J. Craig Wheeler

For a while in May I contemplated making a serious run at soliciting keynote speaking opportunities. My agent, Regina Ryan, and my independent publicist, Joanne McCall, both pointed out that many authors make their real income in that way, not from book sales. A woman at an Austin Forum on Science and Society meeting pointed out that doing keynotes is a "real job." I ended up voting with my body. I turned back to writing on my father's biography. It's always been writing that centers me. Still, if another keynote opportunity fell into my lap, I would pursue it. Just saying.

On May 7, I attended a dinner meeting of the Austin Forum Board, of which I am a lowly member. I fell into an interesting conversation with William Fitzgerald and Stephanie Scales of Bárd, a technical writing consulting company. They are trying to compile a catalog of human intelligence which they have provisionally titled "Human Documentation." At a previous board meeting, I had teased William by saying that Human Documentation was a rather meh title. I rashly promised to come up with a better one. At this dinner, William teased me back, pointing out that I had not done so. A long discussion ensued.

That night, I awoke in the middle of the night with various thoughts racing through my sleep-addled brain. I thought that a catalog of human intelligence does not capture the breadth and depth of the topic. In pondering this, it seemed to me that Homo sapiens are a way point, not the end of human intelligence. One can consider where and how human intelligence will go in the future, by pure biological evolution or by melding with machines. It roiled in my head that a while a catalog of human intelligence is not an infinitesimal point, it is a very small dot in the continuum of intelligence that begins with stromatolites, bacteria, and continues to plants, trees, animals, humans in the past and present and humans beyond in the future, other biological intelligence, extraterrestrial of all sorts, biomarkers less intelligent than us but also the possibility of hugely advanced biological intelligence and biological/machine melds. How, my sleepy mind asked, can one establish clear boundaries between human and "other" intelligence. What is the difference between machine ASI and biological ASI? That led me to sleepily ponder the question of the meaning of human. Human as opposed to what? "Inhuman" does not intrinsically mean evil but could encompass alien as well as machine. I also found myself thinking about the relationship between "intelligence" and "creativity." Creativity seems to involve thinking things that have never been thought before, but of course much creativity involves extrapolating things that have been thought or done before. How, I asked myself, do you encompass art in the context of intelligence? A popular exercise is to think of things that humans do that machines cannot, an increasingly small set. Machine thinking may involve things that no human can or has done. Already we have machines that can strategize in a manner that no human has or can do. Prime examples are the products of DeepMind like AlphaGo Zero or AlphaFold. I fuzzily concluded that the dimensions of intelligence are huge, less than, comparable to, or greater than current human intelligence, and, that there is diversity even among humans. I found myself conflating intelligence, thinking, and creativity, never mind consciousness.

What a jumble.

I wrote a summary of this sleep infested core dump to William and Stephanie the next day. Who knows what they will make of it? What I did not do was come up with a better name than "Human Documentation."

On May 19, I finally formally registered my novels, The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending and The Path to Singularity with Created by Humans. Created by Humans is an organization that promises to handle licensing that ensures that some sort of royalty is paid by firms that use an author's work to train their AI LLM models. I don't know whether this will work or not, but it seemed a useful experiment. I had vetted the notion of registering with Created by Humans with Regina Ryan. The registration process required some to-ing and fro-ing by email, but I got it done.

On May 29, I participated in another Austin Forum book discussion, this time on Reid Hoffman's new book, Superagency. Hoffman is a tech titan who founded LinkedIn. He has an optimistic view of what AI will do for humanity, as long as we avoid all the existential threats.

I spent most of my writing time in May working on father's biography. I discovered a bunch of correspondence dating back to the mid 1920's and am trying to incorporate that into what I've already written of that era up into the 1950's when he witnessed the first hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike. One challenge has been the correspondence from my beloved Grandmother Wheeler, Vernie. Vernie had the charming but frustrating habit of dating her letters with just the day of the week. A typical entry would be "Sat. P.M." I engaged in considerable detective work using other correspondence and the text and context of her mail to see where it fit chronologically. One letter was sent on a Tuesday after she returned from voting. I checked the calendar. Aha! Elections always happen on Tuesdays in November, and I deduced we were talking about midterm elections on November 2, 1942. I went on to other things, but this rattled around in my head. There were some things that didn't quite fit. Finally, I went back and realized that she was talking about Tuesday November 2, 1936. I'd been off by six years.

I'm posting examples of technology advances every weekday on X and LinkedIn, my quest to document the exponential growth of technology. Spoiler alert. It's still growing.

The last week of April was packed with various activities.

Chloé Hummel, my publicist at Prometheus/Global Pequot, emailed that she was moving on, as ambitious young women in the book business are wont to do. I enjoyed working with her and wish her luck. We were just starting a project to try to promote bulk sales to companies. I waited a decent interval to see if Prometheus would provide a new publicist, then wrote my editor. No response. After a month, I wrote to my only other contact, a fellow in productions. He did not know the situation but linked in a marketing director. It has been another couple of weeks. No response from anyone. My book is six months old, there is a new season, I'm being dropped.

I got a wonderful note from Neil DeGrasse Tyson saying that I had a standing invitation to be on his podcast, Star Talk, if I were sometime in New York. I replied that I would get myself there if we could line up a time. I'm awaiting that development.

Before I retired, I was a member of The University of Texas at Austin Academy of Distinguished Teachers. I still attend their weekly conversational lunches when I can. The Academy sponsors a program called Reading Roundup wherein faculty meet with incoming freshmen just before the start of their first term to discuss a book chosen by the Academy member. The seeds of The Path to Singularity were planted in such a get together, as described in the preface. I stopped doing Reading Roundup when I retired, but when I got the invitation to Reading Roundup this year, I realized that it would be great fun to talk about The Path to Singularity, so I signed up to do so in the fall. I'll report on that in a future post.

In an interesting surprise, I received an email from Juan Serinyà, Chief Technology Officer of Tory Technologies, a Houston company that writes control room management software, primarily for the petroleum business, with clients in the US, Brazil, Columbia and elsewhere. Juan has Catalonian roots, was trained in Venezuela, and has been in US for 30 years. He was in Austin for a conference and ran across The Path to Singularity in our independent bookstore, Book People, a remnant of my doing a book signing there. Juan said he was interested in the topics of my book and wondered if I might be willing to give a keynote address at his client meeting in August. Hey! Is the Pope Italian? Despite the prospect of Houston in August, I replied with an enthusiastic yes. He asked about my fee. I have never done such a thing but recognizing that while Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a friend of mine, I'm no Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I named a number that seemed neither embarrassingly small, nor overambitious. Juan said, "we can handle that." I should have asked for more. We've signed a contract that spells out what Juan would like to hear me talk about and that is exactly what I would like to say. They will pay my expenses and agreed to cover the cost of a rental car and the time of my son, Rob, to drive me, the equivalent of an Uber. I'm shy of driving long distances by myself these days. They will set up a table where I can sell and sign books. There will be 50 clients, so I'm trying to think how many books I'd need. I'm exploring getting a Houston bookstore to provide the books and handle the sales and romancing the notion of setting up a book signing in an independent bookstore in Bastrop which is on the way to Houston from Austin.  I'm really looking forward to it, including gently raising climate issues to a bunch of oil people. I'll do a blog on that when it happens.

I went to a talk by Dr. Aubra Anthony, a Senior Fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She spoke on "responsible AI," asking "responsible on whose terms?" She stressed the cultural differences around the world that complicate the topic, pointing out that AI LLM models developed in the Global North might not be totally appropriate in the Global South.

I attended a Zoom call book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. The book was Artificial Integrity: The Paths to Leading AI Toward a Human-Centered Future by Hamilton Mann. This book also addressed cultural differences with regard to AI and social issues, arguing that AI Integrity involves culture and is context dependent and that given the complexity of both machines and people, perfection is hard to reach.  The author advised accepting that society will lag technical status and to be practical about what is most doable in policy and regulation, given that perfect will not be possible. The goal should be minimizing the severity of the technology/society dislocation. He called for avoiding systems that can manipulate and deceive. To that I say, too late! Recent LLMs lie and deceive. I advocated the Golden Rule for AI I invented for The Path to Singularity, "Do unto AI as you would have it do unto you." The author asked how to prevent malicious use of AI but did not answer the question directly. A small technical quibble. The author claimed that the global market size for AI is expected to be $2,575.16 billion by 2032; 6 significant figures? Really?

I read a longish online essay by Dario Amodei, the founder and CEO of the AI company Anthropic that produced the LLM AI, Claude. The essay covers many of the same topics I do in The Path to Singularity, but with interesting, complementary insights. You might find the second section on neuroscience and mind especially interesting. I also started reading a long amusing, cartoon illustrated presentation on why Elon Musk created his brain/computer interface company, Neurolink. I bogged down despite being entertained and even a little educated. I need to get back to it.

I joined an online MIT-sponsored webinar with Sherry Turkle. She discussed the issues with having chatbot friends. She regards this as an existential threat, arguing that children developing their own sense of empathy should not use chatbots that have no true inner life. People have an inner life, chatbots don't. Among her admonitions and declarations: Don't make products that pretend to be a person. Require/request engineers to write a memoir to connect them to their own inner life. No good therapist asks a patient, are you happier after our interaction as chatbots do. Criticize metrics of the use of chatbots. Effect on civil society – terrible, terrible, terrible. To make people angry and keep people with their own kind; could not be a worse algorithm. Guardrails – companies invite people to invent their own AI. Pretend empathy is not empathy. Chatbots don't have a body, don't have pain, don't fear death. Chatbots are alien. Not human. The woman has opinions. I share many of them.

What a week that was!

In my previous blog on my Active April, I omitted one event that I thought was worth its own post.

On Friday, 4/11/25, I attended a session of the Mountains and Plains Independent Book Sellers Association (MPIBA) SpringCon 2025 that my Prometheus publicist, Chloé Hummel, had arranged. MPIBA represents independent bookstores throughout the west, so this was a good chance to raise awareness of the book. The hope is that the bookstore representatives will go home and order, stock, and sell a mess of books throughout the western US. Rob drove me down, served as health care checker in case I had conniptions, and as ad hoc publisher representative. We drove down Friday morning (about 2 hours) and returned later that afternoon.

The conference was in the Menger Hotel, one of the oldest in the city, even in the state. Grand old place. It is right across the street from the Alamo, which is under reconstruction and a bit of a mess. The bar in the Menger was one place where Teddy Roosevelt recruited Rough Riders and the bar to which Carrie Nation took her ax during Prohibition. Unfortunately, I learned this history later and did not think to check out the bar at the time.

The conference lasted for three days. The day we attended, there were workshops in the morning. I listened in on one and learned a new vocabulary word, "shelf talker." That's what bookstore staff call the little "staff recommends" tags on the shelves. I asked whether it is appropriate for an author to promote such things or whether that violated some bookstore staff prerogative. The answer seemed to be "it depends."

Then we had a box lunch in the banquet hall, sitting at a set of round tables holding one author and five other people. That kind of discouraged the authors from meeting one another, so I went around and introduced myself to a few of my fellow authors before we ate. 

During lunch, each of 10 authors got four minutes to promote their book. The woman who was hosting, Heather Duncan (from Oklahoma, Executive Director of the MPIBA), sat at my table as did two representatives from Austin's Book People where I had done my book signing earlier. They had not met me then.

Heather introduced the authors, calling author's names off a list, and she was chagrined when she skipped me. No big deal. I had written out my single page of notes (below), rehearsed, edited, and timed them several times and was confident I could go through them in a little over three minutes. I gave my spiel which felt like only a minute. Rob gave me two enthusiastic thumbs up and then informed me that I had taken 5 minutes. My turn to be chagrined, although others also ran over. Despite the stern written instructions, Heather did not rigorously enforce the four-minute limit. I ad-libbed a little, and I guess my cadence in front of a live audience was a little slower than speaking at my computer screen. 

I introduced myself as an emeritus professor of astronomy, The Path to Singularity, Prometheus, and the foreword by Tyson (always an attention getter) and began with this challenge: "Virtually everyone in this room is anxious about Artificial Intelligence. This book is aimed at addressing that anxiety." I ended with: "How do we stay in control? First, be aware! Developing awareness is the aim of this book. Then vote!" Pretty punchy stuff, I thought.

After the author presentations, people queued up to get the books signed. It took me a while to figure out how this worked. It turns out the publishers, beside paying the author registration fee, also send 60 copies of the book (which doesn't count toward author royalties). The attendees at the conference than get the books of their choice for free and can get the authors to sign them. I did that for 20 minutes or so, having fun chatting with people. Some wanted generic signatures, some personalized for themselves, others personalized for husbands, sons, friends (rarely for women, now that I think about it). I lost track of how many books I signed, but the pile of leftovers was about 20, so maybe 40 copies got claimed while I was there. 

One particularly interesting interaction was with a woman who has just started her own bookstore in a little town west of Fort Worth, if I have the story straight. She asked if I would talk to her reading group. As I was pondering a drive to Fort Worth, she hastened to say it would be by Zoom, and I said I would be delighted. Then she went on to say, she wanted to give a copy of Path to her boss. Turns out her day job is working for United Health Care. United Health Care is "democratizing" AI by insisting that all employees should learn to use AI in their work. She wanted to convince her boss that Path should be given to a bunch of high-level managers at United Health Care. I said "excellent," and explained that Chloé and I have been talking about how to promote bulk sales to companies I mention in the book, over 100 of them. United Health Care was not on my radar screen. I gave the woman a book card and my regular business card (at Rob's urging) to make sure she knew how to contact me. Dumb of me to not make sure I had her contact info. At this writing (5/3/25), I've not heard from her.

After realizing that the meeting attendees were snapping up free books, I asked whether authors could also take books of other authors. The answer was an enthusiastic "yes!" because otherwise the MPIBA staff would have to pack up the extras and ship them back to publishers, a headache for them. I got two signed, one from Texas naturalist Steve Ramirez to whom I'd introduced myself before lunch. He's an ex-soldier turned nature promoter who gave a powerful presentation. The other was by Constance Fay, whom I had also met before the lunch, and who also gave a great presentation. She writes science fiction romance. Rob also snagged a book. 

Five o'clock traffic was not terrible. We got back to Austin about 5 PM.

Appendix – My notes (One page, five minutes!).

San Antonio Book Fair

The Path to Singularity: How Technology Will challenge the Future of Humanity

Published by Prometheus Press. Foreword by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Virtually everyone in this room is anxious about Artificial Intelligence. This book is aimed at addressing that anxiety.

Primer

Primer for those who want to know what is going on with our technology: how we got here, what is happening, where it is going.

Exponential change

Reasons that technology advances exponentially ever more rapidly. Importance of ever increasing technology. In the past it was possible, with some disruption, for societies and individuals to adjust, as in the industrial revolution. Now we are proceeding into a new phase of human existence when change may happen so rapidly that societies and individuals cannot adapt sufficiently rapidly.

Changes on many fronts

The Path to Singularity illustrates how artificial intelligence is affecting nearly every aspect of society, but it is not just about AI. The book also treats robots, autonomous vehicles and weapons, brain/computer interfaces, conscious computers – the essence of the technological singularity - genetics and biotechnology, climate change, economics, democracy, the space program, and how these may play out in the future. Ethics.

Key Questions

Current LLM AI can strategize, lie, and deceive. What are the implications?

Could AI influence or even dictate our voting behaviors?

If widespread mental connectivity becomes a reality, could we see the emergence of a collective consciousness that erases individuality?

What implications arise if we medically cure aging? How will society adapt to the challenges of perpetual youth? What will we do with the babies?

How do we stay in control?

First, be aware! Developing awareness is the aim of this book.

Then vote!

The Black Pearl Bookstore is a nice little family run enterprise in a remodeled house along the sprawl of Burnet Road that bisects north Austin. I had ordered a book from them once, Little Leonardo's Fascinating World of Astronomy by Sarafina Nance who had been an undergraduate student of mine (see also her remarkable memoir, Starstruck), but I had never been in the shop. After putting it off for a while in the press of other things, I finally stopped in on April 2 and made them a deal. I offered them a signed copy of The Path to Singularity from the shrinking store of 50 provided to me by Prometheus Press with the request that if they sold it they would order some more. We struck the deal with smiles all around. Now I need to drop in again to see if it sold.

On April 2 and 3, I participated in the annual symposium of the Good Systems group, the interdisciplinary enterprise on campus that seeks to bring ethics to AI. I had asked whether I could display The Path to Singularity at the symposium as my version of a poster presentation and got enthusiastic agreement. I borrowed the same bookstand that had displayed the book at the previous Astronomy Department Board of Visitors meeting (see Blog 11 – Amazon Reviews). The symposium organizers really did not have a natural way to display the book, but offered one of the round tables at the rear of the room where people could sit and munch goodies during breaks. I commandeered one table, set up the bookstand with the book propped on it, plopped my fedora (it's not a cowboy hat!) on the table, and set out some of my Path business cards. Over the two days of the symposium, I handed out a few cards and might have made a few sales.

The evening of April 3, I finally finished the unique and fascinating novel Magdalena Mountain by my cousin-in-law, the butterfly naturalist Bob Pyle. It took me a while to read it because my novel reading these days tends to be a few paragraphs and then falling asleep at bedtime. It was a pleasure all the way, with vivid writing and a special perspective. Here is my short review on Amazon: I was delighted by this tangled story of odd people and their quests where two of the main characters are a butterfly and a mountain. Naturalist Bob Pyle invents (in some cases) a fascinating array of characters and writes powerfully and lyrically of the black butterfly that breeds in the summits of the Colorado Rockies and of the high country that draws these characters together. Did you know that Vladimir Nabokov chased butterflies in those very mountains? Here is a Nabokov word: VIBGYOR.

My birthday was on Saturday, April 5. We had some takeout fajitas from Maudie's in Austin and slices of a chocolate eruption cake from the Austin World Headquarters of Whole Foods (now wholly subsumed by Amazon). I got two books I had been meaning to read for a long, and longer time, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. It will probably take me until my next birthday to get through them.

I spent most of the week of April 14 at a small workshop on supernova. The venue was special, The Cook's Branch Conservancy. The conservancy is operated by the family and estate of George Mitchell, a Greek immigrant who arrived penniless in the US, invented fracking, built the fancy Woodlands suburb of Houston, and purchased the 7100 acres of the conservancy in the piney woods of east Texas. Mitchell became a benefactor of Texas A&M University where he hit it off with and subsequently hosted famed cosmologist Steven Hawking at the conservancy.

More recently, the conservancy has been the site of focused workshops organized by TAMU faculty. The Department of Physics has hosted one on supernova research, my academic specialty, for over a decade. I had not been there since before Covid, so jumped at the chance when invited this time. Many of the attendees were good friends and colleagues from TAMU and elsewhere. I don't like to drive long distances alone anymore, so my son, Rob, came with me to drive our rental car (long story) for the three-hour trip. We shared a rustic suite in the meeting compound courtesy of the workshop organizers. For this workshop, the Mitchells arranged an Israeli chef, a woman of about 60, to come down from Denver to prepare three scrumptious meals a day for us. At night there is a bonfire around which to sit and stare at the flames.

The meeting itself was small, about 15 people, but very intense with lots of time for discussion and argument. We delved deeply into the weeds of the technical aspects of observing, analyzing, and theorizing about supernova explosions, topics only a mother, or an astrophysicist, could love. It was great fun. The relevance to this blog is that while I am loathe to shove The Path to Singularity in the face of astronomy colleagues, I came prepared with a bunch of the book business cards. Over the course of the workshop, I raised the existence of the book with individuals and gave them cards if they seemed interested, including one to Sheridan Mitchell Lorenz, who dropped in to check how things were proceeding. I realized that by the end of the meeting, I had hit up nearly everyone anyway. So much for discretion.

I had done a podcast with Dan Turchin of The Future of Work back on February 7. This discussion was similar to several podcasts I had done before, but I had also learned some new things in the meantime (current LLM models lie and deceive), and threw that in. Sometimes podcasts are posted fairly promptly, but sometimes they take a while. This one was released on video and was finally edited and posted on April 7. In an interesting departure, they edited snippets and released them daily for a week on LinkedIn. Here is one. They sent me these relevant links:

·  Your episode

·  LinkedIn post you can share

·  Tweet you can share

I had also done an enjoyable podcast the day before, on February 6, with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind. This was purely audio but still was only posted on April 21 on Apple and Spotify.

The same day, April 21, I was in the neighborhood getting a new battery for my 26-year-old Lexus SUV (only 80,000 miles), so I stopped in the Barnes and Nobel where I had previously signed the one copy of The Path to Singularity. To my disappointment, it was still there although in a slightly more prominent place than I had first located it. Better news was that they had ordered another four copies, so I signed those. I gently pleaded with the clerk to make a display of all five of them, but I'm not optimistic.

I skipped here one event, on April 11, a conference of independent book sellers in San Antonio, but that was enough of an adventure that I think it deserves its own blog. Next one.

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.

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.