J. Craig Wheeler

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.

Retirement continues to be a golden time of calm and relaxation (not!).

 

I've settled into a regular schedule of first thing every morning posting a tidbit on a Tech Advance to illustrate the exponential change of technology. I introduced this practice in my class on The Future of Humanity by asking students to bring examples to each class. In my current mode, I keep notes with links to items when I read them in the NYT, the Austin American Statesman, the MIT Technology Review, other magazines, or online. Each morning, I transfer a new one from my notes to my web site, then use the free ChatGPT to draft posts to X and LinkedIn. The drafts usually need a little editing, especially for X so that it fits in 280 characters, but, with luck, the whole process only takes about 10 minutes. I still have not opened an account on Blue Sky.

 

A week after the provost's reception for university authors I mentioned in the previous blog, I went by the provost's office about 4:30 in the afternoon to pick up the copy of The Path To Singularity that had been displayed at the reception. I thought I was there comfortably before closing, but the door to the provost's suite was locked even though I could see a receptionist inside the heavy wooden and glass doors. I let out a not so sotto voce oath. After a frustrated moment, a door to my left rattled and out came the provost from a rest room therein. Amazingly enough, she recognized me from the reception, at least the mustache if not the name, and gave me a friendly greeting. I explained my dilemma, and she said she could fix that and promptly wielded a key to gain entrance. She asked the receptionist to fetch my book from a back room, and off I went. The university appointed a new president the next week, and the provost was promptly let go. Presumably, the new guy wanted his own provost. I only met her those two times in the five years she was provost.

 

On 2/12/25, I listened into a Zoom webinar sponsored by the Authors Guild on opportunities to prevent books being scanned for AI training without compensation. The Authors Guild has created a sticker labeled "Human Authored," that can be designed into or affixed to the covers of books. The notion is to provide a mark of literary authenticity that will certify human creativity in an increasingly AI world. The Authors Guild also has a draft clause for publishing contracts that prohibits AI training uses without permission. This webinar was designed to introduce the partnership between the Authors Guild and a new startup called Created by Humans that proposes to license books and negotiate compensation for authors who agree to have their work used for AI training. I've asked my agent for The Path to Singularity, Regina Ryan, to consider this, and she will consult with fellow agents. She says, "It's brand-new territory!" I'll try to register my novels, The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending, since I own their rights myself. I have tried to ask ChatGPT (again, the free version) and Claude questions about somewhat obscure characters that one would have to have read/scanned the book to know, and they both gave wishy-washy answers. That suggests, but doesn't prove, they have not (yet) been scanned and ingested in some way.

 

On 2/18/25, I had an outpatient treatment to shock my heart out of atrial fibrillation and back into regular rhythm. All went smoothly. Loathe to miss an opportunity, I took a small bunch of my business cards advertising The Path to Singularity and handed them out irregularly to attendants and nurses. I think I may have sold at least two books. One was to a young Vietnamese nurse who did basic prep work and was especially interested. She expressed anxiety about AI, but didn't know what to do about it. Another was an older nurse with a mild southern accent in the cardiac unit who expressed similar feelings - anxiety and uncertainty. I told her that Path was a primer designed for people like her and urged her to be "aware." I was going to lobby the doctor who did the procedure, but they knocked me out and I came to in the recovery room without ever seeing him. On the way home in the afternoon, it occurred to me that hospital staff might represent an untapped market for the book: intelligent, technically-oriented, curious, caring people. I don't know an efficient way to reach them, but I'm open to suggestions.

 

On Saturday morning, 2/22/25, the dean of natural sciences held a donor reception. My wife and I had given the university funds for a small graduate student fellowship this year. By this time, the dean was no longer dean, but a one-day-old interim provost, having been appointed to replace the previous provost (see above). He is a very good guy, the son of an astronomy colleague, but still. Once again in shameless shill mode, I handed out a few book business cards.

 

On 2/25/25, I sat in on a book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. The discussion leader was Geoff Woods on his own book, The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions. Woods advocated a particular use of LLM AI to address problems. He called it Context, Role, Interview, and Task, acronym CRIT. His notion was that an LLM user should not just ask the AI a question but give it a context and assign a role to the AI emulating a particular kind of appropriate problem solver. The critical step, according to Woods, was to then have the AI interview the user and set "non-obvious" tasks for the user. That did seem novel but easy to implement. The next morning, I submitted to ChatGPT the following prompt:

 

#CONTEXT# I'm an author in Austin, Texas, a retired academic, trying to write a new book, promote a current one on the technological future of humanity (prometheusbooks.com/9781493085439/the-path-to-singularity/), write occasional blogs, maintain a website (jcraigwheeler.ag-sites.net/disc.htm), and post daily "tech advances" on X and LinkedIn calling attention to the exponential growth of technology. I've done 13 podcasts on the current book, a book signing, a couple of public appearances and applied to a couple of book festivals. I can't do it all at once, and work on my current book has fallen way behind. I'm limited in my ability to travel. My current publisher has a publicist who is helpful but limited in what she can do. Same for my agent. I'm not sure my website is as effective as it might be. I have little time or talent for SEO. I'm posting blogs on my personal website, not a nationally recognized hosting platform. I can't afford to hire an aide. #ROLE# You are a self-help expert with expertise in SEO, publicity, book writing, and promotion. #INTERVIEW# Interview me, ask me one question at a time up to 5 questions to gain deeper context. #TASK# Your task is to generate 5 non-obvious strategies I could employ to make my life easier and more productive.

 

ChatGPT summarized my prompt and posed five questions, allowing me to answer each before proceeding to the next question. ChatGPT then produced five "non-obvious" suggestions:

1. Target Influencers Within Companies via LinkedIn Automation

2. Outsource Your Book's Promotion to Micro-Influencers with a Twist

3. Digital Outreach Campaign with Email & LinkedIn Automation

4. Hire a Virtual Assistant for a One-Time Setup of Automation

5. Repurpose Content for Broader Platforms

 

Each suggestion had an associated strategy and a short explanation of why it works. At the end ChatGPT asked, "Would you like more details on any of these strategies, or help finding the right freelancers/tools to implement them?" I said "yes," and it spit out three pages of elaborations including suggestions of specific software programs that were all new to me. It then said, "If you're ready to explore any of these strategies, I can help you find a specific freelancer or walk you through the tools more in-depth. For example, I can assist with selecting the right virtual assistant, or help you get started with LinkedIn automation tools. Would you like me to assist with that, or perhaps help prioritize the strategies based on your immediate goals?" Again, I typed "yes," and it produced six more pages of yet more detailed suggestions. I think all this is doable, but I was overwhelmed and set it aside. Maybe someday. I'll need to take it a step at a time.

 

On Friday evening, 2/28, and Saturday morning, 3/1, I attended the semi-annual meeting of the department and observatory Board of Visitors. The BoV is a group of about 200 people of some means and often political influence who enjoy engaging with astronomers and working on behalf of our enterprise. Once again, it was an opportunity for some more shameless shilling. For both days, I put out a copy of The Path to Singularity on a book holder along with a small pile of the associated business cards. I also handed the cards to anyone whom I thought might be interested. I might have sold a few books. A few people had already purchased one.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

I messed up my most recently scheduled podcast with Supernatural Realm Radio on December 12. They had not originally specified a time zone, and I checked with them to make sure. Despite a clear statement in my master schedule that the session was scheduled for 6-8 pm CST, I had scattered various preliminary backup notes around the house saying 7-9 pm CST, and that got stuck in my head. I had a regular Thursday beer with a friend, one of my principal beta readers, Wayne Bowen, from 5 to 6 and was home and comfortably settled in by 6:30. As 7 rolled around, I finally realized with a shock what my error had been. I sent several frantic emails, but it was too late. As it turned out, they had only received a copy of The Path to Singularity that very day and had not had time to look at it. They were just as happy to reschedule. Still a wound to my sense of professionalism.

 

I had enjoyed my podcast interview with Don Murphy on December 7. He posted the results on December 10, but the result was a bit of a tangle. Don uses the PodMatch podcast service. In order to make the release work, he said I needed to confirm that I had done the interview on the PodMatch site. I could not figure out how to do that. After several emails with various people, it turned out that my publicist, Joanne McCall, had done the original scheduling, and she had the email on which the interview had to be confirmed. Don also said that I could establish my own account on PodMatch using his affiliate link. I tried that, but again got lost in some technical PodMatch space. I finally gave up.

 

I wanted to send copies of The Path to Singularity to my colleagues who had been kind enough to write jacket blurbs. Prometheus did not provide that service, and I wanted to sign and personalize them anyway. There is a USPS mode of "media mail" that is pretty reasonable for domestic mail, a little over 5 bucks, but it is a tad pricey to send books to Great Britain and Australia. Worth the price.

 

I've found there is substantial turnover in the book business. The original person in charge of production at Prometheus, Brianna Soubannarath, moved on in December and left some questions hanging, the structure of a royalty statement and how the Audible version of the book came to be. Jake Bonar is my new production person, and he answered those questions. Those rights were sold separately, and the company that bought them produced the audio version. Amazon then buys from them. I had no role in any of that.

 

After the flurry of November/December podcasts, I've turned my attention to other modes of distribution. I'll try to get some books stocked at the Visitors Center at McDonald Observatory. I have convinced both the University of Texas Library and the Austin City Library to stock some version.

 

An odd opportunity turned up. I got an email from a young woman who is a science writer for Popular Mechanics magazine. She said she was interested in doing a review of a preprint a colleague and I had posted last April about the correlation of Dark Matter and spontaneous human combustion. She belatedly realized the paper was a total spoof posted on the astrophysics preprint archive as an April Fools joke. She caught her own mistake before I could correct her, but I emailed her and tried to let her down gently. I mentioned The Path to Singularity as perhaps being of interest to Popular Mechanics readers, and she said she might consider that.

 

After my last post, I have had a very interesting exchange with nephew-in-law Alejandro who runs his own small import business in San Diego. Alejandro has seriously adopted ChatGPT and other large language model AIs in his business and personal use. He swears by their time-saving utility. I wanted to send some copies of The Path to Singularity to people in Congress with a technological bent and decided to try to use ChatGPT. I asked two version of ChatGPT, one on my mobile phone, one online, and online Claude from Anthropic for a list of congress people with an interest in technology and their office addresses. In a few seconds each, I got three slightly different, but overlapping lists. ChatGPT warned me to check office addresses because congress people change offices frequently. It was easy enough to check offices with a regular browser (although that took me about 20 minutes) but combing through a browser to figure out which of 435 representatives and 100 senators had technology interests would have taken me hours. I'm sold, but there is still a learning curve. I generated a collated list of candidates from the three lists. I probably should have asked ChatGPT to do that, but I did it by hand, and it took me a half hour. Prometheus is happy to send books to the 25 people who made the list.

 

I'll attend the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society near Washington DC January 13 – 16 and then stay with son Diek and family in Fairfax for a few days. I contacted several bookstores in the DC area with no response from most, but I'll do a book signing at the Barnes and Nobel in Fairfax, VA, on Sunday, January 19. I'm also scheduled to do a book signing at our preeminent Austin independent bookstore, Book People, on January 29.

 

I've had some tentative discussions with Neil deGrasse Tyson about appearing on his StarTalk podcast in NYC. Prometheus is keen on the idea. Neil asked whether Prometheus is prepared to do a second printing to accommodate a "Tyson hit." StarTalk is watched by several hundred thousand to a million people. Serious business! Several people involved in the game have suggested that I try to appear on Joe Rogan since he is right here in Austin. I don't weigh my odds highly, but I'm thinking about it. Book People did not want me to do another signing in the greater Austin area, but Neil says there is no such restriction in podcast space.

 

This was typed from my brain, with a little AI help from Grammerly.

 

Talk to you again in 2025!