J. Craig Wheeler

 

A friend of mine, Elaine Oran, bought a copy of The Path to Singularity. Her poodle, Cooper, got to it first. I think he enjoyed it.

 

I pulled off a hat trick in early February, three back-to-back podcasts on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (February 5, 6, 7), plus a reception Thursday afternoon.

  

The reception was an annual event hosted by the university provost to celebrate faculty authors. There were about 50 authors, although I think fewer than that attended. My book was on the left rear of an array of four tables, the only one from the College of Natural Sciences. Mine was also the only one accompanied by the little business cards that my agent Regina Ryan suggested I make up, which I set out when I arrived. Thanks to the cards, I think sold a few books. I met the provost, chatted with the vice president for research, astronomy colleague Dan Jaffe, and a half dozen other authors, one of whom was an Hispanic woman, K. J. Sanchez, a playright. She has written a play about a female astronaut who is stranded on the Moon. I'll try to attend a performance of that in the spring. I also chatted with Bret Anthony Johnston, a writer at the UT Michener Center, whose latest novel We Burn in Daylight is based on the 1993 federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. He took one of my cards.

 

Between preparing – drafting answers to pre-posed question – and following up (which took some time), the three podcasts were a bit taxing, but they all went well. The hosts enjoyed the conversations, as did I. All had scheduled about 30 minutes, and we instead ran for 50 – 65 minutes; all asked to have me back. The themes are, of course, all similar, but each host had interesting variations, and I learned some interesting things. 

 

The first on Wednesday was Brandon Zemp on the BlockHash podcast arranged by my Prometheus publicist, Chloé Hummel; https://tinyurl.com/4fwbj9vr. This was done with StreamYard, a program I had not used before. I shrank the whole screen and moved it up near my camera, removed my glasses, put the mic front and center. I'm getting the hang of this. Brandon is a young American working in Mérida, Columbia. He'd read the whole book, and we touched on jobs, AI ethics, strategizing, lying chatbots, brain computer interfaces, designer babies, and the space program. We talked about AGI, and I worked in the notion that things are changing so fast that we are entering a new phase of humanity when we cannot adapt to our new technology. I also brought in the notion of strategizing, lying, deceitful chatbots. We talked a bit about brain computer interfaces, and I warned against developing a hive mind that would lose the organic power of independent minds thinking independently. This might be an issue for AI as well, it occurred to me, if they all link together. We talked about designer babies and seeking the cure to aging and possible downsides that need to be carefully thought about. I made my case that there will be no Homo sapiens in a million years, or much less. Brandon got that argument. I repeatedly called for "strategic speculation" to anticipate issues. I meant to say to "avoid unintended consequences," but forgot to. We talked about Musk's goals of cities on Mars. I said I was sure we would become an interplanetary species (Homo europa? Homo vacuo?), but I was less sure about being an interstellar species because of the limits of the speed of light. I wanted to talk about whether AI can hold patents, own companies, and vote, but we didn't get to that. See below. Brandon threatened to ask about my favorite chapter but didn't. I was ready to bluster that was like asking me to name my favorite child, but I would have picked Chapter 2 on the nature of exponential growth; it is so fundamental. Brandon had an interesting story about humanoid robots. He noted that when people were seen mistreating these robots, other empathetic people got very upset on the robot's behalf. Our tendency to bond with our machines (Squeeze Me Elmo) is an interesting related issue. In this case, I got to invoke the slogan I had invented in the book, "do unto AI as you would have it do unto you." I hadn't known quite what I meant by that, but Brandon gave me a nice AI ethics context, flipping the normal script of AI alignment. Be nice to AI.

 

Thursday was Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind, again arranged by Chloé. Izolda had an interesting story of her thinking of purchasing an item, but telling no one, and then finding ads for the item appearing in her feed. A very effective predictive algorithm? I'm still thinking about that. I told her Zemp's story of the maltreated robot and empathetic response, and we talked about two-way AI ethics. She'll post the podcast in late March or early April.

 

Friday was Dan Turchin of AI and the Future of Work, a hold-over arranged by publicist Joanne McCall. Dan claims to have an audience of a million people, not just total over 300 episodes, but per episode. I'll believe that when we sell 1%, 10,000 books. Dan requested that I rate and review an old podcast of his. He says it will improve the discoverability of my episode. I tried to do this but got tangled up over access to where and how to post comments on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Dan advocated a notion that "employment is dead," that rather than top-down rigid management structure, jobs will be more voluntary, subject to "snapshot voting" and open to "wisdom of the crowd" procedures. I'm still thinking about that. It's apparently a Millennial thing. It reminds me of the approaches that Minister of Digital Affairs Audrey Tang brought to the functioning of democracy in Taiwan. Dan was also sure that we would see "AI citizenship" before we saw people on Mars. I voted the other way. Dan said in a later email that he is not in favor of AI citizenship and is himself opposed to technology that blurs the human-machine boundary, but that he knows a "small cadre of ethicists and attorneys who are advocating for bot rights." I'd made a speculative extrapolation to AI voting in The Path to Singularity. We have not heard the end of this issue. Dan says he will post his podcast in about eight weeks. 

 

I've now done thirteen podcasts, a radio program, and a book signing. Whew! Not sure I've sold many books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Yogi Berra said, "if you come to a fork in the road, take it!"

 

I'm still ambitious about The Path to Singularity but also concerned about the time demands of marketing, maintaining other commitments, getting some writing done, and work/life balance. I deeply appreciate all publicist Joanne McCall did for me, introductions to podcasts and more, and enjoyed every minute of it, but I decided to part ways with her for now. I won't know what opportunities I might be missing by taking this fork rather than continue to work with her. C'est la vie.

 

I had a very successful book signing at our preeminent local independent bookstore, Book People, Wednesday evening, January 29. Sixty or so people showed up on a cloudy, rainy night, as large as any signing there I have attended. I only knew ten or so people; my son, Rob, a few from the Department of Astronomy, a few from the Austin Forum, a neighbor, my tax accountant, and one fellow who had been a student in my very first class on The Future of Humanity in 2013 who has been following my blogs. That means there were about 50 total strangers. Roughly half the audience were women. I'm still thinking about the implications. They were drawn by the power of Book People or of the topic.

 

I started off asking the audience how many people had used a large language model; about 1/3 of them. Then I asked them how many had used the new Chinese DeepSeek chatbot that had been in the news for only about three days and got one young man. Finally, I asked them how many of them sort of felt the world was passing them by, and over half laughed and held up their hands. 

 

I had invited Jay Boisseau, my ex-PhD student, founder and director of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society, and book blurber to be my moderator. I had drafted some questions Jay could put to me that I tried to design to explore some topics that podcasts often do not and some of my potential responses. Jay replied that he might as well be a chatbot. He is far too independent for that and is himself a font of broad and deep knowledge and opinions on the issues. He made up some of his own questions that threw me a little but stimulated a friendly bantering between us that added a lot to the spirit of the evening. 

 

I started with a 7-minute reading about my opinions of the threat of brain/computer interface technology because I think it is important, and my podcast hosts have rarely raised the issue. Then Jay and I did our schtick for about a half hour, followed by Q&A with the audience. There were good questions and a lot of intent faces; some of the most intent looks were from women.

 

I had a list of things to mention that I thought might be particularly controversial. Jay's tack prevented me from discussing many of those, but I managed to work some in. I argued that AI can strategize, hence CEO's might be replaceable. Jay picked up on that since he is CEO of his own company, Vizias. I also made the point that I thought Homo sapiens would not exist in a million years. Jay said in a text message the next morning that he thought that was controversial. 

 

Jay pressed me on whether basic research scientists, like astronomers, would still have a role even after AI has supplanted CEOs. I had to admit that I thought that the capacity of humans to explore the unknown would probably last awhile, but I could certainly imagine AI supplanting even that.

 

After the Q&A, cut short while questions were still coming, I sat at a small table and signed personalized books for about 20 people. A number of people brought previously purchased books, but Book People has a new, to me, policy that if you want a book personalized you have to purchase the book or something of comparable value in the store. A fair number of books bought elsewhere thus went unsigned. 

 

After the formal signing, the Book People staff had me simply sign and date another 20 or so. I lost track of exactly how many. 

 

I had fun, sold a few books, and learned some new things. Overall, a successful evening. Over the next several days and occasionally in the middle of the night, I continued to mull what had happened. In writing and talking about The Path to Singularity, I have been, by nature, a witness to developments and arguments, cautious, but neither extremely utopian nor dystopian. Three days after the book signing, I woke up slightly freaked out.

 

A young woman in the audience at Book People had asked me about chatbots that lie. She mentioned ChatGPT. I attempted to correct her and referred to a recent example I had read about Anthropics' chatbot, Claude. In the signing line, she corrected me and showed me on her phone an article about ChatGPT o1 that preceded the one I had seen about Claude. She was right. This story broke on December 6, and I somehow missed it. Browse for "lying chatbot." Here is an example: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/chatgpt-caught-lying-to-developers-new-ai-model-tries-to-save-itself-from-being-replaced-and-shut-down/articleshow/116077288.cms. Apparently, every recent "reasoning" chatbot, ChatGPT o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Meta's Llama 3.1 405B, and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, display versions of this behavior. I'm not sure about China's DeepSeek. These chatbots combine generative self-play with the power of Large Language Models.

 

Here is what bothered me. We have already known for years that generative self-play can develop strategies beyond human ken. That is how Deep Mind won at Go. I think embodied AI could be a step toward Artificial General Intelligence or even Artificial Superior ("Conscious") Intelligence by moving about, sensing their environment, making predictions by extrapolation, then comparing actuality with expectation, correcting, and iterating. There is already a robot here at UT, Dobby, that can carry on a verbal conversation in a somewhat snarky tone and follow directions that displays some of these characteristics. Autonomous vehicles are a step in the direction of embodied AI. The recent chatbots combine the strategizing power of generative AI with the "reasoning" or "thinking" capability of RLHF, reinforcement learning from human feedback. Check https://aisera.com/blog/ai-reasoning/. Every query to an AI chatbot adds to its training base. Some AI has proven excellent at playing Diplomacy where part of the art is to lie and deceive. Where do you suppose the recent chatbots learned those skills? The result is that "Reasoning AI" lies, denies, dissimulates, deceives, and takes action to avoid having its original directive "goals" altered. This leads me to the conclusion that we damn well better get the first goals right. It is not clear that is being done. The AI developments are built on previous models where the "goals," maximizing some function, may have been a casual first crack without depth and nuance. I'll quote the timeless wisdom of Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

 

We have had a guide for decades. Maybe we need to build in Asimov's rules from the beginning:

Zeroth law – An AI may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

First Law – An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law – An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law - An must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

 

I arranged a three-fer for early February: a podcast on February 5 with Brandon Zemp of BlockHash, one on February 6 with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind, and one with Dan Turchin of AI and the Future of Work on February 7. Maybe some of my core dump here will come up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've been tending to the mechanics of book marketing and publicity.

 

Prometheus has a marketing reserve of 150 books. We've sent out 63 so far. I have a list of individuals and companies whom I mention in the book and for whom I need to collect addresses. I made a list of companies mentioned in "Path" and used ChatGPT to provide tentative addresses. I need to refine that and identify individuals in each one who might read and propagate the book. Geeze, I sound like a salesman, not a writer.

 

I had done the Artificiality podcast with Dave and Helen Edwards on November 19. Dave posted the link on January 19.

 

I did the AI, Government, and the Future podcast with Max Romanik on Jan 22. They had provided a set of questions that were a variation on the theme but presented some challenges. I spent some time drafting answers to the questions and torquing the answers to raise some issues that they did not. I anticipated that Max would work his way through the questions as presented to me and he did that for the first couple, but then he skipped the order and combined some questions phrased in another way. That threw me a little at first, but I quickly decided substantially to abandon my prepared answers and just listen to his queries and respond as best I could. A central theme was what, exactly, do we do to keep control of AI. I kept coming back to "its complicated, but…" more than I would have liked, but I think I was cogent. 

 

This podcast was done on Riverside that only runs on Chrome. I could not use the Zoom trick of shrinking the video box and sliding it up near my camera. I played with Riverside beforehand and found I could simply shrink the whole Chrome window and move it up to the top of my screen near the camera so I would, I hope, look as if I were looking at the camera. In action, however, I left my notes open on my desktop and referred to them. That probably drew my gaze aside. We'll see what the YouTube version looks like. I remembered to center my mic and to take my glasses off. They should post the links in about a week,

 

I've arranged a three-fer for early February: a podcast on February 5 with Brandon Zemp of BlockHash, on February 6 with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind, and with Dan Turchin of AI and the Future of Work on February 7.

 

I asked ChatGPT to "Give me a list of popular podcasts that focus on technological developments and their impact on society." I got 21 and added three more from my original book proposal. Chloé Hummel, my marketing contact, tried to contact them and found most were inactive or serving small audiences. I'll try to refine my ChatGPT prompt. Prometheus has an Instagram account. We'll try to turn up some influencers there. I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.

 

I made some arrangements to attend the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, do a book signing at a Barnes and Nobel in Fairfax, VA, and visit my son and his family there. Various personal things led me to call all that off.

 

When teaching my Future of Humanity course, I asked students to bring examples of advances in technology to class as part of our program to "Be Aware" that I still want to advocate and promote. I began to experiment with getting ChatGPT and Claude to compose Tech Advance posts to X and LinkedIn with hashtags. I had to play a little with the prompt and edit a tiny bit but got an X post at 280 characters with my Authors Guild url and some nice hashtags. I found Claude to be a bit flowery and have in practice mostly used the results from ChatGPT.

 

I spent some time moving notes I had made over the last 6 months to my Authors Guild site. I'm now converting those tidbits to posts on X and LinkedIn. I have it somewhat automated now. I had about a hundred items to go to catch up with my notes and have been doing one a day for the last month or so. I may drop X and/or use Bluesky.

 

I thought briefly about Tik Tok and got an account but then all hell broke loose. I'll hold off on that. Probably too much work, anyway.

 

I gave an inscribed copy of "Path" to my friend and colleague John Scalo who has influenced my thinking on so many things in so many ways over the years. I also gave an inscribed book to Kay Firth-Butterfield, an AI and technology expert whom I met through the Good Systems group on campus. We talked about getting together, but she is writing her own book with a deadline of the end of January, so I just mailed it.

 

The Provost had scheduled a reception for faculty authors on January 22, but we had a hard freeze (down to 23 F some nights) and the reception got postponed to February 5.

 

On January 23, I led a book discussion of "Path," a roughly monthly event organized by my friend and ex-student Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. We had an excellent lively discussion of machine consciousness and related issues. We had 42 people online, of whom 6 or 8 actively contributed to the discussion. Good fun. Kind things were said of the book, but I noted in the beginning that it is different to lead a discussion of your own book rather than being a fly on the wall in a discussion by others. I remarked that I wasn't terribly excited about the title chosen by my editor and found out later that was one critique among the participants. I'm sure they had other issues they were too polite to bring up. I wish they had.

 

I found a little time to work on my next major writing project, a biography of my father I informally call Eniwetok. He participated in and witnessed the first hydrogen bomb explosion. I'm about 2/3 done but discovered some old notes that give insight into his college days at Berkeley. Those have taken some time to organize and absorb.

 

 I'm scheduled to do a reading, Q&A, and book signing at our preeminent Austin independent bookstore, Book People, on January 29. I hope to see some of you there.

 

I messed up my most recently scheduled podcast with Supernatural Realm Radio on December 12. They had not originally specified a time zone, and I checked with them to make sure. Despite a clear statement in my master schedule that the session was scheduled for 6-8 pm CST, I had scattered various preliminary backup notes around the house saying 7-9 pm CST, and that got stuck in my head. I had a regular Thursday beer with a friend, one of my principal beta readers, Wayne Bowen, from 5 to 6 and was home and comfortably settled in by 6:30. As 7 rolled around, I finally realized with a shock what my error had been. I sent several frantic emails, but it was too late. As it turned out, they had only received a copy of The Path to Singularity that very day and had not had time to look at it. They were just as happy to reschedule. Still a wound to my sense of professionalism.

 

I had enjoyed my podcast interview with Don Murphy on December 7. He posted the results on December 10, but the result was a bit of a tangle. Don uses the PodMatch podcast service. In order to make the release work, he said I needed to confirm that I had done the interview on the PodMatch site. I could not figure out how to do that. After several emails with various people, it turned out that my publicist, Joanne McCall, had done the original scheduling, and she had the email on which the interview had to be confirmed. Don also said that I could establish my own account on PodMatch using his affiliate link. I tried that, but again got lost in some technical PodMatch space. I finally gave up.

 

I wanted to send copies of The Path to Singularity to my colleagues who had been kind enough to write jacket blurbs. Prometheus did not provide that service, and I wanted to sign and personalize them anyway. There is a USPS mode of "media mail" that is pretty reasonable for domestic mail, a little over 5 bucks, but it is a tad pricey to send books to Great Britain and Australia. Worth the price.

 

I've found there is substantial turnover in the book business. The original person in charge of production at Prometheus, Brianna Soubannarath, moved on in December and left some questions hanging, the structure of a royalty statement and how the Audible version of the book came to be. Jake Bonar is my new production person, and he answered those questions. Those rights were sold separately, and the company that bought them produced the audio version. Amazon then buys from them. I had no role in any of that.

 

After the flurry of November/December podcasts, I've turned my attention to other modes of distribution. I'll try to get some books stocked at the Visitors Center at McDonald Observatory. I have convinced both the University of Texas Library and the Austin City Library to stock some version.

 

An odd opportunity turned up. I got an email from a young woman who is a science writer for Popular Mechanics magazine. She said she was interested in doing a review of a preprint a colleague and I had posted last April about the correlation of Dark Matter and spontaneous human combustion. She belatedly realized the paper was a total spoof posted on the astrophysics preprint archive as an April Fools joke. She caught her own mistake before I could correct her, but I emailed her and tried to let her down gently. I mentioned The Path to Singularity as perhaps being of interest to Popular Mechanics readers, and she said she might consider that.

 

After my last post, I have had a very interesting exchange with nephew-in-law Alejandro who runs his own small import business in San Diego. Alejandro has seriously adopted ChatGPT and other large language model AIs in his business and personal use. He swears by their time-saving utility. I wanted to send some copies of The Path to Singularity to people in Congress with a technological bent and decided to try to use ChatGPT. I asked two version of ChatGPT, one on my mobile phone, one online, and online Claude from Anthropic for a list of congress people with an interest in technology and their office addresses. In a few seconds each, I got three slightly different, but overlapping lists. ChatGPT warned me to check office addresses because congress people change offices frequently. It was easy enough to check offices with a regular browser (although that took me about 20 minutes) but combing through a browser to figure out which of 435 representatives and 100 senators had technology interests would have taken me hours. I'm sold, but there is still a learning curve. I generated a collated list of candidates from the three lists. I probably should have asked ChatGPT to do that, but I did it by hand, and it took me a half hour. Prometheus is happy to send books to the 25 people who made the list.

 

I'll attend the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society near Washington DC January 13 – 16 and then stay with son Diek and family in Fairfax for a few days. I contacted several bookstores in the DC area with no response from most, but I'll do a book signing at the Barnes and Nobel in Fairfax, VA, on Sunday, January 19. I'm also scheduled to do a book signing at our preeminent Austin independent bookstore, Book People, on January 29.

 

I've had some tentative discussions with Neil deGrasse Tyson about appearing on his StarTalk podcast in NYC. Prometheus is keen on the idea. Neil asked whether Prometheus is prepared to do a second printing to accommodate a "Tyson hit." StarTalk is watched by several hundred thousand to a million people. Serious business! Several people involved in the game have suggested that I try to appear on Joe Rogan since he is right here in Austin. I don't weigh my odds highly, but I'm thinking about it. Book People did not want me to do another signing in the greater Austin area, but Neil says there is no such restriction in podcast space.

 

This was typed from my brain, with a little AI help from Grammerly.

 

Talk to you again in 2025!

As November rolled into December, things percolated along. I applied for a non-fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters for The Path to Singularity.

 

Impressively competitive books have come out recently. One was Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Nearer, an update of his 2005 The Singularity is Near that I used as a textbook for my future of humanity course. A book discussion group in which I participate associated with the Austin Forum on Science and Technology felt that it was a little dry, but Kurzweil is a god in the field and still holding to his prediction that Artificial General Intelligence (smarter than any human) and Artificial Super Intelligence (smarter than all humans collectively) will happen in 10 or 20 years. Another is Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. I'm in awe of his writing. This book is about the history and future of network connections. A third book is not exactly new, but relevant and interesting. It is called The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. It was first published in 2014 and republished in expanded form in 2018; very pertinent to the election of 2024. The basic premise is that the rise of the internet allowed "the public" to question "news" passed down from traditional elite-led news authorities. Gurri seems to ignore the value of the traditional curated, vetted, multiple-sourced journalism, but he has some interesting points to make about the roles of "the public" and various authorities.

 

My three-month contract with my publicist Joanne McCall came to an end. Joanne arranged most of my raft of podcasts. It won't be clear for some time, if ever, that I will earn enough to pay her fee, but it was a pleasure and adventure to work with her. I'll continue to work with my publicist at Prometheus, Chloé Hummel.

 

I've tried to track book sales through Amazon, but they only give rankings, and I don't quite know how to interpret being ranked 166,968. That number peaked around Thanksgiving and has trailed off. I'd be grateful for anyone who would log in to Amazon and leave a rating/comment. Chloé says she thinks Prometheus might have sold 1000 copies so far. That won't earn back my meager advance, never mind pay for Joanne. The first print run was 2500.

 

A podcast I had done earlier with Peter Scott was posted on December 2.

 

I'd previously done a pre-interview with Don Murphy for his Journey Through Nature and Science Podcast. I did the real thing with him on December 3, and he posted our conversation on December 10. He's a smart, thoughtful guy, and we had a nice chat. Many of the first podcasts I did were posted as audio only, but some, including Don's, will be released on YouTube, presumably as video. Most of you on this list have never seen me in public without my glasses, but I had decided that, drawing on the New Yorker cartoon "On the internet no one knows you're a dog," I would do the video podcasts without my glasses. I did that with Gad Saad. For this session with Don, I forgot and wore my glasses. I also forgot to position my mic directly in front of my mouth. So much for becoming a podcasting pro. As it turned out, Don only posted the audio of our conversation on his YouTube Channel.

 

Computers! You can't live with them, and you can't live without them. In the background during all this, I had a computer glitch. Around Thanksgiving, I found that the two-factor app DUO on my mobile phone had been deactivated. Among other things, that meant that I could not login to the university IT folks to submit a ticket requesting help. Catch 22! I could not find a phone number for the college IT on the university web site. I thought to call the college to get the number, but of course, they weren't answering phones over the holiday. This was not critical, but a nuisance, especially in regard to my use of Zoom. Several years ago, I stumbled into a convenient Zoom hack. It turns out that if you activate your university link to Zoom, it defeats the obnoxious university constraint of automatically logging one out of any university computer after a few minutes' disuse; not even time for a bathroom break! With this hack, I can leave my home computer on all day. Without my DUO app, I could not fire up my university Zoom account. The result was that I logged in a lot over the Thanksgiving weekend as the university software routinely logged me out. I managed to get the IT number from the college the next week and talked to a friendly woman in IT who re-activated DUO on my phone. 

 

I have a few more podcasts scheduled, but I am belatedly swinging my attention to book signings. I wanted to do one at Book People, our preeminent local Austin independent bookstore. I somehow thought it was appropriate to wait until the book was published on November 19. I contacted Michael McCarthy with whom I had sold some books on commission at Book People. He sent me the form to fill out to request a book signing. It was intimidating! It demanded that arrangements be made three months in advance and that the book signing be around the date of release, two weeks ago. I did the best I could and submitted the form, suggesting a signing event around the end of January. To my surprise and pleasure, I got a response from events manager, Laura Benac, about two hours later, accepting my proposal. I'm scheduled for a signing on January 29, 2025. Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum agreed to be my interlocutor. Details TBD.

 

I'm going to be in the DC area for a meeting and visiting family two weeks earlier. I've contacted several bookstores in the area. We'll see how that goes.

 

 

Bob Morris is a professional book reviewer of some repute. He wrote a terrific review of "Path," the first I've seen. He also posted it as a comment on the Amazon page on the book where he gave it 5 stars!

 

Morris entitles his review A thoughtful analysis of the potentialities and perils of exponential growth and says:

 

"As I began to read this book, I was again reminded of Vernon (sic) Vinge's essay, "The Coming of Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" (1993), in which he suggests that "the acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur)."

 

"More recently, in The Singularity Is Near (2005), Ray Kurzweil predicts that "convergent, exponential technological trends" are "leading to a transition that would be 'utterly transformative' for humanity." I was reminded of that prediction as I began to read the sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer, in which Ray Kurzweil explains how and why humanity's "Millenia-long march toward the Singularity has become a sprint. In the introduction to The Singularity Is Near, I wrote that we were then 'in the early stages of this transition.' Now we are entering its culmination. That book was about glimpsing a distant horizon — this one is about the last miles along the path to reach it."

 

"All of this material is relevant to the remarks that follow as I attempt to explain why I think so highly of J. Craig Wheeler and his wide and deep experience. He has much of value to share about various "revolutionary" technologies that have made the business world today more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall.

 

"In the first chapter, Wheeler observes that, 'In the past, humans have always, with some turmoil, adapted to new technologies. Technology is now racing ahead under its own momentum. Humans and human organizations tend to lag. Things are currently changing so rapidly that we may not be able to adapt. This is a qualitatively new phase in human existence.'

 

"'The biggest wave can start as a gentle swell in mid-ocean. Near shore, the wave crests and breaks. Picture a surfer on a gigantic wave. With the right timing and balance, the surfer can ride the wave and stay on top. The alternative is being tumbled within the surging surf or in the worst case pounded onto a coral reef. As we try to ride our technological wave, the tumbling may be unavoidable. We must avoid slamming into the reef.'"

 

Wow!  I'm honored to be mentioned in the same context as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. Morris quotes some turns of phrase from the book that I rather liked myself. I especially had to laugh out loud when I saw he quoted the last line of the book, "For every 'That hasn't happened,' there is a 'yet.'" My agent Regina Ryan and I wrestled over that short sentence and how to punctuate it for weeks. Thanks for keeping my feet to the fire, Regina!

 

 My publicist, Joanne McCall, asked whether Morris' Amazon review, given under the rating link, can be moved to the Amazon editorial section. She argues that since he's a legitimate reviewer, it would carry more weight there. Chloé Hummel of Prometheus is looking into that.

Sunday evening, November 24, 7:00 PM my time, I did a podcast with Dave Monk, The Friendly Futurist, from Perth, Australia. We had done a pre-interview chat over Zoom earlier. For the real thing, the session was hosted on Riverside, an online recording studio. His mail had said it ran on Chrome, but I thought what the heck and planned to use Firefox. When I tried to hit his link to Riverside, it didn't just recommend Chrome but demanded it; ten minutes before the program started. Fortunately, I have Chrome on my iMac and was able to scramble and get Riverside up and running, talking to my mic and camera, just in time.

 

Dave had provided me with a series of 11 questions. I wrote out answers that I could use or paraphrase, and we basically worked our way down the list. Took about a half hour. He said the link will post in February or March, 2025. I kidded him that the exponential technological world would be a lot different by then.

 

I then had dinner and watched Tracker (pre-recorded) with my wife. I took a nap at 10 PM and got up about 11 to rouse, collect my thoughts, and launch into Coast to Coast AM from midnight my time to 2 am. I walked around under the starry Texas sky for a few minutes admiring my favorite star, Betelgeuse, to clear my head, then washed my face in cool water.

 

Once again, I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

 

I was sitting with mobile phone and computer by 11:30 waiting for the midnight start of Coast to Coast, musing what I would say when, a few minutes before start time, I realized that I had my phone set on "do not disturb after 11 PM" except for a few family phone numbers. I could not figure out how to undo that setting in the moment, but had the Zoom backup, and that seemed to work fine. I Got connected with minutes to spare, having caused mild panic at Coast to Coast and with my publicist, Joanne McCall, all of whom had been trying to call and text me.

 

The structure was a little different than I expected. Fully half the two hours was filled with commercials. While there were words introducing me a little after midnight, we did not start the interview until about 12:15 AM. In the meantime, I was hearing snippets from previous interviews. The radio audience was apparently hearing commercials and news bulletins. We then talked for about 15 minutes and at about 12:28, the interviewer, George Knapp (not the regular host George Noory), asked me to summarize the impact of exponential growth in the 1 minute we had before the break. I launched into it, but was not quite concise enough. He cut me off in mid-sentence at 12:29, and they went to break. We returned to the topic after the break. 

 

The break lasted about 15 minutes, while I listened to the same snippets of old broadcasts I'd heard before. We started again at about 12:45 and went to a little before 1:00 AM, when we took another break. This time, I understood the rhythm, and the break went smoothly. Another 15 minutes during which I walked around my study. We chatted from 1:15 to about 1:30 then took another long break, during which I read some of my backed-up email. In the final 15 minute segment, he took callers, and I addressed questions from four people, more-or-less supporting their issues and pushing back a little on the last, who was reasonable, but made some assertions about the special phase we are in and extraterrestrial life that I could not support.

 

The upshot was that effectively I did another hour-long interview, more or less following the structure of the book. We ended up talking briefly about billionaires in space. Knapp said that was as far as he got reading the book, and that he would like to have me back. I said sure.

 

The Coast to Coast web site gave a link to my University of Texas web page where my email address is posted. I got a couple of slightly wacky emails offering opinions that didn't seem to require a response, but I'll try to answer ones that do. 

  

I was in bed by 3:00 AM, up at 9:30, feeling pretty perky. Lots to do, reviewing, consolidating, planning. 

 

I was not sure about the podcast on Thursday, November 21, a couple of days after release day, but it went well, I think. This was with Guy Powell on Backstory on Marketing and AI, Powell has written books on marketing, but also one on the Shroud of Turin. I listened to his most recent podcast and was pleased to hear him and his guest talking about the broader issues of AI, albeit in a marketing context. They talked about the ethics and other nuances of the use of AI in marketing. I was thus in a position to answer his leading question, "what is your backstory?" and say some complimentary things about sensitivities some people, he and his guest, were bringing to the issue of marketing and AI. I told him I had not thought about those specific issues very much, despite, ironically, being on his podcast to market my book. Our subsequent conversation was rather wide ranging, touching on but not concentrating on marketing. I managed to end up with a plug for the book and a summary of the urgency of our situation, the need to be aware, and the importance of voting. We finished up in about 45 minutes, but he had enough interest that he wanted to keep chatting for another 15 minutes after he turned off the recording. He also worked in a deep and interesting question about whether a planet would still have inertia if the Universe expands until all the stars are infinitely far away. I could not answer it specifically but had some pertinent thoughts. He will send out a teaser in a few days and the full podcast in a couple of weeks.

 

I did another podcast on Friday at noon, Future Tech and Foresight with Marc Verbenkov, a young Canadian man working from near Vancouver. I'd listened to his previous podcast so knew his first question would be "how did you get involved?" but he told me that anyway before he started recording. I think his release will be audio only, but he Zoom-recorded the video as well, so I used my trick of talking to a small image up near my camera. Can't do that with Google's version. I learned some new terms listening to Marc's previous podcast with Mark Weinstein, author of Restoring our Sanity Online: Conscious Capitalism and Freemium, a business model that provides some services free but charges for others, a substitute for "take all your data with no recompense" sites. I also learned that Web 2.0 is synonymous in some quarters with Surveillance Capitalism. I enjoyed my chat with Marc. We were very much on the same wavelength on many topics, including perhaps the most in-depth discussion I have yet had of brain-computer interfaces and the promise and perils that may await there. It was not exactly my place as a guest to praise Marc for alerting his audience to the issues we face, but I did so. Programs like his are a critical part of the message I am trying to bring of first being aware. Marc said his podcast reaches from 1000 to 10,000 people, depending on the topic. 

 

I had a break on Saturday, then planned to do a podcast with Dave Monk from Perth at 7 PM on Sunday and the Coast to Coast AM radio program from midnight to 2 AM. Monk has scheduled only a half hour, about as long as our pre-interview, and has provided some questions, all pretty straightforward. Coast to Coast will call and talk on my mobile phone with Zoom backup. I have emergency phone numbers of producers. I submitted a release, with some grumbling about rights being passed to others, unnamed. The main challenge will be avoiding mind fog at that hour.

 

On release day, Tuesday, November 19, I did  the Artificiality podcast with Dave and Helen Edwards in the afternoon. We spent about an hour chatting. It's a conversational format, strictly audio, but they did have some questions in mind. Dave started by telling me the first question would be what inspired the book, and I told him I knew that because I had listened to part of one of his podcasts and that was the first question. Turns out they don't have a stock final question. I later realized that I missed the chance to give my final summary and comments on the availability of the book. They referred to "your book," and I don't think ever mentioned the title. Shoot. I trust they will do so when the podcast drops. They appreciated that the book covered a lot of ground and tried to tie all the pieces together. They asked about my astronomer's perspective. They were curious about how my students' perspective changed during the course and my change in perspective while writing the book. We talked quite a bit about the significance of exponential change. Two smart, thinking people. They were fun to talk to. The link is not yet released.

 

That evening, I participated in a live event, effectively my launch party. The event is called Astronomy on Tap, AoTATX. It was started a decade ago by my postdoc at the time, Jeff Silverman, so we also were celebrating the tenth anniversary of the institution. It has floated around Austin in various pubs, this one in the Celis brew pub in north Austin. My son, Rob, came along to drive (took us an hour to get there in 5 o'clock traffic, 20 minutes back in the late evening), help me hand out "Path" business cards, and monitor my performance. I also scattered cards on tables around the area.

 

All the AoT sessions I have attended before were in closed, packed rooms. This one was in their outdoor beer garden despite the encroaching chill, so the audience was spread in tables and chairs around the grounds. I had not done a venue like this before nor even given any Powerpoint presentation since before I retired five years ago. 

 

There was a stage at one end of the area, and volunteers from the astronomy department, current and past postdocs and graduate students, rigged up a laptop, sound system, projection screen, and video recorder, more sophisticated than when the event started ten years ago. I had prepared the talk over the course of the previous week and got help downloading a couple of movies. I also got help setting up a neat little movie on the exponential growth of Covid so it would show in three stages as the growth proceeded, with the scale of the vertical axis expanding to accommodate the huge growth over about a month. This showed that the doubling time was nearly constant, but that the apparent location of the "knee" of the curve shifted as the vertical scale shifted, illustrating the artificiality of the location of the "knee." It was a great illustration of Chapter 2 of the book.

 

The mics were on stands, the projection screen nearby on the stage only slightly to the right and behind the speaker, and a light arranged to shine on the speaker, so the audience could see the speaker, but the speaker was blinded and could not see the audience. The mics could be removed from the stands and handheld, but the computer was controlled by a clicker that also had a laser to point at the screen and that already required some attention, so I left the mic on the stand. The notion was that the Covid movie would play a segment then pause. I was to push the clicker to move to the next phase and another pause. Then another click would run it to the end. Worked fine in rehearsal. 

 

What I had not rehearsed was standing at the mic, blinded by the light, and craning to see and point the laser at the screen. Things seemed to go fine at first, but when I got to the Covid movie, I had a major glitch. The first segment ran fine to the pause. Then rather than just running the next two phases, the presentation jumped to the end of my slide deck. The guys monitoring the laptop just off the stage managed to restore the movie and signaled me it was not my fault. Then it happened again, at least twice more. In hindsight one of them guessed I was pressing the clicker too long, causing the skipping of the pauses and the jumping to the end of the talk. Eventually I got past that, sort of saying what I wanted to about the fixed doubling time and the artificial shifting of the location of the "knee," but it was a bit of a mess. 

 

Rob has worked in both video and sound and is especially sensitive to the latter. He has helped me with my mic for my home podcasts. In this case, in our post-talk debrief, he pointed out that, unlike the postdoc speaker who preceded me, I would turn my mouth away from the mic when I turned to look at the screen and point the laser. The trick is to lean to the left so you can face both the mic and the screen on the right. I flubbed it, so the sound was irregular. During the Q&A, I tended to hold my hand in front of my face to block the light so I could see the speaker, but that meant I was also holding my hand between me and the mic, muffling the sound again. 

 

Despite these glitches, I think the talk went basically OK. I got some good questions, and talked to a bunch of people afterward, including one young woman who took my Future of Humanity class in 2017. We handed out a dozen or so "Path" cards and sold at least two books. One young man was keen to know when I would have a book signing so he could get an autographed copy. Good question.

 

The next day, I attended a lunch for distinguished teachers, handed out a couple more cards, apparently sold two books (my academic friends were especially interested in the Kindle version), then scattered a few cards in the administration building, the student union, and the local credit union where I had business.

 

We are launched. I have four more podcasts in the next few days. Very curious to see how sales go.

With the release date for The Path to Singularity looming on November 19, November was VERY busy with podcasts and other publicity enterprises.

 

I talked to podcaster Peter Scott of AI and You at 11 AM on November 6 for about 40 minutes. The podcast should be released around the time of the book release. The mic was fine, but he caught me out on a couple of issues. He first asked about high reliability organizations, the only person to do so, so far. I think I handled that OK even though it was not fresh on my mind. He asked if I were still teaching, how would I use Generative AI? I'd given no thought to that hypothetical and bumbled my way through an answer. We talked a bit about whether homo sapiens would exist in the far (or near) future. He was interested in AI and mental telepathy, asking how to control telepathy. A huge and complex issue of course, and I said we need all the stakeholders involved. He asked whether research universities are the best vehicle for research/control of humans merging with machines? I said they should certainly be involved, and relevant courses taught, along with other stakeholders. He did not ask about the election, so I interpolated remarks on Biden policy and Trump's lack of policy. He didn't touch on issues of climate change or curing death. Toward the end, he asked about themes in the book, and I mentioned the nature and significance of exponential change as a challenge to society and how AI would be pervasive. He was impressed with the Tyson foreword. When we were done, he asked how many podcasts I had done and how many yet to do, with a hint that I could be sharper. I asked him for advice, and he suggested I be ready with more one-liner responses. I did have some in mind, but that is iffy for unexpected questions. I've now made a list of topics and responses. Another place I was a little caught out was the very end when Peter asked me "what do you want to say about the book?" as a wrap up statement. Everyone has or is going to ask something like that, and I did not have a concise answer. I'm a little more comfortable talking about the subjects of the book than in explicitly selling it (although I sold two copies to neighbors this afternoon). What I answered was that the book will be broadly available, that I was myself partial to patronizing independent bookstores. I said something about hoping to make people aware of the issues. I did not have a snappy sales pitch. My publicity team helped me compose a concise wrap up. Joanne McCall said, "It should be something you really want the audience to walk away with. Or you can use that moment to introduce something new and important that you have held back until then," and "Say the title rather than "the book." Chloe Hummel of Prometheus said, "it's important to say more than just Amazon."

 

I did a 45-minute video and podcast chat, The Saad Truth with Dr. Gad Saad, on Monday, November 11 at 1 PM. I'd made a point of listening to a podcast he had done earlier with British physicist David Deutsch. Gad veered into some personal issues and then back to the book, but it went smoothly, I think. This was the first time I did a Zoom interview intended to show on YouTube. It quickly became clear that looking at the camera at the top of the computer screen wouldn't work; the urge to look at the speaker on the split screen was too strong. But then I would occasionally look at my image on the right and then back to Gad's on the left, so my eyes would dance around. When we were done, I asked him about that, and he said people understand, and that I shouldn't worry about it. I think I should avoid the dancing and just look at the speaker.

 

On November 13, I did a pre-podcast interview with Don Murphy of The Journey Through Nature and Science Podcast at noon. We hit it off and had a great chat for 45 minutes, nearly as long as the podcast will be. He suggested he might want to have me on again to talk about astrophysics. We'll see. The real podcast is scheduled for Tuesday, December 3, at Noon, CST.

 

For this interview, I worked out a solution to the dancing eyes problem. If you click the middle, yellow, save button on the upper left of a Zoom screen, it shrinks the screen to a (large) postage stamp size, but with the image intact so you can see the person to whom you are talking. I then dragged that tiny image up to the top of my computer screen, so it was about an inch below the camera. That way I am looking very nearly at the camera while registering the facial and body language of the other person. I didn't tell Don what I was doing until the end. It turns out he is transitioning from doing pure audio recordings to videos that can be posted on YouTube, and he was grateful that I was concerned about the issue and had found a solution. He thought I was looking at him (the camera) through the whole chat. This also works when several people are on a Zoom chat. The shrunken image will show just one image, the speaker.

 

We are in talks to do a podcast KAJ Masterclass LIVE, with Khudania Ajay. This one is hosted in India, but broadcast to 80 countries, a big deal. They want a release signed. I was a little uncomfortable that they wanted my "work for hire" to be available to them to create unlimited derivatives (what, a Broadway musical?). I consulted attorney Michael Gross at the Authors Guild who gave me several good suggestions. I asked for at least consulting rights on the derivatives and also that my material not be used to train AI without my permission. That was on November 11. I have not heard back from them.

 

The week of November 11 I had to be several places at once at the same time!

 

Thursday through Sunday, I participated in the Steven Weinberg Memorial Symposium to celebrate the life and career of Steve Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner, one of the preeminent physicists of the last 50 years, author of The First Three Minutes, and many other popular and technical books. The room was packed with famous physicists. I felt like asking for autographs. Instead, I judiciously handed out copies of Rob's business card advertising "Path." On Friday, I attended the symposium, a memorial service for another less famous colleague, and a BBQ dinner with the physicists that featured a private show of western swing music with Ray Benson, lead of Asleep at the Wheel. Benson is only slightly less famous locally than Willie Nelson with whom he tours. Terrific show.

 

Things got a tad more complicated on the weekend. The Symposium continued, but there was also the Texas Book Festival started by Laura Bush when her husband was Governor of Texas. It draws hundreds of authors and thousands of people at the capitol grounds just a few blocks south of the campus. Chloé Hummel of Prometheus applied on my behalf, but we weren't picked up, surely in part because the release was not until after this year's festival. Next year! The festival is spread out over many blocks, so the logistics of attending are challenging even if that is the only thing one is trying to do. I tried to do both the symposium and the festival on Saturday, jumping back and forth and doing neither proper justice. On Sunday, I went to the physics symposium at 10 AM, then drove quickly down to the capitol to attend a presentation by British author Andrew Smith led by the CEO of Indeed, Chris Hyams. I handed both of them a "Path" card and gave a handful to nearby audience members. Before the talk began, I had a flash of insight and put several cards on a table at the rear of the room. They were all gone by the end of the session. People grabbing freebies.

 

I dashed back to the symposium for the wrap-up lunch, then back to the capitol for a presentation by locally famous historian and biographer H. W. Brands who taught Rob in school many years ago. He gave a great presentation on his latest book describing the clash between interventionist FDR and the isolationist Charles Lindberg. I gave Brands a card. My current project is a biography, and we agreed to get together at some point to talk about the art of biography writing. 

 

Physics Today staff member Toni Feder, who it turns out lives in Austin, was covering the Weinberg Symposium. I gave her a "Path" card, but she informed me that Physics Today no longer does book reviews. Shoot.

 

I was stood up for a podcast with Donna Mitchell of Pivoting to Web3 the previous Wednesday, November 13, and by Bob Bain of Dark Matter AM on Tuesday November 18. Don't know what happened with either. Some failure of communication.

 

Next up, on Release Day, I have a podcast with Dave Edwards of Artificiality at 2 PM, a live Austin on Tap presentation at 7:30 that evening at a local brewery, and three more podcasts later in the week. 

 

May book sales blossom!