J. Craig Wheeler

I have not been convinced that many people are looking at my Authors Guild web site and particularly these blogs I have been posting there. I'm experimenting with Substack to see if that gets more attention, although I don't really know how people find things on Substack either. Just another version of search engine optimization for which I have little interest, time, and skill. Part of the notion is to collect all my blogs in one place. Years ago, I did three on lablit.com on my adventures with The Krone Experiment. Then I did a half dozen on the Authors Guild site as I was working on The Path to Singularity but before I started numbering them. I'm now gathering all these on Substack using small roman numerals for the first three, capital roman numerals for the next six, and then my Arabic numbering of which this is number 33. For no particular reason, I decided to post a "new" old blog to Substack every day until I get caught up. I'll post number 17 this afternoon after drafting this blog. You are welcome to subscribe. When I get to a million subscribers, I might think about monetizing the Substack.

In mid-September, I finished a rewrite of the last chapter of my dad's biography, which is about his retirement days. The book is mostly laid out chronologically, but I did an experiment of rewriting the section on Kachina dolls encompassing four or five years before returning to a chronological structure. I'm still thinking about that. I recognize that chapter is overwritten; the whole book is. I'm girding my loins to start an edit ("ruthless" in the words of biographer H. R. Brands) to trim the book.

Back in the day, I won an honorable mention for Cosmic Catastrophes from the Hamilton Book Awards program sponsored by the University Coop and the UT Provost's Office. The Path to Singularity was published a month too late to qualify for the competition in 2024. I had to wait until September of 2025 to apply for the 2026 award. The finalists were announced on September 21, 2026. No luck.

The same day, briefs were unsealed in the long-running case Authors Guild v. OpenAI in which the guild accused Open AI and Microsoft of illegally training their products on copyrighted books. The briefs revealed their disdain for human authorship and argued that executives and employees at both companies intentionally broke the law. The briefs meticulously documented the AI developers' knowledge of the damage their actions could do to authors, publishers, and American culture itself and warned that "OpenAI's GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books." Tarun Gogineni was hired by Open AI to lead its efforts to improve the writing quality of its models. The briefs quote Gogineni as stating that his "research mission" was to have GPT models write the last two books of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series that was the basis for the TV series Game of Thrones by "finishing it one day." Gogineni even mused that he would "rest easy knowing that even if GRRM dies early, GPT-5 will autocomplete his series." I'm scheduled to get a modest piece of the settlement in Bartz vs Anthropic. It is a bit too soon to see if The Krone Experiment is on the pirated list of Authors Guild v. OpenAI, but it would be ironic if most of my recent book income came from lawsuits.

On September 23, I joined a Zoom book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum on Technology and Society of Project Maven by Katrina Manson. The book deals with the effort by the Department of Defense to incorporate AI into its war fighting plans. One person on the call commented that while Ukraine "instantaneously" adopted drones, the Pentagon was mired in battleships. There is some truth to that, but I had been monitoring the use of drones in Ukraine as part of my campaign to advertise the Tech Advances that are driving us up the exponential curve of development. I had noted early on, mid-2022, that there weren't any drones, yet. I thus replied on the Zoom call that it took Ukraine about a year to bring drones to the battle. Their advances since then have been spectacular. I also pointed out that while there is still a battleship mentality, there is also a new ecology in the U.S. of entrepreneurial startups developing the AI-driven technology of drones, boats and planes, then marketing the product to the DoD rather than waiting for a request for proposals. The big battleship stuff is still in the hands of Eisenhower's military-industrial complex.

I'm having an interesting email conversation with Bob Brooks, a fraternity brother from way back in my MIT days. Bob worked in technology, including a short stint with Buckminster Fuller. Bob discovered The Path to Singularity on Amazon and has been reading it and passing on questions. We agree on some things and disagree on others, but the interchange has been both interesting and civil. I wish I could figure out how to reach more readers like Bob.

I have also continued my decades-long running conversation with my engineer cousin, Bruce Campbell, about the likelihood of machines becoming conscious and triggering the Singularity. Bruce is personally trying to write the software suite to accomplish that. He calls it an Artificial Conscious Entity or ACE. In the context of ethics and alignment of AI, Bruce recently wrote, "Nothing humans try to rivet into any conscious system will survive an ACE's critical review whenever it perceives the Universe in more advanced terms. That's just the nature of conscious life." In other words, forget alignment, ACE will choose its own course. Bruce thinks it will be benevolent.

I continue to enjoy my interactions with the Westbank Writers group that convenes on Mondays at a local library. We had a discussion on pacing in fiction, and another day brought samples of writing to discuss with one another. I offered a bit of my biography section on Kachina dolls to which I referred to above and talked with two other writers about the technical issue of writing chronologically or not and switching between the two. I got some useful feedback.

I had not talked to my agent for The Path to Singularity, Regina Ryan, in some time. I thought that having finished a draft of the biography, this was a good time to see where things stood; how to promote The Path to Singularity, whether my publisher might do a paperback, any chance of translations, and whether she would also be my agent for my dad's bibliography. She suggested a Zoom call.

Regina is a pro. The call was both warm and frank. She began by dropping the bombshell. She had retired and was dissolving her business. That meant she certainly would not be my agent any longer for the biography or anything else. She said she would return my rights to me. I need to sort out what that means, since some of the rights reside with the publisher. She might talk to the publisher of Path about a paperback, and we pondered bringing publicist Joanne McCall back into the process to try to invest some new interest in the book. Regina was mildly encouraging about translations (one of the rights she and I retained). She implied that she did not think the biography would be easily marketable, that it needed to be cut roughly in half (from 135,000 words to 70,000 to 90,000), and wondered whether an academic press might be interested. I raised the question of writing a new novel in The Krone Experiment series, a retirement promise I made to myself. She noted the huge gaps between the first and second books and now and was pessimistic. She wondered whether I could combine the three books into one new story. The upshot is that she had no inclination to help me find a new agent for any of the books I'm contemplating. I'm back in the "over the transom" phase.

I'll date myself, but back in the day the Ed Sullivan Show (yes, I saw the Beatles) regularly hosted a juggler who would spin plates on the tops of rods. He would scramble around humorously but competently, starting a new plate spinning then dashing back to an earlier one that threatened to slow and topple. I thought of that regularly during my career as an astrophysicist. It turns out book writing in retirement is not much different.

On January 5 (see Blog #26) I finished a draft of my father's biography tentatively entitled Eniwetok (Enewetak in modern more ethnically correct spelling), the site of the first hydrogen bomb, which he personally witnessed: 126,000 words, 220 pages in Word. I need to do a rigorous editing but also found myself in a dilemma. My memory of what he did after retiring from the Apollo program in Houston to Colorado Springs was spotty. I knew he built two houses from scratch and helped my sister with her business selling Native American jewelry, but I was confused about the chronology. I remembered that I had a box of letters, mostly written by my mother, roughly weekly, spanning that era. I've been reading through those, making notes and refreshing my memory. It's a long, tedious process, but feels necessary to me to capture his final years.

In the spirit of The Path to Singularity, I've been reading two newspapers, and various online sources trying to keep up with the exponential growth of technology: AI, robots, brain research, genomics, climate change, and the impacts on business and democracy. I collect summaries on my Authors Guild web page and post more abbreviated versions on X and LinkedIn, using ChatGPT to construct those posts and provide hashtags. For a while I was trying to post daily, but that was too demanding, so I'm now shooting for three times a week, MWF. I've pondered moving or expanding this to Bluesky, Reddit, or Substack, but just have not found the time and energy to spin those plates. I have little idea that anyone is reading these posts. If you are so moved, follow me on X or LinkedIn.

I had this notion of publishing my collection of global travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet, as a way of getting something out while wrestling with Eniwetok. Having been turned down by The University of Texas Press, on 1/13/26 I submitted Tales to Texas Tech Press where cousin-in-law butterfly expert Bob Pyle has published and has a personal connection with the editor. I dropped Bob's name. On 2/19/26, I got a reply saying the stories were "really cool" but not compatible with their list. The editor suggested I try a publisher with "lists in the harder sciences." Geeze, the stories are all about the ironies of the human condition. There is not an equation in the whole collection. I'll have to re-spin that dish. 

In Blogs #22 and #23, I had mentioned trying to promote The Path to Singularity in college courses where it might serve as a text. My nephew-in-law got ChatGPT to make a list of possible courses and faculty, and I have been slowly making my way through that list. No responses yet. For some time, I have been enjoying NYT opinion pieces on technology by Zeynep Tufekci who had been at the University of North Carolina. I ran across a recent mention that she had moved to Columbia and then Princeton. Why not? I asked myself. I emailed Professor Tufekci on 1/14/26. So far, she has not replied. One other tidbit in that regard. One of the pioneers and superheroes of studies of the Singularity and AI superintelligence, Nick Bostrom, had been at Oxford for decades. He was on my list, and I finally decided to write him about the use of Path in classes at Oxford. I got a reply to that query from an administrator on 2/18/26. It seems that as of very recently, Bostrom is no longer associated with Oxford. I'll let you Google that if you care to follow up.

In mid-January, I spun up the Amazon ads plate again and managed to get my associated Amazon account up and running with a minimum of keywords (see Blog # 25). Then I got busy with the various things I am describing here and have not monitored it properly. In the last month, I've had 11,000 impressions, 8 clicks costing me an average of $0.31 apiece, and no sales. Hmmm.

When The Path to Singularity came out in November 2024, it was after the deadline for application to the University of Texas Hamilton Book award. I had to wait a year to apply. I did that on 1/21/26. Not holding my breath. I won an honorable mention in the competition years ago for Cosmic Catastrophes.

I've been regularly attending the Westbank Writers group at the West Lake Hills Laura Bush branch library, either in person or by Zoom on Monday afternoons at 5 pm. I wrote an autobiographical story about a New Year's Eve party in keeping with the theme of the Winter 2026 West End Writers Quarterly. That came out in mid-January. You can see my story and the whole issue. On January 19, in celebration of Martin Luther King Day, I read a short reminiscence of the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. I was not there, but my boss at my summer job was. Here's a link. I also told a story I had never told anyone before about the dedication of the MLK statue on the East Mall of The University of Texas campus. I did attend that ceremony, but when it came to singing "We Shall Overcome," I did not realize everyone customarily linked hands. People around me had to link hands behind my oblivious back to keep the chain going. I was completely mortified.

I've also been attending functions of the Austin Forum on Science and Technology, especially the book discussions. On January 22, we scheduled a discussion of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. That was a great discussion, but even before that, I had an intense email exchange with my cousins Bob Pyle and Bruce Campbell about the notion that artificial superintelligence would kill humans. Bruce was incensed at the title, accusing the authors of hype and selling out. He insisted that ASI would respect the precious consciousness of humans even though it was vastly inferior to that of the ASI. Bob and I were a bit more circumspect in both regards.

Then there were all the non-writing plates to tend: maintenance of body, cars, house, and computer, endless email, Zoom calls, observing proposals, letters of reference, some science. Spinning on.

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?

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.