not terrible. We got back to Austin about 5 PM.

Appendix – My notes (One page, five minutes!).

San Antonio Book Fair

The Path to Singularity: How Technology Will challenge the Future of Humanity

Published by Prometheus Press. Foreword by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Virtually everyone in this room is anxious about Artificial Intelligence. This book is aimed at addressing that anxiety.

Primer

Primer for those who want to know what is going on with our technology: how we got here, what is happening, where it is going.

Exponential change

Reasons that technology advances exponentially ever more rapidly. Importance of ever increasing technology. In the past it was possible, with some disruption, for societies and individuals to adjust, as in the industrial revolution. Now we are proceeding into a new phase of human existence when change may happen so rapidly that societies and individuals cannot adapt sufficiently rapidly.

Changes on many fronts

The Path to Singularity illustrates how artificial intelligence is affecting nearly every aspect of society, but it is not just about AI. The book also treats robots, autonomous vehicles and weapons, brain/computer interfaces, conscious computers – the essence of the technological singularity - genetics and biotechnology, climate change, economics, democracy, the space program, and how these may play out in the future. Ethics.

Key Questions

Current LLM AI can strategize, lie, and deceive. What are the implications?

Could AI influence or even dictate our voting behaviors?

If widespread mental connectivity becomes a reality, could we see the emergence of a collective consciousness that erases individuality?

What implications arise if we medically cure aging? How will society adapt to the challenges of perpetual youth? What will we do with the babies?

How do we stay in control?

First, be aware! Developing awareness is the aim of this book.

Then vote!

The Black Pearl Bookstore is a nice little family run enterprise in a remodeled house along the sprawl of Burnet Road that bisects north Austin. I had ordered a book from them once, Little Leonardo's Fascinating World of Astronomy by Sarafina Nance who had been an undergraduate student of mine (see also her remarkable memoir, Starstruck), but I had never been in the shop. After putting it off for a while in the press of other things, I finally stopped in on April 2 and made them a deal. I offered them a signed copy of The Path to Singularity from the shrinking store of 50 provided to me by Prometheus Press with the request that if they sold it they would order some more. We struck the deal with smiles all around. Now I need to drop in again to see if it sold.

On April 2 and 3, I participated in the annual symposium of the Good Systems group, the interdisciplinary enterprise on campus that seeks to bring ethics to AI. I had asked whether I could display The Path to Singularity at the symposium as my version of a poster presentation and got enthusiastic agreement. I borrowed the same bookstand that had displayed the book at the previous Astronomy Department Board of Visitors meeting (see Blog 11 – Amazon Reviews). The symposium organizers really did not have a natural way to display the book, but offered one of the round tables at the rear of the room where people could sit and munch goodies during breaks. I commandeered one table, set up the bookstand with the book propped on it, plopped my fedora (it's not a cowboy hat!) on the table, and set out some of my Path business cards. Over the two days of the symposium, I handed out a few cards and might have made a few sales.

The evening of April 3, I finally finished the unique and fascinating novel Magdalena Mountain by my cousin-in-law, the butterfly naturalist Bob Pyle. It took me a while to read it because my novel reading these days tends to be a few paragraphs and then falling asleep at bedtime. It was a pleasure all the way, with vivid writing and a special perspective. Here is my short review on Amazon: I was delighted by this tangled story of odd people and their quests where two of the main characters are a butterfly and a mountain. Naturalist Bob Pyle invents (in some cases) a fascinating array of characters and writes powerfully and lyrically of the black butterfly that breeds in the summits of the Colorado Rockies and of the high country that draws these characters together. Did you know that Vladimir Nabokov chased butterflies in those very mountains? Here is a Nabokov word: VIBGYOR.

My birthday was on Saturday, April 5. We had some takeout fajitas from Maudie's in Austin and slices of a chocolate eruption cake from the Austin World Headquarters of Whole Foods (now wholly subsumed by Amazon). I got two books I had been meaning to read for a long, and longer time, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. It will probably take me until my next birthday to get through them.

I spent most of the week of April 14 at a small workshop on supernova. The venue was special, The Cook's Branch Conservancy. The conservancy is operated by the family and estate of George Mitchell, a Greek immigrant who arrived penniless in the US, invented fracking, built the fancy Woodlands suburb of Houston, and purchased the 7100 acres of the conservancy in the piney woods of east Texas. Mitchell became a benefactor of Texas A&M University where he hit it off with and subsequently hosted famed cosmologist Steven Hawking at the conservancy.

More recently, the conservancy has been the site of focused workshops organized by TAMU faculty. The Department of Physics has hosted one on supernova research, my academic specialty, for over a decade. I had not been there since before Covid, so jumped at the chance when invited this time. Many of the attendees were good friends and colleagues from TAMU and elsewhere. I don't like to drive long distances alone anymore, so my son, Rob, came with me to drive our rental car (long story) for the three-hour trip. We shared a rustic suite in the meeting compound courtesy of the workshop organizers. For this workshop, the Mitchells arranged an Israeli chef, a woman of about 60, to come down from Denver to prepare three scrumptious meals a day for us. At night there is a bonfire around which to sit and stare at the flames.

The meeting itself was small, about 15 people, but very intense with lots of time for discussion and argument. We delved deeply into the weeds of the technical aspects of observing, analyzing, and theorizing about supernova explosions, topics only a mother, or an astrophysicist, could love. It was great fun. The relevance to this blog is that while I am loathe to shove The Path to Singularity in the face of astronomy colleagues, I came prepared with a bunch of the book business cards. Over the course of the workshop, I raised the existence of the book with individuals and gave them cards if they seemed interested, including one to Sheridan Mitchell Lorenz, who dropped in to check how things were proceeding. I realized that by the end of the meeting, I had hit up nearly everyone anyway. So much for discretion.

I had done a podcast with Dan Turchin of The Future of Work back on February 7. This discussion was similar to several podcasts I had done before, but I had also learned some new things in the meantime (current LLM models lie and deceive), and threw that in. Sometimes podcasts are posted fairly promptly, but sometimes they take a while. This one was released on video and was finally edited and posted on April 7. In an interesting departure, they edited snippets and released them daily for a week on LinkedIn. Here is one. They sent me these relevant links:

·  Your episode

·  LinkedIn post you can share

·  Tweet you can share

I had also done an enjoyable podcast the day before, on February 6, with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind. This was purely audio but still was only posted on April 21 on Apple and Spotify.

The same day, April 21, I was in the neighborhood getting a new battery for my 26-year-old Lexus SUV (only 80,000 miles), so I stopped in the Barnes and Nobel where I had previously signed the one copy of The Path to Singularity. To my disappointment, it was still there although in a slightly more prominent place than I had first located it. Better news was that they had ordered another four copies, so I signed those. I gently pleaded with the clerk to make a display of all five of them, but I'm not optimistic.

I skipped here one event, on April 11, a conference of independent book sellers in San Antonio, but that was enough of an adventure that I think it deserves its own blog. Next one.