After all this time, 3+ months since the book release, I had still received only one book review on Amazon, the terrific one from Robert Morris. It slowly sank into me that I need to be more proactive, and I'm thinking of how to do that.
On 2/27/25, I briefly encountered an engineer in the department whom I don't know all that well, but who had attended my Book People book signing. He said he had read The Path to Singularity and thanked me for writing it. I told him I could not think of a more deeply touching thing to say to an author. I worked up my courage and asked him if he would write an Amazon review. He did. Here it is, under a surname:
5.0 out of 5 stars More newsworthy than any headline you are reading right now
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2025
Someone has to speak on the behalf of our species and in this case it is a seasoned scientist who happens to be a professor of astrophysics. In a topic so broad that no single technical expert or journalist can hold authority over the field, it makes perfect sense that Professor Wheeler has emerged as an author on this important topic. A university keeps a fresh supply of ideas flowing through it in a broad array of topics and he is mentor and educator to thousands of students and has trained dozens of PhD researchers in the martial art of critical thinking in an exceedingly complicated discipline (astronomy and physics) that has been part of an exponential burst of knowledge about the cosmos that we live in. This foundation has provided him the perspective to understand in a very broad sense where we find ourselves in history, and such people never stop learning, or teaching, as long as they have lungs to fill and air to breathe. I encourage you to take the time to read this work cover to cover and keep a thumb in the extensive list of references supporting his thesis. We have a rocket strapped to our backs and it is on full throttle. It makes a difference in each of our lives personally, and as humans, to understand what is happening and how to do our small part in steering our trajectory. I'm grateful that someone with credibility and insight has taken the time and energy required to create this work. I encourage you to take advantage of it.
Me: "Wow!"
My agent, Regina Ryan, said such reviews are critical and that the place to start is a plea to friends and family. It's a long book and takes a while to read, but please consider this my plea write a review for Amazon if you are so moved. I'll try to pursue more of these in other ways.
I don't have an Instagram account, but my publicist, Chloé Hummel, had pointed out that Prometheus has its own Instagram account. I used ChatGPT to search for people interested in technology who post on Instagram and got a dozen people. Chloé checked them out and most were defunct or with a very small number of followers. I tried again with the restrictions that the accounts were active and had more than 10,000 followers. I got three suggestions. Chloé reached out to two who seemed especially likely, and Carolina Gelen, with 1.4 million followers, responded to her pitch by requesting a review copy! Still waiting to see if anything concrete emerges from that. Rumor is that one can't expect more than about 1% of followers to respond with a purchase, but that would be 14,000 books. In my dreams!
The Austin American Statesman has a relatively new technology reporter, working just the last few months, I think. She writes about exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for in my Tech Advance posts. Chloé had written to her some time ago and sent her a press kit. No response. I decided to write her myself, since her Statesman account seeks email input. I sent her a fan email telling her how much I enjoyed her articles, suggesting she might get involved with the Austin Forum on Technology and Society, and offering to talk with her if she were interested. Same response. Nada.
I had realized some time ago that the MIT (my alma mater) Technology Review does small book reviews and also lists books by MIT authors. I wrote to them soliciting a mention. The latest edition, March/April, does not have a review, but it does include a short mention of the book in their MIT author list. Yay!
This year is my 60th MIT reunion. Several of us from my fraternity (Alpha Tau Omega, a long complex story in itself) got together in Boston for our 50th. This year one of those guys emailed to point out that our 60th was coming up, and that MIT was hosting an online digital memory book. He wrote a brief summary of his life as a prominent nuclear engineer who had worked with Hyman Rickover that he had posted on the MIT site. Another, a retired optical engineer had recently lost his wife and emailed a brief update. A third who had been Obama's Science Advisor, and winner of a MacArthur Award and a group Nobel Prize and wrote a blurb for The Path to Singularity had posted online, but did not mail our group. I wrote a quick summary of my life in the last decade to our group, then sent a somewhat more elaborate post of my life since MIT to the memory book. And yes, I took the opportunity to mention The Path to Singularity in each.
I made a list of people who might be sent book copies in my original book proposal for The Path to Singularity. I am belatedly trying to follow up on that. I had asked Stuart Russell and Melanie Mitchell, both famous computer scientists about whom I'd written in the book, to write jacket blurbs for the book, and both politely declined at the time. On March 4, I wrote them again offering a copy of the book and seeking a mailing address. Both responded warmly, and Chloé sent copies, to Russell where he is on sabbatical in England and to Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute.
I also have a list of over 100 businesses that I mentioned in the book. I had asked ChatGPT for contact information and got it, but rather generic addresses that are unlikely to encourage a response or to make a mass purchase for the company. I singled out one person, Tom Markusic, of Firefly Aerospace that builds rockets in Cedar Park, a suburb of Austin. Firefly just landed the first successful (it didn't tilt over) commercial lander on the Moon. I'd heard Tom give a fascinating talk some time ago at the Austin Forum and wrote about him in the book. His Firefly email address was defunct, but I found him on LinkedIn, and he accepted my contact request. I asked for a mailing address for the book, but so far have not had a response. Ninety-nine businesses to go.
I applied for the Texas Book Festival that will happen next November, but have yet to hear from them. Chloé applied on my behalf for SpringCon 2025! that convenes book sellers from the western United States in San Antonio in mid-April. They invited me to give a short spiel about The Path to Singularity at a lunchtime meeting and to sign books afterward. Prometheus will pay the $700 entry fee. I'll probably try to make it a day trip.
On 3/4/25, I went to the evening get together of the Austin Forum that comprised a panel of three people addressing the topic of Being a Human Worker in 2030. I've been going to these sessions for several years, and this was one of the most interesting yet. I'm afraid I didn't clearly hear everything the panelists said, but the sense of concern, even anxiety, in the room was palpable, especially in the audience questions posted on Slack and in the informal discussion after. There was also some fresh, creative thinking about how we get through the AI-induced turmoil to come. I found I was not the only person wondering whether we need a new form of economics to supplant our current capitalistic model. I'm no Marxist, but I think things are going to change a lot with AI encroaching and populations stagnating or shrinking. The whole session left me with a lot to think about.
On Thursday, 3/6/25, I went to a small lunch of members of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. We talked about our personal and academic uses of AI and university political gossip: presidents out, presidents in, provosts out, provosts, deans out, deans in. I then went to a talk at a robotics conference that had been going on all week and tried to track down a couple of local roboticists whom I had written about and wanted to give a book. Back in the department, I had a very nice chat with the engineer who had written that Amazon review. Finally, I went for my regular Thursday 5 o'clock beer with my beta reader.
I'm not bored. Please write a review.