Amazingly, to me, it has been a year and eight months since that last blog post. I have not been asleep. A lot has gone on and adding to the blog was just not the highest priority.
In Fall of 2022, my agent, Regina Ryan, began sending out the proposal and faced some resistance. A common theme was "why publish on book on AI when the author is not an expert on AI?" I think my book is about more, but you have to face the world as it is. I tried submitting a couple of opinion pieces to the New York Times to garner attention. No luck. We kept revising the proposal. By November Regina decided to halt her sending out the proposal for the season and pick it up again in the spring. I rearranged the order of the chapters putting those on biological issues, including the evolution of humankind, in one group later in the book.
Looking back, one huge disruption was the announcement of Open AI's LLM ChatGPT in November of 2022. I'm trying to publish a book on the technological future of humanity and a revolution just occurred in the digital aspect of all that! Is my book now too late? I had intended it to be a primer. My response was to think (hope!) that with all the attention on ChatGPT, a significant piece of the world would appreciate a book that helped to explain what was going on and that a primer was just the thing. Of course, I had to go through the book and add some description of ChatGPT and its progeny.
In the meantime, Regina and I were discussing the structure of the book. She had always had an issue with the first chapter that was, frankly, somewhat pedantic. It was a remnant of the first lecture i gave in my class in 2013 outlining the astronomical background that lead us to today. That was relevant material, but it better belonged elsewhere in the book. I finally threw out that chapter and wrote a new one giving it a more "hair on fire" aspect suggesting how close we might actually be to development of an artificial general intelligence, designer babies, and mind-probing.
In spring of 2023, Regina and I continued to wrestle with how to revise the book and proposal in the new world of ChatGPT. We worked with the title "Wild Ride Ahead: The Future of Humanity and Technology." The New York Times began writing essentially daily articles on AI. I checked that ChatGPT and others did not seem to have absorbed the full texts of my novels. They did seem to have digested online commentary about them. Otherwise, I have not used LLMs. I signed the letter calling for a hiatus on AI LLM work, knowing the letter was pointless. Regina and I debated the last sentence of the book. I ended up with a judicious use of quotation marks to enunciate what I was trying to say. We settled on a revised proposal in May 2023 and Regina began sending it out. She got some more declines. Finally, on June 29, she got a positive response from Jonathan Kurtz at Prometheus books. I enjoy the irony of publishing a book about the new era of promethean developments in technology with a publisher of the same name. We rapidly decided that we would sign with Prometheus despite a somewhat lean advance. That began a whole new phase of hurry up and wait as contracts were interated and signed and the production process lumbered into action. I submitted my draft on October 20, 2023. I heard nothing until December 12 when it was summarily accepted. The title was changed to "The Path to Singularity: How Technology Will Challenge the Future of Humanity." I can work with that. A cover was designed. I reviewed the copyedited version in April, 2024. The book is scheduled for release in November 2024. Pre-orders available now.
I had known Neil Tyson since he was in graduate school here at the University of Texas. I watched with delight and amazement as he became Neil DeGrasse Tyson through talent, hard work, and his natural charisma. I had not been in touch with him for a long time, but in August 2022, I succumbed to pressure from Regina to see if he would write a foreward to the book. To my pleasant surprise, he graciously agreed. After the sale to Prometheus, he carefully read the whole book in detail and sent insightful comments on sentence structure, punctuation, and the functioning of the publishing business. Just before the new year, he sent the text of his foreword. He captured exactly the spirit of why a scientist, and especially an astrophysicist, is entitled to write on topics of general interest beyond their specific technical expertise. This was the heart of the discussion I had had with Regina for two years.
Throughout this interval, I continued to fiddle with this website. There is no question that Google and other search engines know about it, but it does not come up in a generic search on my name. Not enough traffic, I guess. I don't know what to do to imporove the situation. I have to become an expert in search engine optimization when I would rather be writing.
I'm looking forward to the publication of the book, but feeling some trepidation about marketing and publicizing that needs to be done before then.
Meanwhile, I'm about 2/3 through my dad's biography. I need to get back to that.