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.