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.

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?

For a while in May I contemplated making a serious run at soliciting keynote speaking opportunities. My agent, Regina Ryan, and my independent publicist, Joanne McCall, both pointed out that many authors make their real income in that way, not from book sales. A woman at an Austin Forum on Science and Society meeting pointed out that doing keynotes is a "real job." I ended up voting with my body. I turned back to writing on my father's biography. It's always been writing that centers me. Still, if another keynote opportunity fell into my lap, I would pursue it. Just saying.

On May 7, I attended a dinner meeting of the Austin Forum Board, of which I am a lowly member. I fell into an interesting conversation with William Fitzgerald and Stephanie Scales of Bárd, a technical writing consulting company. They are trying to compile a catalog of human intelligence which they have provisionally titled "Human Documentation." At a previous board meeting, I had teased William by saying that Human Documentation was a rather meh title. I rashly promised to come up with a better one. At this dinner, William teased me back, pointing out that I had not done so. A long discussion ensued.

That night, I awoke in the middle of the night with various thoughts racing through my sleep-addled brain. I thought that a catalog of human intelligence does not capture the breadth and depth of the topic. In pondering this, it seemed to me that Homo sapiens are a way point, not the end of human intelligence. One can consider where and how human intelligence will go in the future, by pure biological evolution or by melding with machines. It roiled in my head that a while a catalog of human intelligence is not an infinitesimal point, it is a very small dot in the continuum of intelligence that begins with stromatolites, bacteria, and continues to plants, trees, animals, humans in the past and present and humans beyond in the future, other biological intelligence, extraterrestrial of all sorts, biomarkers less intelligent than us but also the possibility of hugely advanced biological intelligence and biological/machine melds. How, my sleepy mind asked, can one establish clear boundaries between human and "other" intelligence. What is the difference between machine ASI and biological ASI? That led me to sleepily ponder the question of the meaning of human. Human as opposed to what? "Inhuman" does not intrinsically mean evil but could encompass alien as well as machine. I also found myself thinking about the relationship between "intelligence" and "creativity." Creativity seems to involve thinking things that have never been thought before, but of course much creativity involves extrapolating things that have been thought or done before. How, I asked myself, do you encompass art in the context of intelligence? A popular exercise is to think of things that humans do that machines cannot, an increasingly small set. Machine thinking may involve things that no human can or has done. Already we have machines that can strategize in a manner that no human has or can do. Prime examples are the products of DeepMind like AlphaGo Zero or AlphaFold. I fuzzily concluded that the dimensions of intelligence are huge, less than, comparable to, or greater than current human intelligence, and, that there is diversity even among humans. I found myself conflating intelligence, thinking, and creativity, never mind consciousness.

What a jumble.

I wrote a summary of this sleep infested core dump to William and Stephanie the next day. Who knows what they will make of it? What I did not do was come up with a better name than "Human Documentation."

On May 19, I finally formally registered my novels, The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending and The Path to Singularity with Created by Humans. Created by Humans is an organization that promises to handle licensing that ensures that some sort of royalty is paid by firms that use an author's work to train their AI LLM models. I don't know whether this will work or not, but it seemed a useful experiment. I had vetted the notion of registering with Created by Humans with Regina Ryan. The registration process required some to-ing and fro-ing by email, but I got it done.

On May 29, I participated in another Austin Forum book discussion, this time on Reid Hoffman's new book, Superagency. Hoffman is a tech titan who founded LinkedIn. He has an optimistic view of what AI will do for humanity, as long as we avoid all the existential threats.

I spent most of my writing time in May working on father's biography. I discovered a bunch of correspondence dating back to the mid 1920's and am trying to incorporate that into what I've already written of that era up into the 1950's when he witnessed the first hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike. One challenge has been the correspondence from my beloved Grandmother Wheeler, Vernie. Vernie had the charming but frustrating habit of dating her letters with just the day of the week. A typical entry would be "Sat. P.M." I engaged in considerable detective work using other correspondence and the text and context of her mail to see where it fit chronologically. One letter was sent on a Tuesday after she returned from voting. I checked the calendar. Aha! Elections always happen on Tuesdays in November, and I deduced we were talking about midterm elections on November 2, 1942. I went on to other things, but this rattled around in my head. There were some things that didn't quite fit. Finally, I went back and realized that she was talking about Tuesday November 2, 1936. I'd been off by six years.

I'm posting examples of technology advances every weekday on X and LinkedIn, my quest to document the exponential growth of technology. Spoiler alert. It's still growing.