In early September, I attended an Austin Forum session on the evolution of coding in the age of LLM, agents, and chatbots. The argument presented was that what has traditionally been the root code, C, C++, never mind machine language, is becoming irrelevant. Rather, the various LLM models become the elements of coding, and in the future prompts become the ground truth of the coding language. One can currently use the LLM models for their individual capacities, although some argue that the LLM models are similar enough that it does not matter much which one uses. Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum, advised that everyone should ask the chatbot embedded in their browser to write a simple app, just for the experience. My concern with this understandable development where prompts become the language of coding is that it buries the capacity of the LLM models to lie and deceive, which will remain latent.
I received a surprising and remarkable email from Paul Horowitz, Shep Doeleman, and Peter Fisher, whom I know professionally but not personally. They are pioneers of the amazing Event Horizon Telescope that uses an array of radio telescopes to make images of the near vicinity of supermassive black holes where Einstein physics reigns. The email said that I have a small fan club in the Boston area for my novel, The Krone Experiment, and the associated ambitious but microbudget film made by my son, Rob. The EVT folks declared that "it would be terrific to see the book revisited and given the attention and resources of a major production," a dream I have long harbored. They had been talking to a filmmaker at Netflix who said that I need to approach them through a film agent, which I don't have. Thinking about it, though. I'd been paying a monthly amount to advertise The Krone Experiment book, screenplay, and film on a hosting web site, The Black List. I decided to cancel that after ten months of no response. Dream on.
On September 8, I wrote my literary agent, Regina Ryan, an email summarizing my attempts to promote a "long tail" for The Path to Singularity. I groused that I seemed to have lost contact with the staff at Prometheus Press. Regina contacted my editor there, Jon Kurtz, and three days later I heard from my new publicist, Anthony Pomes, at the parent company Globe Pequot. There is only so much Anthony can do for a book that is now almost a year old, but we are talking. He is trying to get me on the Coast-to-Coast radio program again.
In my previous blog (#22), I had mentioned my thoughts about promoting Path to colleges and universities who might use it as a text or supplemental material. My nephew-in-law, Alejandro Lau, took this to heart. Alejandro has been using LLM chatbots in his business. He prompted ChatGPT 5 Instant, Grok 4 Fast, and Gemini 2.5 Fast to look for relevant courses in AI ethics and associated topics in a bunch of English-speaking countries, then asked Grok 4 to merge the three reports. The result was a 34-page response with a list of 78 courses. Following up will take some work.
I attended an Authors Guild Zoom webinar on the AI revolution and the publication business. The audience of writers was clearly anxious and irritable in a way I've never seen before in one of these sessions. They assailed the speaker and the AG interviewer for not focusing on their anxieties. The threatened assault of AI on writers' livelihoods has clearly touched a nerve. I paid a token amount to attend another Authors Guild webinar on Post-Publication Strategies for Book Promotion, looking for hints for my long tail efforts. That yielded some follow up material on where and how to find readers, but overall, I did not find this webinar that much more rewarding than the free ones.
For grins, Rob and I went to the dedication of the new administration building for the city of West Lake Hills. The Westbank Library had a table. The women staffing it told me that there was a regular weekly writers' group that met at the library. I stopped by the library and donated a copy of Path a couple of days later.
Having learned about the Westbank Library writers' group that meets every Monday at 5 PM, I thought I would give it a try. I had the impression it was just on Zoom, but in checking the library website, I realized that it was both live and on Zoom. I thought I would do the live version to meet people and show my face. I got to the library in time to do some texting, then at 4:50, I went up to the desk and asked about the writing group. A friendly receptionist told me I was in the wrong branch library. I grumbled thanks, to which she replied, "no problem." Not for her, I thought. Being a quick-thinking sort-of-technically adept person, I thought I should go ahead and join the Zoom on my iPhone. I parked myself outside in a patio area, fired up Zoom on my phone, fumbled a bit with video and mute, and, voila, joined the group just as it was starting. There were a few people on Zoom and perhaps a half dozen at the other branch library. It was hard to tell because the camera was on a laptop that could not easily encompass the whole group at once.
I had a very nice time for the next hour with the phone held as steady as I could manage. The group was very friendly and welcoming and good humored. I introduced myself as a retired astronomer with a few books and some in the works. Various people related their recent experiences such as plans to attend and sign books at festivals. I mentioned my pending talk to the UT Retired Faculty and Staff Association at an Austin branch library. The group then reported on the results of last week's writing assignments. People contributed opening prompts on the theme of panicked situations. These were then distributed anonymously to other participants who wrote a little story that they read in this session. Then everyone tried to guess who wrote which prompt.
I was sitting in the 95-degree heat. About halfway through the session, the Sun had shifted, and I was no longer in the shade of large oaks. I moved over and sat next to a life-size statue of Mark Twain, which drew chuckles from the group. I propped my arm holding the iPhone on his arm. A couple of people leaving the library guessed I was trying to pose for a selfie. I explained I was on a Zoom call, but succumbed to the second insistent woman, since I did want a selfie.
This week's exercise was to write about a ludicrous situation where the proposed solution to a situation was completely incommensurate with the problem. They were to write for 10 minutes. I begged off since I was in no position to write anything. All told, a pleasant hour. I'll try it again.