J. Craig Wheeler

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.