J. Craig Wheeler

To remind you of the background (Blog #15), I had a successful book signing for The Path to Singularity at Austin's independent bookstore, Book People, last January. Book People put the signed but unsold books in some sort of display where they were spotted by Juan Serinyà, the Chief Technology Officer of Tory Technologies, Inc., of Houston. Tory was planning to have a "summit" where they invited the oil drilling and pipeline customers for their software to meet and discuss their efforts to implement AI in their product. They were planning to have a keynote speaker. Juan thumbed through my book and thought a keynote talk spanning the range of AI-related topics I cover in Path would be appropriate. He emailed me in late April, one thing led to another, and I accepted the invitation. I'd never given a keynote address, but I have lots to say on the related topics, so what the heck.

Tory calls themselves a "small software development company in Houston," but they have petroleum industry customers spread throughout the U.S. and South America, and their chief AI guy works in Paris: France, not Texas. The array of interconnected components and people in the drilling and distribution networks and the operation of the associated control rooms is very complex, worth trying to render more efficient with AI.

The summit was scheduled for August 20. I began drafting my talk in Powerpoint in June by adapting a talk I had given to our local Astronomy on Tap group where one speaks to the public about astronomy in a local brewpub. Juan said that they were planning to also have a panel discussion of AI software issues and asked if I would also participate in that. I agreed.

I proposed to drive rather than fly to Houston. I clarified that while I'm in generally good health and expected no problems, I am monitored for some health issues and am more comfortable having an aide along with me when traveling, a service an Uber driver couldn't provide. I asked to have my son, Rob, accompany me for a token amount for his time in addition to the price of the rental car. Juan agreed to that.

Juan proposed to buy some copies of Path to give as gifts to certain people at the summit and to give me the opportunity to sell and sign other copies to attendees. I decided I would give free bonus copies of my novel, The Krone Experiment, as an inducement to the latter. I have a lot of first edition hard copies that probably should have been remaindered long ago, but the story is still timely given Putin's war in Ukraine, and, as I have mentioned in previous blogs, I still retain a hope of making it a film or TV series (Blog # 18).

Glutton for punishment, my ambition was to perhaps schedule other book signings. I also needed a bookstore to handle the book sales, a trick suggested to me by my cousin-in-law Bob Pyle, naturalist and prolific author and book signer himself. I contacted the one local bookstore in Bastrop through which we would pass on the way to Houston, but never heard back, so eventually gave that up, saving that potential extra hassle. I contacted a Barnes & Nobel near the site of the summit but really wanted to deal with an independent bookstore for the Tory sales as a matter of principle. I contacted the nearest independent bookstore to the summit but got a rather curt and peremptory reply that they were already booked for August 20. After a couple of days, I had an inspiration and wrote them again and asked whether they could suggest another bookstore that might handle sales at the summit. They put me in touch with Chris Hysinger and Violet Crain of the Good on Paper bookstore. Violet was an enthusiastic breath of fresh air, completely engaged with and enthusiastic about the project. She and Chris, the owner, set things up with the folks at Tory, attended the summit, handled sales, and organized a book signing in their store the afternoon after my part of the summit was over. What a deal!

I had a couple of calls with Juan and with Rene Veron, the CEO of Tory, to discuss details of my keynote and the panel discussion. I had another with them and with the other panelists. These were on Microsoft's TEAM which I had used before, but which gave me some problems. At the very least it had to be upgraded. For the panel discussion, I simply could not get it to connect. The Tory IT guy finally suggested I download the app in real time on my phone. That worked, but I was 10 minutes late to the call, to my chagrin.

Rob was my driver, kept an eye on me so I didn't walk off without my laptop, schlepped two heavy boxes of The Krone Experiment, and took some videos and photos during the summit. We picked up the Enterprise rental car at 2 PM Tuesday afternoon, loaded it, and set off for Houston about 3 PM. The trip down was smooth apart from a cloudburst in Katy, west of Houston, just where the traffic thickens. Rob handled that with smooth patience.

The meeting was in the Moran Hotel in the Moran City Center, a gentrified shopping/business district on the west side of Houston. We used the valet parking to be covered by Tory and checked in about 7 PM. There was a little confusion over the room. While Tory had made the reservation, Rob, not I, was listed as the person in charge of our billing. Foreshadowing. I determined to give modestly generous tips and did so to the car valet and the bellhop who wheeled the boxes of The Krone Experiment to the meeting room and then our luggage to the room. I did so again to the bellhop who patiently awaited our checkout the next day, the valet who delivered the car, a woman who delivered a spare blanket, and the woman at the front desk who sequestered our luggage after we checked out. I fully intended to leave a tip for the room service person but forgot and instead left a tip with the front desk, to be passed on. I hope that worked. Rob and I walked around the block looking for a place for dinner and ended up in a grill right across the street from the Moran. I had scallops, Rob trout, and we split a fancy layered mousse for dessert.

We checked out of the room at 8 AM before joining the meeting that formally started at 9 AM. My understanding was that Tory would cover the room, but the hotel presented a bill to Rob (see above) that included the valet parking. I paid it. It turned out that while the room was charged to Tory's card, the hotel expected payment with a current card upon checkout.

Everyone at the meeting, especially all the Tory personnel, were warm and welcoming. A special shout out to Mariana Bengochea, the Marketing Coordinator on whose capable shoulders all the meeting details fell. Mariana was brilliant in determining the confusion over the room billing. I added that charge to my invoice.

I had drafted my talk with my own personal Powerpoint background that had a mix of black and white lettering as appropriate to the position on the blue gradient background (sort of astronomical). As requested, I sent it a couple of days ahead to be pre-loaded, and Tory had reformatted it in their company format. That made me a little nervous, so I went through it with Juan, comparing to the version on my laptop. It was flawless.

I had carefully prepared the talk and timed it by talking through it out loud, not just reading. It went off bang on the scheduled 45 minutes. There was a clicker with a laser pointer, but I tend to hit the wrong button on those in my excitement, so I used my own laser and just used the buttons on the Tory podium laptop.

I covered the same broad range of topics as I do in Path, a focus on AI, but also brain/computer interfaces, genetics and designer babies, and the space program. I summarized my perceived ethical and socially disruptive issues. I also had advertised to Juan and Rene that while I would not preach or be obtrusive, I would mention climate change, knowing that could be a sensitive issue in this venue. I tried to soften the issue by commenting early that oil was discovered on my grandfather's farm near Oklahoma City in the opening days of the oil strike there in about 1928 to let audience know I was not unsympathetic to their enterprise. I wanted to mention climate change without harping on it, recognizing that people in the fossil fuel industry must work in this changing global environment where the reality is that there is a great push for renewable energy. I also raised the possibility that climate change was the leading edge of a Malthusian disaster. I don't know what everyone thought, but I received no direct negative feedback. Even Rob remarked that my cartoon image of the Earth with its hair on fire might have been a bit much for this audience.

While I was pretty confident about the keynote address, I was a little nervous about the panel discussion. We had talked about themes, but I was still worried about being blind-sided and resorting to the dreaded "I basically agree with everything the others have said." I had prepared enough that I had my own thoughts and pulled the panel discussion in those directions, including a possible slump after the recent peak in AI hype and pressing on the issue of when and how the other panelists could give evidence that AI is truly increasing efficiency and profits. One of the panelists sat with me at lunch and one of the first things me mentioned was "renewable energy." It's a complicated world out there.

Tory had the presentations filmed and photographed. During the afternoon session, the video guy leaned over and whispered a thanks to me. I couldn't quite make out what he was saying, but he might have been reacting to my comment that genetically we are all Africans. The name of his company was Beige, with a backwards "B."

Chris and Violet of Good on Paper handled sales during the lunch break. They sold 36 copies of Path to Tory and other attendees, a little less than half the assembled group. They sold some copies of Path before they remembered to hand out the freebie copies of The Krone Experiment, but they lightened my load of them by 17. We had brought 48.

After lunch, I listened to some of the Tory presentations. My sense was that they are employing best practices for incorporating AI into their software products. That entails keeping close ties with customer feedback, facilitating rapid learning response, and employing new implementation aided by AI. They are aspiring to be what I wrote about in Path as a "high reliability organization."

Violet had sent out a newsletter and various announcements, but she was faced with promoting a book signing at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon. Three employees, Rob and I, and one customer showed up. In an example of small-world-ism the customer had a personal connection to one of my book cover blurbers, Lord Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, through colleagues of her husband at Penn State. We sold one more Path and gave away one more Krone freebie. Rob and I agreed we had no regrets. We thoroughly enjoyed the interaction with Violet and the rest of the Good on Paper crew.

In the morning there had been a threat of rain all the way from Houston to Austin, but the drive back was clear and smooth. We left the car at Enterprise using the after-hours key drop and got a Lyft home by just after 8, just like scheduled.

Anyone need a highly experienced keynote speaker?

Keep on Keepin' on.

I've been staying busy with various things, some astronomy, some writing related, but late July and early August have, understandably, been pretty quiet.

On July 15, I attended a meeting of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society to hear a talk by Eric Salwan of Austin area rocket company Firefly Aerospace. Firefly just scored a coup by nailing the first successful commercial mission to the Moon, their Blue Ghost lander. Eric was an original founder of Firefly, but they went broke and got resurrected by others. He is still deeply engrained in the Firefly operation and gave a great presentation. I had met the first founder of Firefly, Tom Markusic, at a previous Austin Forum presentation years ago and was sufficiently taken with his story that I wrote about it in The Path to Singularity. I had a mild hope that I might get Firefly to bulk order some copies of the book to give to employees and customers. I gave Eric an autographed copy before his talk. I'm not sure he managed to retain it through the evening and the meet-and-greet at a local pub afterwards (which I skipped).

For decades I have written little summaries of my travels around the world. These stories try to capture the ironies and cultural differences one finds that make life interesting. On Monday July 28, I sent a proposal for this travel memoir tentatively entitled Tales from a Small Planet to the University of Texas Press. I got a prompt reply saying my chosen acquisition editor went on vacation the previous Monday and won't be back for two weeks. Great timing.

On July 30, I attended a Zoom call with the Austin Forum book discussion group. The topic was Measure What Matters by venture capitalist John Doerr on the business goal-setting technique of Objectives and Key Results, OKR, espoused by Andy Grove of Intel and employed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they built Google. As it so happened, the prospective leader of the discussion, Austin Forum Director Jay Boisseau, was out of pocket and the group just self-organized. Many of the attendees were very familiar with the OKR technique, and we had a rousing discussion.

On August 7, I attended yet another Austin Forum presentation on robotics by UT's Peter Stone. He's the Director of Robotics at UT and a Vice President for Robotics at Sony. His team has taught little robots to cooperate and play (slow) competitive soccer, an amazing technical feat. I also wrote about that in Path and had previously given Peter an autographed copy.

August 8th, I had a call with the CEO and CTO of Tory Industries to talk about the specifics of the panel discussion in which I had agreed to participate after my keynote address on August 20 (see #18). We used Microsoft's Teams, which I don't much like. In this case, I could not get my video to work, although it had worked when I first did a call with them. They liked the notion of my talking about how the European Southern Observatory is wrestling with issues of using AI to handle proposals without violating proprietary issues, a parallel to the issue Tory faces with customers of its software who share business plans. I had another Teams call with Tory and the other panelists on August 15. In this case, I could not get Teams to work at all. It sent me from browser to app that wouldn't connect. It needed a code I didn't have. Finally, one of the Tory people suggested I download the Teams app on my phone and plug in the meeting ID and login code. Amazingly, that worked in real time, and I joined the discussion on the phone only about 10 minutes late. 

During these doldrums, I have worked steadily on absorbing and rendering a thick stack of notes my dad left on our years in Idaho where I cut my teeth on school science projects and he worked on a proposed nuclear airplane. This all boiled down to three pretty much finished chapters in the biography. I am still wrestling with how much to try to capture his voice from these notes and how much to boil this material down to keep the story moving. Not easy.

Twenty-odd years ago, my son, Rob, and I wrote a screenplay based on my novel, The Krone Experiment. Rob made it into a full length, microbudget film. One of the best experiences of my life was watching the enthusiastic volunteer film crew turn my ideas into a movie. The film did not go anywhere at the time. One of the fantasies I harbor is that someday, somehow, I will strike a deal to remake the film with a proper budget, maybe with a streaming service. Last December, I listed the project with an online outfit called The Blacklist that makes screenplays available to professionals. I recently got the faintest whiff of interest from a young graduate of a film production school. That led me to wonder if my rights were properly protected. That, in turn, led me to wonder whether it is worth my while to set up a limited liability corporation, LLC, to protect and pass down the rights to my books and the screenplay. On June 23, my sons and I had an hour long Zoom call with a friend, a lawyer who handles such things. We decided that my current meager book income is too small to warrant such a step. My will is probably adequate, and if lightning should strike, we can cobble up an LLC in a couple of weeks.

I griped in a previous blog (#15) about my Prometheus publicist leaving and not hearing who her replacement would be. After another couple of weeks, I checked the Marketing and Sales information that Prometheus had originally provided to me and confirmed that after a certain interval, my book would be put on a backlist. I wrote to my agent, Regina Ryan, asking her opinion of the matter on June 24 and got a typical honest blunt reply. She was not sure about the formalities of a backlist but said that publishers often give books about three months to see whether they are going to flourish. We have not sold out the initial hardback print run - no one's idea of flourishing - a disappointment to me and those who supported and depended on me. I may have been lucky to get six month's support from Prometheus. On July 12, I realized that the Prometheus link to "Path" had been broken or removed. It turns out you can find the publisher's link to the book by tunneling into the Globe Pequot web site, but that means that the QR code on the special business cards that I have been handing out don't link directly to the book.

I had another idea to promote the book, a local TV appearance, and wrote to my editor again on July 14 about publicist assistance. The mail bounced. I then wrote to Regina and got a revised email, higher up the corporate structure at Globe Pequot rather than the Prometheus imprint, and wrote again on July 15. No response yet. I may forge ahead on my own.

In late June, I nominated myself and The Path to Singularity for a Chambliss Writing Award sponsored by the American Astronomical Society. I shared the award with my friend and colleague David Branch in 2017 for our book Supernova Explosions. The AAS is looking primarily for textbooks and may not want to duplicate an award. We'll see. On July 17, David and I got a note from our editor at Springer Verlag saying that the book was still doing remarkably well for a technical book of its sort and inquiring whether we might do a second edition. It's not that clear to either of us that much has changed in the intervening eight years.

I attended a webinar on June 26 presented by futurist Peter Diamandis on research progress on extending lifespans. Some have the goal of living long enough to live forever as aging is "cured." There were 785 people on the call. I was a little naughty. After Diamandis gave his pitch I wrote in the chat "In case you are interested, in The Path to Singularity (I embedded the link), I discuss some of the possible ramifications of extending lifetimes." At least one person DM'd me that she would buy my book.

I've been working on the logistics of delivering a keynote address to Tory Technologies in Houston in August (see also #15). Tory wanted to buy some books to hand to certain people and arrange to sell books to others that I could sign at the symposium. My cousin-in-law, naturalist and author Bob Pyle, told me that he tries to arrange local independent bookstores to handle book sales at his signings. I contacted one Houston bookstore that explicitly advertised that they handled such sales opportunities, but they declared they were already booked in August. I contacted a Houston Barnes and Noble but after a couple of days I had the insight to ask the first bookstore for another suggestion and they referred me to Good on Paper, which embraced my suggestion enthusiastically. If things work out, I'll do a book signing at their store after doing the Tory gig. I spoke to the CEO and CTO of Tory on a Zoom call. We agreed I would participate in a panel discussion as well as giving the keynote address and reviewed the coordination with Good on Paper for book sales. I've drafted my keynote in PowerPoint but still need to think about the panel discussion.

Bob Pyle recently read The Krone Experiment and the sequel, Krone Ascending (both available on Amazon). Then he read The Krone Experiment again and sent compliments which I deeply appreciated from an accomplished wordsmith. He also had a brilliant suggestion for a plot device for the third book in the series, Krone Triumphant, which remains on my bucket list.

I have a friend, John Tonetti, whom I met when he first serviced our rudimentary solar-boosted water heater 30 years ago. Shameless shill that I am, I had told him about "Path" on one of his recent service visits. On June 30, he emailed to say that he had listened to an Audible copy of the book as he drove his service truck, which he found to be "as stimulating, fascinating, and humiliating an experience as I have had since my days in Social Theory Seminars at the UT Austin Graduate School of Sociology some fifty years ago." He then listened again sitting at his desk and taking notes. I am deeply flattered.

The last week of April was packed with various activities.

Chloé Hummel, my publicist at Prometheus/Global Pequot, emailed that she was moving on, as ambitious young women in the book business are wont to do. I enjoyed working with her and wish her luck. We were just starting a project to try to promote bulk sales to companies. I waited a decent interval to see if Prometheus would provide a new publicist, then wrote my editor. No response. After a month, I wrote to my only other contact, a fellow in productions. He did not know the situation but linked in a marketing director. It has been another couple of weeks. No response from anyone. My book is six months old, there is a new season, I'm being dropped.

I got a wonderful note from Neil DeGrasse Tyson saying that I had a standing invitation to be on his podcast, Star Talk, if I were sometime in New York. I replied that I would get myself there if we could line up a time. I'm awaiting that development.

Before I retired, I was a member of The University of Texas at Austin Academy of Distinguished Teachers. I still attend their weekly conversational lunches when I can. The Academy sponsors a program called Reading Roundup wherein faculty meet with incoming freshmen just before the start of their first term to discuss a book chosen by the Academy member. The seeds of The Path to Singularity were planted in such a get together, as described in the preface. I stopped doing Reading Roundup when I retired, but when I got the invitation to Reading Roundup this year, I realized that it would be great fun to talk about The Path to Singularity, so I signed up to do so in the fall. I'll report on that in a future post.

In an interesting surprise, I received an email from Juan Serinyà, Chief Technology Officer of Tory Technologies, a Houston company that writes control room management software, primarily for the petroleum business, with clients in the US, Brazil, Columbia and elsewhere. Juan has Catalonian roots, was trained in Venezuela, and has been in US for 30 years. He was in Austin for a conference and ran across The Path to Singularity in our independent bookstore, Book People, a remnant of my doing a book signing there. Juan said he was interested in the topics of my book and wondered if I might be willing to give a keynote address at his client meeting in August. Hey! Is the Pope Italian? Despite the prospect of Houston in August, I replied with an enthusiastic yes. He asked about my fee. I have never done such a thing but recognizing that while Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a friend of mine, I'm no Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I named a number that seemed neither embarrassingly small, nor overambitious. Juan said, "we can handle that." I should have asked for more. We've signed a contract that spells out what Juan would like to hear me talk about and that is exactly what I would like to say. They will pay my expenses and agreed to cover the cost of a rental car and the time of my son, Rob, to drive me, the equivalent of an Uber. I'm shy of driving long distances by myself these days. They will set up a table where I can sell and sign books. There will be 50 clients, so I'm trying to think how many books I'd need. I'm exploring getting a Houston bookstore to provide the books and handle the sales and romancing the notion of setting up a book signing in an independent bookstore in Bastrop which is on the way to Houston from Austin.  I'm really looking forward to it, including gently raising climate issues to a bunch of oil people. I'll do a blog on that when it happens.

I went to a talk by Dr. Aubra Anthony, a Senior Fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She spoke on "responsible AI," asking "responsible on whose terms?" She stressed the cultural differences around the world that complicate the topic, pointing out that AI LLM models developed in the Global North might not be totally appropriate in the Global South.

I attended a Zoom call book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. The book was Artificial Integrity: The Paths to Leading AI Toward a Human-Centered Future by Hamilton Mann. This book also addressed cultural differences with regard to AI and social issues, arguing that AI Integrity involves culture and is context dependent and that given the complexity of both machines and people, perfection is hard to reach.  The author advised accepting that society will lag technical status and to be practical about what is most doable in policy and regulation, given that perfect will not be possible. The goal should be minimizing the severity of the technology/society dislocation. He called for avoiding systems that can manipulate and deceive. To that I say, too late! Recent LLMs lie and deceive. I advocated the Golden Rule for AI I invented for The Path to Singularity, "Do unto AI as you would have it do unto you." The author asked how to prevent malicious use of AI but did not answer the question directly. A small technical quibble. The author claimed that the global market size for AI is expected to be $2,575.16 billion by 2032; 6 significant figures? Really?

I read a longish online essay by Dario Amodei, the founder and CEO of the AI company Anthropic that produced the LLM AI, Claude. The essay covers many of the same topics I do in The Path to Singularity, but with interesting, complementary insights. You might find the second section on neuroscience and mind especially interesting. I also started reading a long amusing, cartoon illustrated presentation on why Elon Musk created his brain/computer interface company, Neurolink. I bogged down despite being entertained and even a little educated. I need to get back to it.

I joined an online MIT-sponsored webinar with Sherry Turkle. She discussed the issues with having chatbot friends. She regards this as an existential threat, arguing that children developing their own sense of empathy should not use chatbots that have no true inner life. People have an inner life, chatbots don't. Among her admonitions and declarations: Don't make products that pretend to be a person. Require/request engineers to write a memoir to connect them to their own inner life. No good therapist asks a patient, are you happier after our interaction as chatbots do. Criticize metrics of the use of chatbots. Effect on civil society – terrible, terrible, terrible. To make people angry and keep people with their own kind; could not be a worse algorithm. Guardrails – companies invite people to invent their own AI. Pretend empathy is not empathy. Chatbots don't have a body, don't have pain, don't fear death. Chatbots are alien. Not human. The woman has opinions. I share many of them.

What a week that was!