J. Craig Wheeler

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.

 

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.