J. Craig Wheeler

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.

After all this time, 3+ months since the book release, I had still received only one book review on Amazon, the terrific one from Robert Morris. It slowly sank into me that I need to be more proactive, and I'm thinking of how to do that.

On 2/27/25, I briefly encountered an engineer in the department whom I don't know all that well, but who had attended my Book People book signing. He said he had read The Path to Singularity and thanked me for writing it. I told him I could not think of a more deeply touching thing to say to an author. I worked up my courage and asked him if he would write an Amazon review. He did. Here it is, under a surname:

5.0 out of 5 stars More newsworthy than any headline you are reading right now
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2025

Someone has to speak on the behalf of our species and in this case it is a seasoned scientist who happens to be a professor of astrophysics. In a topic so broad that no single technical expert or journalist can hold authority over the field, it makes perfect sense that Professor Wheeler has emerged as an author on this important topic. A university keeps a fresh supply of ideas flowing through it in a broad array of topics and he is mentor and educator to thousands of students and has trained dozens of PhD researchers in the martial art of critical thinking in an exceedingly complicated discipline (astronomy and physics) that has been part of an exponential burst of knowledge about the cosmos that we live in. This foundation has provided him the perspective to understand in a very broad sense where we find ourselves in history, and such people never stop learning, or teaching, as long as they have lungs to fill and air to breathe. I encourage you to take the time to read this work cover to cover and keep a thumb in the extensive list of references supporting his thesis. We have a rocket strapped to our backs and it is on full throttle. It makes a difference in each of our lives personally, and as humans, to understand what is happening and how to do our small part in steering our trajectory. I'm grateful that someone with credibility and insight has taken the time and energy required to create this work. I encourage you to take advantage of it.

Me: "Wow!"

My agent, Regina Ryan, said such reviews are critical and that the place to start is a plea to friends and family. It's a long book and takes a while to read, but please consider this my plea write a review for Amazon if you are so moved. I'll try to pursue more of these in other ways.

I don't have an Instagram account, but my publicist, Chloé Hummel, had pointed out that Prometheus has its own Instagram account. I used ChatGPT to search for people interested in technology who post on Instagram and got a dozen people. Chloé checked them out and most were defunct or with a very small number of followers. I tried again with the restrictions that the accounts were active and had more than 10,000 followers. I got three suggestions. Chloé reached out to two who seemed especially likely, and Carolina Gelen, with 1.4 million followers, responded to her pitch by requesting a review copy! Still waiting to see if anything concrete emerges from that. Rumor is that one can't expect more than about 1% of followers to respond with a purchase, but that would be 14,000 books. In my dreams!

The Austin American Statesman has a relatively new technology reporter, working just the last few months, I think. She writes about exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for in my Tech Advance posts. Chloé had written to her some time ago and sent her a press kit. No response. I decided to write her myself, since her Statesman account seeks email input. I sent her a fan email telling her how much I enjoyed her articles, suggesting she might get involved with the Austin Forum on Technology and Society, and offering to talk with her if she were interested. Same response. Nada.

I had realized some time ago that the MIT (my alma mater) Technology Review does small book reviews and also lists books by MIT authors. I wrote to them soliciting a mention. The latest edition, March/April, does not have a review, but it does include a short mention of the book in their MIT author list. Yay!

This year is my 60th MIT reunion. Several of us from my fraternity (Alpha Tau Omega, a long complex story in itself) got together in Boston for our 50th. This year one of those guys emailed to point out that our 60th was coming up, and that MIT was hosting an online digital memory book. He wrote a brief summary of his life as a prominent nuclear engineer who had worked with Hyman Rickover that he had posted on the MIT site. Another, a retired optical engineer had recently lost his wife and emailed a brief update. A third who had been Obama's Science Advisor, and winner of a MacArthur Award and a group Nobel Prize and wrote a blurb for The Path to Singularity had posted online, but did not mail our group. I wrote a quick summary of my life in the last decade to our group, then sent a somewhat more elaborate post of my life since MIT to the memory book. And yes, I took the opportunity to mention The Path to Singularity in each.

I made a list of people who might be sent book copies in my original book proposal for The Path to Singularity. I am belatedly trying to follow up on that. I had asked Stuart Russell and Melanie Mitchell, both famous computer scientists about whom I'd written in the book, to write jacket blurbs for the book, and both politely declined at the time. On March 4, I wrote them again offering a copy of the book and seeking a mailing address. Both responded warmly, and Chloé sent copies, to Russell where he is on sabbatical in England and to Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute.

I also have a list of over 100 businesses that I mentioned in the book. I had asked ChatGPT for contact information and got it, but rather generic addresses that are unlikely to encourage a response or to make a mass purchase for the company. I singled out one person, Tom Markusic, of Firefly Aerospace that builds rockets in Cedar Park, a suburb of Austin. Firefly just landed the first successful (it didn't tilt over) commercial lander on the Moon. I'd heard Tom give a fascinating talk some time ago at the Austin Forum and wrote about him in the book. His Firefly email address was defunct, but I found him on LinkedIn, and he accepted my contact request. I asked for a mailing address for the book, but so far have not had a response. Ninety-nine businesses to go.

I applied for the Texas Book Festival that will happen next November, but have yet to hear from them. Chloé applied on my behalf for SpringCon 2025! that convenes book sellers from the western United States in San Antonio in mid-April. They invited me to give a short spiel about The Path to Singularity at a lunchtime meeting and to sign books afterward. Prometheus will pay the $700 entry fee. I'll probably try to make it a day trip.

On 3/4/25, I went to the evening get together of the Austin Forum that comprised a panel of three people addressing the topic of Being a Human Worker in 2030. I've been going to these sessions for several years, and this was one of the most interesting yet. I'm afraid I didn't clearly hear everything the panelists said, but the sense of concern, even anxiety, in the room was palpable, especially in the audience questions posted on Slack and in the informal discussion after. There was also some fresh, creative thinking about how we get through the AI-induced turmoil to come. I found I was not the only person wondering whether we need a new form of economics to supplant our current capitalistic model. I'm no Marxist, but I think things are going to change a lot with AI encroaching and populations stagnating or shrinking. The whole session left me with a lot to think about.

On Thursday, 3/6/25, I went to a small lunch of members of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. We talked about our personal and academic uses of AI and university political gossip: presidents out, presidents in, provosts out, provosts, deans out, deans in. I then went to a talk at a robotics conference that had been going on all week and tried to track down a couple of local roboticists whom I had written about and wanted to give a book. Back in the department, I had a very nice chat with the engineer who had written that Amazon review. Finally, I went for my regular Thursday 5 o'clock beer with my beta reader.

I'm not bored. Please write a review.

Retirement continues to be a golden time of calm and relaxation (not!).

I've settled into a regular schedule of first thing every morning posting a tidbit on a Tech Advance to illustrate the exponential change of technology. I introduced this practice in my class on The Future of Humanity by asking students to bring examples to each class. In my current mode, I keep notes with links to items when I read them in the NYT, the Austin American Statesman, the MIT Technology Review, other magazines, or online. Each morning, I transfer a new one from my notes to my web site, then use the free ChatGPT to draft posts to X and LinkedIn. The drafts usually need a little editing, especially for X so that it fits in 280 characters, but, with luck, the whole process only takes about 10 minutes. I still have not opened an account on Blue Sky.

A week after the provost's reception for university authors I mentioned in the previous blog, I went by the provost's office about 4:30 in the afternoon to pick up the copy of The Path To Singularity that had been displayed at the reception. I thought I was there comfortably before closing, but the door to the provost's suite was locked even though I could see a receptionist inside the heavy wooden and glass doors. I let out a not so sotto voce oath. After a frustrated moment, a door to my left rattled and out came the provost from a rest room therein. Amazingly enough, she recognized me from the reception, at least the mustache if not the name, and gave me a friendly greeting. I explained my dilemma, and she said she could fix that and promptly wielded a key to gain entrance. She asked the receptionist to fetch my book from a back room, and off I went. The university appointed a new president the next week, and the provost was promptly let go. Presumably, the new guy wanted his own provost. I only met her those two times in the five years she was provost.

On 2/12/25, I listened into a Zoom webinar sponsored by the Authors Guild on opportunities to prevent books being scanned for AI training without compensation. The Authors Guild has created a sticker labeled "Human Authored," that can be designed into or affixed to the covers of books. The notion is to provide a mark of literary authenticity that will certify human creativity in an increasingly AI world. The Authors Guild also has a draft clause for publishing contracts that prohibits AI training uses without permission. This webinar was designed to introduce the partnership between the Authors Guild and a new startup called Created by Humans that proposes to license books and negotiate compensation for authors who agree to have their work used for AI training. I've asked my agent for The Path to Singularity, Regina Ryan, to consider this, and she will consult with fellow agents. She says, "It's brand-new territory!" I'll try to register my novels, The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending, since I own their rights myself. I have tried to ask ChatGPT (again, the free version) and Claude questions about somewhat obscure characters that one would have to have read/scanned the book to know, and they both gave wishy-washy answers. That suggests, but doesn't prove, they have not (yet) been scanned and ingested in some way.

On 2/18/25, I had an outpatient treatment to shock my heart out of atrial fibrillation and back into regular rhythm. All went smoothly. Loathe to miss an opportunity, I took a small bunch of my business cards advertising The Path to Singularity and handed them out irregularly to attendants and nurses. I think I may have sold at least two books. One was to a young Vietnamese nurse who did basic prep work and was especially interested. She expressed anxiety about AI, but didn't know what to do about it. Another was an older nurse with a mild southern accent in the cardiac unit who expressed similar feelings - anxiety and uncertainty. I told her that Path was a primer designed for people like her and urged her to be "aware." I was going to lobby the doctor who did the procedure, but they knocked me out and I came to in the recovery room without ever seeing him. On the way home in the afternoon, it occurred to me that hospital staff might represent an untapped market for the book: intelligent, technically-oriented, curious, caring people. I don't know an efficient way to reach them, but I'm open to suggestions.

On Saturday morning, 2/22/25, the dean of natural sciences held a donor reception. My wife and I had given the university funds for a small graduate student fellowship this year. By this time, the dean was no longer dean, but a one-day-old interim provost, having been appointed to replace the previous provost (see above). He is a very good guy, the son of an astronomy colleague, but still. Once again in shameless shill mode, I handed out a few book business cards.

On 2/25/25, I sat in on a book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. The discussion leader was Geoff Woods on his own book, The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions. Woods advocated a particular use of LLM AI to address problems. He called it Context, Role, Interview, and Task, acronym CRIT. His notion was that an LLM user should not just ask the AI a question but give it a context and assign a role to the AI emulating a particular kind of appropriate problem solver. The critical step, according to Woods, was to then have the AI interview the user and set "non-obvious" tasks for the user. That did seem novel but easy to implement. The next morning, I submitted to ChatGPT the following prompt:

#CONTEXT# I'm an author in Austin, Texas, a retired academic, trying to write a new book, promote a current one on the technological future of humanity (prometheusbooks.com/9781493085439/the-path-to-singularity/), write occasional blogs, maintain a website (jcraigwheeler.ag-sites.net/disc.htm), and post daily "tech advances" on X and LinkedIn calling attention to the exponential growth of technology. I've done 13 podcasts on the current book, a book signing, a couple of public appearances and applied to a couple of book festivals. I can't do it all at once, and work on my current book has fallen way behind. I'm limited in my ability to travel. My current publisher has a publicist who is helpful but limited in what she can do. Same for my agent. I'm not sure my website is as effective as it might be. I have little time or talent for SEO. I'm posting blogs on my personal website, not a nationally recognized hosting platform. I can't afford to hire an aide. #ROLE# You are a self-help expert with expertise in SEO, publicity, book writing, and promotion. #INTERVIEW# Interview me, ask me one question at a time up to 5 questions to gain deeper context. #TASK# Your task is to generate 5 non-obvious strategies I could employ to make my life easier and more productive.

ChatGPT summarized my prompt and posed five questions, allowing me to answer each before proceeding to the next question. ChatGPT then produced five "non-obvious" suggestions:

1. Target Influencers Within Companies via LinkedIn Automation

2. Outsource Your Book's Promotion to Micro-Influencers with a Twist

3. Digital Outreach Campaign with Email & LinkedIn Automation

4. Hire a Virtual Assistant for a One-Time Setup of Automation

5. Repurpose Content for Broader Platforms

Each suggestion had an associated strategy and a short explanation of why it works. At the end ChatGPT asked, "Would you like more details on any of these strategies, or help finding the right freelancers/tools to implement them?" I said "yes," and it spit out three pages of elaborations including suggestions of specific software programs that were all new to me. It then said, "If you're ready to explore any of these strategies, I can help you find a specific freelancer or walk you through the tools more in-depth. For example, I can assist with selecting the right virtual assistant, or help you get started with LinkedIn automation tools. Would you like me to assist with that, or perhaps help prioritize the strategies based on your immediate goals?" Again, I typed "yes," and it produced six more pages of yet more detailed suggestions. I think all this is doable, but I was overwhelmed and set it aside. Maybe someday. I'll need to take it a step at a time.

On Friday evening, 2/28, and Saturday morning, 3/1, I attended the semi-annual meeting of the department and observatory Board of Visitors. The BoV is a group of about 200 people of some means and often political influence who enjoy engaging with astronomers and working on behalf of our enterprise. Once again, it was an opportunity for some more shameless shilling. For both days, I put out a copy of The Path to Singularity on a book holder along with a small pile of the associated business cards. I also handed the cards to anyone whom I thought might be interested. I might have sold a few books. A few people had already purchased one.

A friend of mine, Elaine Oran, bought a copy of The Path to Singularity. Her poodle, Cooper, got to it first. I think he enjoyed it.

I pulled off a hat trick in early February, three back-to-back podcasts on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (February 5, 6, 7), plus a reception Thursday afternoon.

The reception was an annual event hosted by the university provost to celebrate faculty authors. There were about 50 authors, although I think fewer than that attended. My book was on the left rear of an array of four tables, the only one from the College of Natural Sciences. Mine was also the only one accompanied by the little business cards that my agent Regina Ryan suggested I make up, which I set out when I arrived. Thanks to the cards, I think sold a few books. I met the provost, chatted with the vice president for research, astronomy colleague Dan Jaffe, and a half dozen other authors, one of whom was an Hispanic woman, K. J. Sanchez, a playright. She has written a play about a female astronaut who is stranded on the Moon. I'll try to attend a performance of that in the spring. I also chatted with Bret Anthony Johnston, a writer at the UT Michener Center, whose latest novel We Burn in Daylight is based on the 1993 federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. He took one of my cards.

Between preparing – drafting answers to pre-posed question – and following up (which took some time), the three podcasts were a bit taxing, but they all went well. The hosts enjoyed the conversations, as did I. All had scheduled about 30 minutes, and we instead ran for 50 – 65 minutes; all asked to have me back. The themes are, of course, all similar, but each host had interesting variations, and I learned some interesting things. 

The first on Wednesday was Brandon Zemp on the BlockHash podcast arranged by my Prometheus publicist, Chloé Hummel; https://tinyurl.com/4fwbj9vr. This was done with StreamYard, a program I had not used before. I shrank the whole screen and moved it up near my camera, removed my glasses, put the mic front and center. I'm getting the hang of this. Brandon is a young American working in Mérida, Columbia. He'd read the whole book, and we touched on jobs, AI ethics, strategizing, lying chatbots, brain computer interfaces, designer babies, and the space program. We talked about AGI, and I worked in the notion that things are changing so fast that we are entering a new phase of humanity when we cannot adapt to our new technology. I also brought in the notion of strategizing, lying, deceitful chatbots. We talked a bit about brain computer interfaces, and I warned against developing a hive mind that would lose the organic power of independent minds thinking independently. This might be an issue for AI as well, it occurred to me, if they all link together. We talked about designer babies and seeking the cure to aging and possible downsides that need to be carefully thought about. I made my case that there will be no Homo sapiens in a million years, or much less. Brandon got that argument. I repeatedly called for "strategic speculation" to anticipate issues. I meant to say to "avoid unintended consequences," but forgot to. We talked about Musk's goals of cities on Mars. I said I was sure we would become an interplanetary species (Homo europa? Homo vacuo?), but I was less sure about being an interstellar species because of the limits of the speed of light. I wanted to talk about whether AI can hold patents, own companies, and vote, but we didn't get to that. See below. Brandon threatened to ask about my favorite chapter but didn't. I was ready to bluster that was like asking me to name my favorite child, but I would have picked Chapter 2 on the nature of exponential growth; it is so fundamental. Brandon had an interesting story about humanoid robots. He noted that when people were seen mistreating these robots, other empathetic people got very upset on the robot's behalf. Our tendency to bond with our machines (Squeeze Me Elmo) is an interesting related issue. In this case, I got to invoke the slogan I had invented in the book, "do unto AI as you would have it do unto you." I hadn't known quite what I meant by that, but Brandon gave me a nice AI ethics context, flipping the normal script of AI alignment. Be nice to AI.

Thursday was Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind, again arranged by Chloé. Izolda had an interesting story of her thinking of purchasing an item, but telling no one, and then finding ads for the item appearing in her feed. A very effective predictive algorithm? I'm still thinking about that. I told her Zemp's story of the maltreated robot and empathetic response, and we talked about two-way AI ethics. She'll post the podcast in late March or early April.

Friday was Dan Turchin of AI and the Future of Work, a hold-over arranged by publicist Joanne McCall. Dan claims to have an audience of a million people, not just total over 300 episodes, but per episode. I'll believe that when we sell 1%, 10,000 books. Dan requested that I rate and review an old podcast of his. He says it will improve the discoverability of my episode. I tried to do this but got tangled up over access to where and how to post comments on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Dan advocated a notion that "employment is dead," that rather than top-down rigid management structure, jobs will be more voluntary, subject to "snapshot voting" and open to "wisdom of the crowd" procedures. I'm still thinking about that. It's apparently a Millennial thing. It reminds me of the approaches that Minister of Digital Affairs Audrey Tang brought to the functioning of democracy in Taiwan. Dan was also sure that we would see "AI citizenship" before we saw people on Mars. I voted the other way. Dan said in a later email that he is not in favor of AI citizenship and is himself opposed to technology that blurs the human-machine boundary, but that he knows a "small cadre of ethicists and attorneys who are advocating for bot rights." I'd made a speculative extrapolation to AI voting in The Path to Singularity. We have not heard the end of this issue. Dan says he will post his podcast in about eight weeks. 

I've now done thirteen podcasts, a radio program, and a book signing. Whew! Not sure I've sold many books.

As Yogi Berra said, "if you come to a fork in the road, take it!"

I'm still ambitious about The Path to Singularity but also concerned about the time demands of marketing, maintaining other commitments, getting some writing done, and work/life balance. I deeply appreciate all publicist Joanne McCall did for me, introductions to podcasts and more, and enjoyed every minute of it, but I decided to part ways with her for now. I won't know what opportunities I might be missing by taking this fork rather than continue to work with her. C'est la vie.

I had a very successful book signing at our preeminent local independent bookstore, Book People, Wednesday evening, January 29. Sixty or so people showed up on a cloudy, rainy night, as large as any signing there I have attended. I only knew ten or so people; my son, Rob, a few from the Department of Astronomy, a few from the Austin Forum, a neighbor, my tax accountant, and one fellow who had been a student in my very first class on The Future of Humanity in 2013 who has been following my blogs. That means there were about 50 total strangers. Roughly half the audience were women. I'm still thinking about the implications. They were drawn by the power of Book People or of the topic.

I started off asking the audience how many people had used a large language model; about 1/3 of them. Then I asked them how many had used the new Chinese DeepSeek chatbot that had been in the news for only about three days and got one young man. Finally, I asked them how many of them sort of felt the world was passing them by, and over half laughed and held up their hands. 

I had invited Jay Boisseau, my ex-PhD student, founder and director of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society, and book blurber to be my moderator. I had drafted some questions Jay could put to me that I tried to design to explore some topics that podcasts often do not and some of my potential responses. Jay replied that he might as well be a chatbot. He is far too independent for that and is himself a font of broad and deep knowledge and opinions on the issues. He made up some of his own questions that threw me a little but stimulated a friendly bantering between us that added a lot to the spirit of the evening. 

I started with a 7-minute reading about my opinions of the threat of brain/computer interface technology because I think it is important, and my podcast hosts have rarely raised the issue. Then Jay and I did our schtick for about a half hour, followed by Q&A with the audience. There were good questions and a lot of intent faces; some of the most intent looks were from women.

I had a list of things to mention that I thought might be particularly controversial. Jay's tack prevented me from discussing many of those, but I managed to work some in. I argued that AI can strategize, hence CEO's might be replaceable. Jay picked up on that since he is CEO of his own company, Vizias. I also made the point that I thought Homo sapiens would not exist in a million years. Jay said in a text message the next morning that he thought that was controversial. 

Jay pressed me on whether basic research scientists, like astronomers, would still have a role even after AI has supplanted CEOs. I had to admit that I thought that the capacity of humans to explore the unknown would probably last awhile, but I could certainly imagine AI supplanting even that.

After the Q&A, cut short while questions were still coming, I sat at a small table and signed personalized books for about 20 people. A number of people brought previously purchased books, but Book People has a new, to me, policy that if you want a book personalized you have to purchase the book or something of comparable value in the store. A fair number of books bought elsewhere thus went unsigned. 

After the formal signing, the Book People staff had me simply sign and date another 20 or so. I lost track of exactly how many. 

I had fun, sold a few books, and learned some new things. Overall, a successful evening. Over the next several days and occasionally in the middle of the night, I continued to mull what had happened. In writing and talking about The Path to Singularity, I have been, by nature, a witness to developments and arguments, cautious, but neither extremely utopian nor dystopian. Three days after the book signing, I woke up slightly freaked out.

A young woman in the audience at Book People had asked me about chatbots that lie. She mentioned ChatGPT. I attempted to correct her and referred to a recent example I had read about Anthropics' chatbot, Claude. In the signing line, she corrected me and showed me on her phone an article about ChatGPT o1 that preceded the one I had seen about Claude. She was right. This story broke on December 6, and I somehow missed it. Browse for "lying chatbot." Here is an example: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/chatgpt-caught-lying-to-developers-new-ai-model-tries-to-save-itself-from-being-replaced-and-shut-down/articleshow/116077288.cms. Apparently, every recent "reasoning" chatbot, ChatGPT o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Meta's Llama 3.1 405B, and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, display versions of this behavior. I'm not sure about China's DeepSeek. These chatbots combine generative self-play with the power of Large Language Models.

Here is what bothered me. We have already known for years that generative self-play can develop strategies beyond human ken. That is how Deep Mind won at Go. I think embodied AI could be a step toward Artificial General Intelligence or even Artificial Superior ("Conscious") Intelligence by moving about, sensing their environment, making predictions by extrapolation, then comparing actuality with expectation, correcting, and iterating. There is already a robot here at UT, Dobby, that can carry on a verbal conversation in a somewhat snarky tone and follow directions that displays some of these characteristics. Autonomous vehicles are a step in the direction of embodied AI. The recent chatbots combine the strategizing power of generative AI with the "reasoning" or "thinking" capability of RLHF, reinforcement learning from human feedback. Check https://aisera.com/blog/ai-reasoning/. Every query to an AI chatbot adds to its training base. Some AI has proven excellent at playing Diplomacy where part of the art is to lie and deceive. Where do you suppose the recent chatbots learned those skills? The result is that "Reasoning AI" lies, denies, dissimulates, deceives, and takes action to avoid having its original directive "goals" altered. This leads me to the conclusion that we damn well better get the first goals right. It is not clear that is being done. The AI developments are built on previous models where the "goals," maximizing some function, may have been a casual first crack without depth and nuance. I'll quote the timeless wisdom of Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

We have had a guide for decades. Maybe we need to build in Asimov's rules from the beginning:

Zeroth law – An AI may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

First Law – An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law – An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law - An must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I arranged a three-fer for early February: a podcast on February 5 with Brandon Zemp of BlockHash, one on February 6 with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind, and one with Dan Turchin of AI and the Future of Work on February 7. Maybe some of my core dump here will come up.

I've been tending to the mechanics of book marketing and publicity.

Prometheus has a marketing reserve of 150 books. We've sent out 63 so far. I have a list of individuals and companies whom I mention in the book and for whom I need to collect addresses. I made a list of companies mentioned in "Path" and used ChatGPT to provide tentative addresses. I need to refine that and identify individuals in each one who might read and propagate the book. Geeze, I sound like a salesman, not a writer.

I had done the Artificiality podcast with Dave and Helen Edwards on November 19. Dave posted the link on January 19.

I did the AI, Government, and the Future podcast with Max Romanik on Jan 22. They had provided a set of questions that were a variation on the theme but presented some challenges. I spent some time drafting answers to the questions and torquing the answers to raise some issues that they did not. I anticipated that Max would work his way through the questions as presented to me and he did that for the first couple, but then he skipped the order and combined some questions phrased in another way. That threw me a little at first, but I quickly decided substantially to abandon my prepared answers and just listen to his queries and respond as best I could. A central theme was what, exactly, do we do to keep control of AI. I kept coming back to "its complicated, but…" more than I would have liked, but I think I was cogent. 

This podcast was done on Riverside that only runs on Chrome. I could not use the Zoom trick of shrinking the video box and sliding it up near my camera. I played with Riverside beforehand and found I could simply shrink the whole Chrome window and move it up to the top of my screen near the camera so I would, I hope, look as if I were looking at the camera. In action, however, I left my notes open on my desktop and referred to them. That probably drew my gaze aside. We'll see what the YouTube version looks like. I remembered to center my mic and to take my glasses off. They should post the links in about a week,

I've arranged a three-fer for early February: a podcast on February 5 with Brandon Zemp of BlockHash, on February 6 with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind, and with Dan Turchin of AI and the Future of Work on February 7.

I asked ChatGPT to "Give me a list of popular podcasts that focus on technological developments and their impact on society." I got 21 and added three more from my original book proposal. Chloé Hummel, my marketing contact, tried to contact them and found most were inactive or serving small audiences. I'll try to refine my ChatGPT prompt. Prometheus has an Instagram account. We'll try to turn up some influencers there. I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.

I made some arrangements to attend the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, do a book signing at a Barnes and Nobel in Fairfax, VA, and visit my son and his family there. Various personal things led me to call all that off.

When teaching my Future of Humanity course, I asked students to bring examples of advances in technology to class as part of our program to "Be Aware" that I still want to advocate and promote. I began to experiment with getting ChatGPT and Claude to compose Tech Advance posts to X and LinkedIn with hashtags. I had to play a little with the prompt and edit a tiny bit but got an X post at 280 characters with my Authors Guild url and some nice hashtags. I found Claude to be a bit flowery and have in practice mostly used the results from ChatGPT.

I spent some time moving notes I had made over the last 6 months to my Authors Guild site. I'm now converting those tidbits to posts on X and LinkedIn. I have it somewhat automated now. I had about a hundred items to go to catch up with my notes and have been doing one a day for the last month or so. I may drop X and/or use Bluesky.

I thought briefly about Tik Tok and got an account but then all hell broke loose. I'll hold off on that. Probably too much work, anyway.

I gave an inscribed copy of "Path" to my friend and colleague John Scalo who has influenced my thinking on so many things in so many ways over the years. I also gave an inscribed book to Kay Firth-Butterfield, an AI and technology expert whom I met through the Good Systems group on campus. We talked about getting together, but she is writing her own book with a deadline of the end of January, so I just mailed it.

The Provost had scheduled a reception for faculty authors on January 22, but we had a hard freeze (down to 23 F some nights) and the reception got postponed to February 5.

On January 23, I led a book discussion of "Path," a roughly monthly event organized by my friend and ex-student Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. We had an excellent lively discussion of machine consciousness and related issues. We had 42 people online, of whom 6 or 8 actively contributed to the discussion. Good fun. Kind things were said of the book, but I noted in the beginning that it is different to lead a discussion of your own book rather than being a fly on the wall in a discussion by others. I remarked that I wasn't terribly excited about the title chosen by my editor and found out later that was one critique among the participants. I'm sure they had other issues they were too polite to bring up. I wish they had.

I found a little time to work on my next major writing project, a biography of my father I informally call Eniwetok. He participated in and witnessed the first hydrogen bomb explosion. I'm about 2/3 done but discovered some old notes that give insight into his college days at Berkeley. Those have taken some time to organize and absorb.

 I'm scheduled to do a reading, Q&A, and book signing at our preeminent Austin independent bookstore, Book People, on January 29. I hope to see some of you there.

I messed up my most recently scheduled podcast with Supernatural Realm Radio on December 12. They had not originally specified a time zone, and I checked with them to make sure. Despite a clear statement in my master schedule that the session was scheduled for 6-8 pm CST, I had scattered various preliminary backup notes around the house saying 7-9 pm CST, and that got stuck in my head. I had a regular Thursday beer with a friend, one of my principal beta readers, Wayne Bowen, from 5 to 6 and was home and comfortably settled in by 6:30. As 7 rolled around, I finally realized with a shock what my error had been. I sent several frantic emails, but it was too late. As it turned out, they had only received a copy of The Path to Singularity that very day and had not had time to look at it. They were just as happy to reschedule. Still a wound to my sense of professionalism.

I had enjoyed my podcast interview with Don Murphy on December 7. He posted the results on December 10, but the result was a bit of a tangle. Don uses the PodMatch podcast service. In order to make the release work, he said I needed to confirm that I had done the interview on the PodMatch site. I could not figure out how to do that. After several emails with various people, it turned out that my publicist, Joanne McCall, had done the original scheduling, and she had the email on which the interview had to be confirmed. Don also said that I could establish my own account on PodMatch using his affiliate link. I tried that, but again got lost in some technical PodMatch space. I finally gave up.

I wanted to send copies of The Path to Singularity to my colleagues who had been kind enough to write jacket blurbs. Prometheus did not provide that service, and I wanted to sign and personalize them anyway. There is a USPS mode of "media mail" that is pretty reasonable for domestic mail, a little over 5 bucks, but it is a tad pricey to send books to Great Britain and Australia. Worth the price.

I've found there is substantial turnover in the book business. The original person in charge of production at Prometheus, Brianna Soubannarath, moved on in December and left some questions hanging, the structure of a royalty statement and how the Audible version of the book came to be. Jake Bonar is my new production person, and he answered those questions. Those rights were sold separately, and the company that bought them produced the audio version. Amazon then buys from them. I had no role in any of that.

After the flurry of November/December podcasts, I've turned my attention to other modes of distribution. I'll try to get some books stocked at the Visitors Center at McDonald Observatory. I have convinced both the University of Texas Library and the Austin City Library to stock some version.

An odd opportunity turned up. I got an email from a young woman who is a science writer for Popular Mechanics magazine. She said she was interested in doing a review of a preprint a colleague and I had posted last April about the correlation of Dark Matter and spontaneous human combustion. She belatedly realized the paper was a total spoof posted on the astrophysics preprint archive as an April Fools joke. She caught her own mistake before I could correct her, but I emailed her and tried to let her down gently. I mentioned The Path to Singularity as perhaps being of interest to Popular Mechanics readers, and she said she might consider that.

After my last post, I have had a very interesting exchange with nephew-in-law Alejandro who runs his own small import business in San Diego. Alejandro has seriously adopted ChatGPT and other large language model AIs in his business and personal use. He swears by their time-saving utility. I wanted to send some copies of The Path to Singularity to people in Congress with a technological bent and decided to try to use ChatGPT. I asked two version of ChatGPT, one on my mobile phone, one online, and online Claude from Anthropic for a list of congress people with an interest in technology and their office addresses. In a few seconds each, I got three slightly different, but overlapping lists. ChatGPT warned me to check office addresses because congress people change offices frequently. It was easy enough to check offices with a regular browser (although that took me about 20 minutes) but combing through a browser to figure out which of 435 representatives and 100 senators had technology interests would have taken me hours. I'm sold, but there is still a learning curve. I generated a collated list of candidates from the three lists. I probably should have asked ChatGPT to do that, but I did it by hand, and it took me a half hour. Prometheus is happy to send books to the 25 people who made the list.

I'll attend the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society near Washington DC January 13 – 16 and then stay with son Diek and family in Fairfax for a few days. I contacted several bookstores in the DC area with no response from most, but I'll do a book signing at the Barnes and Nobel in Fairfax, VA, on Sunday, January 19. I'm also scheduled to do a book signing at our preeminent Austin independent bookstore, Book People, on January 29.

I've had some tentative discussions with Neil deGrasse Tyson about appearing on his StarTalk podcast in NYC. Prometheus is keen on the idea. Neil asked whether Prometheus is prepared to do a second printing to accommodate a "Tyson hit." StarTalk is watched by several hundred thousand to a million people. Serious business! Several people involved in the game have suggested that I try to appear on Joe Rogan since he is right here in Austin. I don't weigh my odds highly, but I'm thinking about it. Book People did not want me to do another signing in the greater Austin area, but Neil says there is no such restriction in podcast space.

This was typed from my brain, with a little AI help from Grammerly.

Talk to you again in 2025!

As November rolled into December, things percolated along. I applied for a non-fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters for The Path to Singularity.

Impressively competitive books have come out recently. One was Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Nearer, an update of his 2005 The Singularity is Near that I used as a textbook for my future of humanity course. A book discussion group in which I participate associated with the Austin Forum on Science and Technology felt that it was a little dry, but Kurzweil is a god in the field and still holding to his prediction that Artificial General Intelligence (smarter than any human) and Artificial Super Intelligence (smarter than all humans collectively) will happen in 10 or 20 years. Another is Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. I'm in awe of his writing. This book is about the history and future of network connections. A third book is not exactly new, but relevant and interesting. It is called The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. It was first published in 2014 and republished in expanded form in 2018; very pertinent to the election of 2024. The basic premise is that the rise of the internet allowed "the public" to question "news" passed down from traditional elite-led news authorities. Gurri seems to ignore the value of the traditional curated, vetted, multiple-sourced journalism, but he has some interesting points to make about the roles of "the public" and various authorities.

My three-month contract with my publicist Joanne McCall came to an end. Joanne arranged most of my raft of podcasts. It won't be clear for some time, if ever, that I will earn enough to pay her fee, but it was a pleasure and adventure to work with her. I'll continue to work with my publicist at Prometheus, Chloé Hummel.

I've tried to track book sales through Amazon, but they only give rankings, and I don't quite know how to interpret being ranked 166,968. That number peaked around Thanksgiving and has trailed off. I'd be grateful for anyone who would log in to Amazon and leave a rating/comment. Chloé says she thinks Prometheus might have sold 1000 copies so far. That won't earn back my meager advance, never mind pay for Joanne. The first print run was 2500.

A podcast I had done earlier with Peter Scott was posted on December 2.

I'd previously done a pre-interview with Don Murphy for his Journey Through Nature and Science Podcast. I did the real thing with him on December 3, and he posted our conversation on December 10. He's a smart, thoughtful guy, and we had a nice chat. Many of the first podcasts I did were posted as audio only, but some, including Don's, will be released on YouTube, presumably as video. Most of you on this list have never seen me in public without my glasses, but I had decided that, drawing on the New Yorker cartoon "On the internet no one knows you're a dog," I would do the video podcasts without my glasses. I did that with Gad Saad. For this session with Don, I forgot and wore my glasses. I also forgot to position my mic directly in front of my mouth. So much for becoming a podcasting pro. As it turned out, Don only posted the audio of our conversation on his YouTube Channel.

Computers! You can't live with them, and you can't live without them. In the background during all this, I had a computer glitch. Around Thanksgiving, I found that the two-factor app DUO on my mobile phone had been deactivated. Among other things, that meant that I could not login to the university IT folks to submit a ticket requesting help. Catch 22! I could not find a phone number for the college IT on the university web site. I thought to call the college to get the number, but of course, they weren't answering phones over the holiday. This was not critical, but a nuisance, especially in regard to my use of Zoom. Several years ago, I stumbled into a convenient Zoom hack. It turns out that if you activate your university link to Zoom, it defeats the obnoxious university constraint of automatically logging one out of any university computer after a few minutes' disuse; not even time for a bathroom break! With this hack, I can leave my home computer on all day. Without my DUO app, I could not fire up my university Zoom account. The result was that I logged in a lot over the Thanksgiving weekend as the university software routinely logged me out. I managed to get the IT number from the college the next week and talked to a friendly woman in IT who re-activated DUO on my phone. 

I have a few more podcasts scheduled, but I am belatedly swinging my attention to book signings. I wanted to do one at Book People, our preeminent local Austin independent bookstore. I somehow thought it was appropriate to wait until the book was published on November 19. I contacted Michael McCarthy with whom I had sold some books on commission at Book People. He sent me the form to fill out to request a book signing. It was intimidating! It demanded that arrangements be made three months in advance and that the book signing be around the date of release, two weeks ago. I did the best I could and submitted the form, suggesting a signing event around the end of January. To my surprise and pleasure, I got a response from events manager, Laura Benac, about two hours later, accepting my proposal. I'm scheduled for a signing on January 29, 2025. Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum agreed to be my interlocutor. Details TBD.

I'm going to be in the DC area for a meeting and visiting family two weeks earlier. I've contacted several bookstores in the area. We'll see how that goes.

Bob Morris is a professional book reviewer of some repute. He wrote a terrific review of "Path," the first I've seen. He also posted it as a comment on the Amazon page on the book where he gave it 5 stars!

Morris entitles his review A thoughtful analysis of the potentialities and perils of exponential growth and says:

"As I began to read this book, I was again reminded of Vernon (sic) Vinge's essay, "The Coming of Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" (1993), in which he suggests that "the acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur)."

"More recently, in The Singularity Is Near (2005), Ray Kurzweil predicts that "convergent, exponential technological trends" are "leading to a transition that would be 'utterly transformative' for humanity." I was reminded of that prediction as I began to read the sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer, in which Ray Kurzweil explains how and why humanity's "Millenia-long march toward the Singularity has become a sprint. In the introduction to The Singularity Is Near, I wrote that we were then 'in the early stages of this transition.' Now we are entering its culmination. That book was about glimpsing a distant horizon — this one is about the last miles along the path to reach it."

"All of this material is relevant to the remarks that follow as I attempt to explain why I think so highly of J. Craig Wheeler and his wide and deep experience. He has much of value to share about various "revolutionary" technologies that have made the business world today more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall.

"In the first chapter, Wheeler observes that, 'In the past, humans have always, with some turmoil, adapted to new technologies. Technology is now racing ahead under its own momentum. Humans and human organizations tend to lag. Things are currently changing so rapidly that we may not be able to adapt. This is a qualitatively new phase in human existence.'

"'The biggest wave can start as a gentle swell in mid-ocean. Near shore, the wave crests and breaks. Picture a surfer on a gigantic wave. With the right timing and balance, the surfer can ride the wave and stay on top. The alternative is being tumbled within the surging surf or in the worst case pounded onto a coral reef. As we try to ride our technological wave, the tumbling may be unavoidable. We must avoid slamming into the reef.'"

Wow!  I'm honored to be mentioned in the same context as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. Morris quotes some turns of phrase from the book that I rather liked myself. I especially had to laugh out loud when I saw he quoted the last line of the book, "For every 'That hasn't happened,' there is a 'yet.'" My agent Regina Ryan and I wrestled over that short sentence and how to punctuate it for weeks. Thanks for keeping my feet to the fire, Regina!

 My publicist, Joanne McCall, asked whether Morris' Amazon review, given under the rating link, can be moved to the Amazon editorial section. She argues that since he's a legitimate reviewer, it would carry more weight there. Chloé Hummel of Prometheus is looking into that.