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.