J. Craig Wheeler

I summarized the 30-year family Krone Experiment adventure in Blog #30. After posting the film on YouTube on June 9, it got a few views the first day and then took off in exponential growth with a doubling time of 1.5 days. By Saturday, June 20, there had been 678 views, far more than the number following these blogs, so something else was going on. It was not clear how many people actually watched the whole film. There were few comments. My favorite was a fellow who said he had really liked The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending books, but was pissed at me for not writing the third novel in the series. The views grew to a total of 3,600 then stopped on the Fourth of July. Clearly, there had been some kind of YouTube algorithmic manipulation. Asked ChatGPT about this history. It said, ask YouTube. YouTube has its own AI, which artfully dodged the question. Back to getting 3 or 4 views per day. Not sure of next step. As expected, Black List rejected me as a candidate for their fall screen writing workshop.

On June 15, I Zoomed an Authors Guild webinar with a panel of three agents. I asked whether there was a bias against old folks. All three rushed to deny such was the case. I have my doubts.

On June 22, I joined an especially interesting meeting of the Westbank Writers group. The guest of the day was Dean Bredeson, who writes under the pen name Anthony Dean. He was joined by his wife and movie-maker son who advocated Black List for support of screen writing (see above). Bredeson is a professor of instruction in the UT Business School. In an experiment to see if he could make a little money writing, he has been self-publishing a sci-fi series with Amazon's Kindle Direct. He wrote the first book, The Voided Man (about life as a prisoner in a cosmic void), in three weeks in 2024. It's a good story, although it overstates the brightness of a supernova in one plot point (very few supernova experts among his readership, I suspect). By the time of our meeting, he had written a total of 11 books in the series in 1.5 years (I was blown away. It takes me 11 years to write one book!). He reported on his experience. He advocated Kindle Direct for self-publishing and argued that a writer must have a series and publish regularly to attract readers and make a buck (another strike against me; my interests are too eclectic). He talked about the art and science of Amazon Ads: use phrases as keywords; avoid copyrighted names/titles (I used them); newbies famously overpay for ads; blogs are not worth it (I enjoy doing this one); register with US Copyright Office. He wrote several hours a day, morning and then evening. He writes 700 words per hour (I can do 1000 if the subject is in my head). He left us with an exercise, to answer two questions: To what do you aspire? What is your goal for tomorrow?

Thus motivated, I reactivated my Amazon Ads account for The Path to Singularity with phrases as keywords. I started with the price I would pay at $0.50 per click, then inched up to $0.75 on 7/7/26, then to $1.00 on 7/13/26. I got little reaction. I checked in with ChatGPT to see what it thought about phrases as keywords, how to navigate the Amazon Ads web page, and recommendations on how to sell books. It turned out that most of my previous impressions and clicks and the 8 previous sales were all on the simple keyword "ai." I turned that keyword back on and sold a single book on July 26. The sale price of that book was more than I paid for the clicks, but of course, I only get 15% of the sale, so I'm basically losing money. I fiddled with keywords and prices a bit more and will watch that for a while.

I heard somewhere, maybe a local bit on our NPR radio station KUT, about a UT psychology professor, Paige Harden, who had written a book on twins raised apart, a powerful technique for separating the effects of genetics and environment, nature versus nurture. I contacted her and proposed giving her a copy of The Path to Singularity in exchange for her signature on her book, Original Sin, which I promised to purchase and read. She agreed, but with summer travel we did not get together until July 9. The book was fascinating, not quite what I expected. It does involve twin research but delves into the ethically murky issue of when and how one deserves to be punished for a transgression. The deep question is how we should think about it if a person is just unlucky and trapped in circumstances in which they have no control. That is where original sin comes in. You are bad because of Adam and Eve, not anything you personally did. In Hardin's bailiwick, there is evidenced from twin studies that bad behavior is substantially, but not totally, genetic, inherited, but our modern justice system makes no allowance for that. Hardin concludes, if I may simplify, that these issues deeply entwine nature and nurture, that these two aspects cannot be cleanly separated. We had a very interesting discussion in her office, and I now have an autographed copy of her book on my study shelf.

I've been regularly chipping away at editing my dad's biography. I'm in the final chapter incorporating a lot of personal correspondence from my parents on their retirement when they built two houses by hand and made the transition from the Apollo program to the business of Native American jewelry and Kachina dolls. You'll have to read it to make sense of that.

I've been experimenting a little with Substack, posting the notices I have been sending to LinkedIn and X. I'm thinking of using that as a vehicle for these blogs but have not found the time to focus on the nuts and bolts of that.  

On July 22, The Austin Forum on Science and Society did an interesting Zoom book discussion on Infinity Machine, a biography of Demis Hassibis, the brilliant founder of the company DeepMind, now owned by Google. His father is a Greek Cypriot and his mother is Chinese from Singapore. He was a chess prodigy at four. Later, he developed the machine learning code AlphaZero that beat the world's human champion at the game of Go and then won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the AI code AlphaFold that essentially solved the previously intractable problem of protein folding. Put your vita up against that!

The local chapter of the Authors Guild held its recently-constituted quarterly meet-and-greet sessions on July 30. In an interesting wrinkle, they scheduled author readings. The venue was Alienated Majesty Books near the corner of 29th and Guadeloupe in the little shopping center that hosted Oat Willie's for a long time (but no more). I drive by all the time and had no idea they had opened a couple of years ago. About 20 people snacked and chatted before the readings. I made one new acquaintance, Gary Keith, a retired UT professor of political science. He does a Substack under the pen name Demosthenes in which he comments on the political world. In retirement, he decided to try his hand at writing fiction. He published his first novel, Austin Blues, a year ago with Atmosphere Press, a local hybrid publisher with which the author shares the cost and receives full editorial support. I asked him if he included Clifford Antone in the story, and he said, "Of course!" The main plot line concerns an episode where The University of Texas refuses tenure to an acclaimed faculty member and offers no explanation nor venue for appeal. Gary made it up a few years ago while he was writing his story. Sound familiar? I promptly ordered a copy from Amazon which arrived today, 8/2. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Gary also gave what I thought was the best reading of the evening. Rather than an excerpt from his novel, he read a poem; his meditation about getting old, his version of raging against the dying of the light. His delivery was dramatic and emotional. Rather than choosing from a work in progress, I decided to read an excerpt from The Path to Singularity on AI-catalyzed mind reading, telekinesis, and mental telepathy. Amid all the furor over AI, I don't think this topic gets enough attention. My presentation seemed to go okay. Three or four people asked for my book business cards with the declared intention of buying the book. I wrote to Alienated Majesty Books a couple of days later, inquiring whether they would stock The Path to Singularity and host a reading and book signing. We'll see.

Where does the time go? It's been a little over two months since I last posted. Then a week shot by after I drafted this. Not that I haven't been busy. In addition to non-astronomical things, I've been heavily involved in helping to write and edit a paper on the polarization of supernovae that promises new insights into asymmetrical propagation of the thermonuclear burning fronts in Type Ia exploding white dwarf events. I also found myself involved in a rather tense personal intra-group conflict over contributions, credit, presentation, and choice of journal. I think the contretemps is now substantially smoothed over.

I noted in Blog #27 that I had finished a draft of my father's biography about the first hydrogen bomb and other 20th century technology and noted a box of letters from my parents in their retirement years in Colorado Springs. I ended up doing a crude typed transcription of those letters. That gives me a searchable digital base to draw on to sort out the chronology while they built two houses, helped with my sister's business selling Kachina dolls (a long story in itself), and cushioned her through a divorce. That transcription alone took a large part of last two months. I hope it was worth it. I'm now working my way through the draft biography, attempting to streamline it and render it more readable.

On 2/12/26, I was contacted by a representative of OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. They had heard good things about my presentation on the technological future of humanity I'd presented to the Retired Faculty/Staff Association and wondered if I could give a similar presentation based on my book The Path to Singularity. The hooker was that they were looking for a talk in spring, 2027. I warned that with things changing exponentially rapidly, the topic might be rather different than now (witness Moltbook's self-conversing AI agents, Anthropic's Claude Mythos that revealed thousands of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and generic threats to cybersecurity from quantum computing), but I agreed to give a presentation in January 2027. Unless it is canceled by our robot overlords.
 

I sampled various webinars from the Authors Guild, one way back on 2/2/26 on side gigs for authors. Not sure I learned a lot from that one. Another on 3/12/26 was entitled Amplify Your Story: How Writers Can Build Literary Visibility, and one on 3/16/26 covered Promoting Books Without Social Media. I have mentioned in previous blogs my screenplay for The Krone Experiment and my dream of having it made into a streaming film or series. To that end, I had posted it on Blacklist.com back in 2025. Nothing immediately came of that, but then the Authors Guild did a webinar on 4/14/26 with two of the leaders of Blacklist. They are Black, hence the name, which I presume is an ironic poke at J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. I picked up some hints I might try to pursue. On 4/16/26, I attended the second annual Authors Guild Austin Meet and Greet. I had a couple of interesting conversations about Amazon ads and the use of Substack.
 

I attended the local Good Systems and UT Robotics symposium in the Alumni Center on March 3 and 4. Some good talks and a few folks to whom I could flog The Path to Singularity. One was Yi Mao, a pleasant woman who is the CEO and Managing Director of ATSEC, a local information security firm. She was interested in taking a group of her people to McDonald Observatory, and I did a little to catalyze that. They will visit on May 2. In return, I fished for the possibility of giving them a talk on the future of technology, maybe with an honorarium since they are a business. Instead of that, Yi offered a free lunch, and the possibility of a keynote talk at a later time. I agreed and will meet with them on May 13. I'll try to update my spiel. Do we control our technology, especially AI, or succumb to it? Do we flourish in an age of AI-induced abundance or suffer social disruption in an era of hyper-rapid dislocation?

I attended the semi-annual meeting of the department and observatory Board of Visitors on March 6 and 7. It is always good to schmooze and to hear excellent talks from young people. I passed out a few business cards for The Path to Singularity.

Kelsey Piper is a brilliant writer on technology and its social effects. She wrote for the online Future Perfect hosted by Vox. I have been reading her for years and quoted her in The Path to Singularity. I had tried to contact her with no luck when the book came out. In early March, I attended a quickly scheduled lively panel discussion on the dust up between Anthropic and the Pentagon as to whether Anthropic would allow its AI Claude to be used for autonomous weapons and spying on civilians. To my surprise one of the panelists, computer scientist Scott Aaronson, mentioned Piper's name during his presentation. Turns out he knows her personally. I asked for an introduction and contacted her, offering her a signed copy of the book. She is now working for The Argument (a substack publication that tries to make the case for liberalism as distinct from progressivism, populism, and MAGAism). She replied graciously, and I sent her the book on March 11 but have not heard back.

I have been regularly attending the Westbank Writers Group on Monday's at 5 PM, either in person or by Zoom. One of our most interest sessions was on 3/16/26. We examined samples of writing by humans and by AI and then voted on which we preferred and which did we think was AI. The result was basically chaos, with people all over the map. One bit was generic astronomy-for-poets boosterism for the glories of astronomy that any astronomer could have written. I voted for human, but it was AI. Another piece that I liked very much touched on the spiritual aspects of science. I voted for AI, but it was Carl Sagan.  

I also regularly attend sessions of the Austin Forum for Science and Society, especially their Zoom book discussions. On 3/25/26, we tackled Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Yup!

I'll date myself, but back in the day the Ed Sullivan Show (yes, I saw the Beatles) regularly hosted a juggler who would spin plates on the tops of rods. He would scramble around humorously but competently, starting a new plate spinning then dashing back to an earlier one that threatened to slow and topple. I thought of that regularly during my career as an astrophysicist. It turns out book writing in retirement is not much different.

On January 5 (see Blog #26) I finished a draft of my father's biography tentatively entitled Eniwetok (Enewetak in modern more ethnically correct spelling), the site of the first hydrogen bomb, which he personally witnessed: 126,000 words, 220 pages in Word. I need to do a rigorous editing but also found myself in a dilemma. My memory of what he did after retiring from the Apollo program in Houston to Colorado Springs was spotty. I knew he built two houses from scratch and helped my sister with her business selling Native American jewelry, but I was confused about the chronology. I remembered that I had a box of letters, mostly written by my mother, roughly weekly, spanning that era. I've been reading through those, making notes and refreshing my memory. It's a long, tedious process, but feels necessary to me to capture his final years.

In the spirit of The Path to Singularity, I've been reading two newspapers, and various online sources trying to keep up with the exponential growth of technology: AI, robots, brain research, genomics, climate change, and the impacts on business and democracy. I collect summaries on my Authors Guild web page and post more abbreviated versions on X and LinkedIn, using ChatGPT to construct those posts and provide hashtags. For a while I was trying to post daily, but that was too demanding, so I'm now shooting for three times a week, MWF. I've pondered moving or expanding this to Bluesky, Reddit, or Substack, but just have not found the time and energy to spin those plates. I have little idea that anyone is reading these posts. If you are so moved, follow me on X or LinkedIn.

I had this notion of publishing my collection of global travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet, as a way of getting something out while wrestling with Eniwetok. Having been turned down by The University of Texas Press, on 1/13/26 I submitted Tales to Texas Tech Press where cousin-in-law butterfly expert Bob Pyle has published and has a personal connection with the editor. I dropped Bob's name. On 2/19/26, I got a reply saying the stories were "really cool" but not compatible with their list. The editor suggested I try a publisher with "lists in the harder sciences." Geeze, the stories are all about the ironies of the human condition. There is not an equation in the whole collection. I'll have to re-spin that dish. 

In Blogs #22 and #23, I had mentioned trying to promote The Path to Singularity in college courses where it might serve as a text. My nephew-in-law got ChatGPT to make a list of possible courses and faculty, and I have been slowly making my way through that list. No responses yet. For some time, I have been enjoying NYT opinion pieces on technology by Zeynep Tufekci who had been at the University of North Carolina. I ran across a recent mention that she had moved to Columbia and then Princeton. Why not? I asked myself. I emailed Professor Tufekci on 1/14/26. So far, she has not replied. One other tidbit in that regard. One of the pioneers and superheroes of studies of the Singularity and AI superintelligence, Nick Bostrom, had been at Oxford for decades. He was on my list, and I finally decided to write him about the use of Path in classes at Oxford. I got a reply to that query from an administrator on 2/18/26. It seems that as of very recently, Bostrom is no longer associated with Oxford. I'll let you Google that if you care to follow up.

In mid-January, I spun up the Amazon ads plate again and managed to get my associated Amazon account up and running with a minimum of keywords (see Blog # 25). Then I got busy with the various things I am describing here and have not monitored it properly. In the last month, I've had 11,000 impressions, 8 clicks costing me an average of $0.31 apiece, and no sales. Hmmm.

When The Path to Singularity came out in November 2024, it was after the deadline for application to the University of Texas Hamilton Book award. I had to wait a year to apply. I did that on 1/21/26. Not holding my breath. I won an honorable mention in the competition years ago for Cosmic Catastrophes.

I've been regularly attending the Westbank Writers group at the West Lake Hills Laura Bush branch library, either in person or by Zoom on Monday afternoons at 5 pm. I wrote an autobiographical story about a New Year's Eve party in keeping with the theme of the Winter 2026 West End Writers Quarterly. That came out in mid-January. You can see my story and the whole issue. On January 19, in celebration of Martin Luther King Day, I read a short reminiscence of the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. I was not there, but my boss at my summer job was. Here's a link. I also told a story I had never told anyone before about the dedication of the MLK statue on the East Mall of The University of Texas campus. I did attend that ceremony, but when it came to singing "We Shall Overcome," I did not realize everyone customarily linked hands. People around me had to link hands behind my oblivious back to keep the chain going. I was completely mortified.

I've also been attending functions of the Austin Forum on Science and Technology, especially the book discussions. On January 22, we scheduled a discussion of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. That was a great discussion, but even before that, I had an intense email exchange with my cousins Bob Pyle and Bruce Campbell about the notion that artificial superintelligence would kill humans. Bruce was incensed at the title, accusing the authors of hype and selling out. He insisted that ASI would respect the precious consciousness of humans even though it was vastly inferior to that of the ASI. Bob and I were a bit more circumspect in both regards.

Then there were all the non-writing plates to tend: maintenance of body, cars, house, and computer, endless email, Zoom calls, observing proposals, letters of reference, some science. Spinning on.