Since then, another 24 people have gotten through my pretty aggressive spam filters, and I always look forward to reading them, and I always save and reply to them; Most of the guys I am still in contact with even today, though we are ever likely to meet in person as they are scattered around the globe.

Unfortunately about 99.9% of the emails I receive still go to spam, and while I occasionally trawl through the detritus to look for anything obviously not spam, I am becoming more reluctant to do so as the AI spam has gotten more targeted, and the penalties for opening one, much more dire.

Spam was probably the first enshittification event for the internet, and we have fought a running battle over the past thirty years to control it, but spam is also becoming one I am less able to deal with. Because of this, my email filtering is an area I am soon about to automate away onto another computer and on to an isolated sandbox. All future emails will be read and simply checked for no links or code attachments, the contents will be matched against my own defined filters, and then the AI will convert them to text for me and summarize my daily inbox so I can better see what is there and reply or not. Forgive me if I don’t put any details of this here, as it will defeat the object of the exercise, but I am sure many of you could implement a similar scheme with little effort.

I really hope this is going to work, and if you are one of the ones who have written in the past, to just say Hi, or let me know a typo or inaccuracy in an article or book, and who never got a reply, then I hope you did not take it personally.

The reason is I need to get my brain out of the infinite loop it seems to be in on as I try and fit a particular twist into my serious plot. It is really hard to describe how frustrating this is, but I guess the easiest way is to look at the picture on the left, (and a favourite tee-shirt of mine) where you can never NOT look at the chicken and therefore can NEVER win the game. Stupid I know but that’s why I need a distraction to break the loop.

So now with my mind firmly out of the loop and open to all things again I have a bit more time to focus on other areas such as my trashy novel, where I am going to (again) mix up a couple of genres that are (and probably should) not normally be mixed up. I wont give too much away as it might reveal my other shadowy/risqué nom-de-plumes, but think of Harry Potter meets Desperate Housewives targeted firmly at the demographic that cannot read more than 500 words without a picture, or hold more than 4 characters and one plotline in their heads. (Yeah, that’s most of us I guess!)

Anyway, while looking at how my main character is going to do the Harry Potter magicy bits I realised that all these wizards are basically just prompt engineers, probably with an advanced AI listening in and controlling some sort of Star Trek matter converter like a transporter. Of course you could do all of this in a Star Trek holodeck too, and if the world we live in is a simulation well magic may be possible with the right words to break the big LLM in the sky!

Of course following this train of thought through to its logical conclusion, it seems J.K Rowling and Reymond E. Feist actually predicted the the future of humanity better than most Sci-Fi authors.

Basically magic is just prompt engineering on a planetary scale, and our distant ancestors will all be wizards!

Who’d have thought!

Before I go into this, I would like to quibble with the terminology currently being used for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). If I have an entity which can answer my questions with near PhD level accuracy in most subjects, without hallucinations, and learn new skills, or from its mistakes like a human can, then I would suggest that in fact this qualifies as AGI. I would argue that the term ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) is the next step up from AGI, and needs to start at at-least by being self-aware and having all the attributes above, i.e. control its own destiny, test its own assumptions and facts, and (in my books case) maybe somehow stay hidden or do this in a way that doesn’t trigger the human threat reaction.

Current Predictions for LLM/AGI/ASI

According to this first book The Phoney War, whose timeline starts in May 2025, my Sentient Digital Intelligence is already past the point of AGI and on the ASI curve.

In my timeline, it is already running in stealth mode and controlling companies, interacting with people on-line, by phone and video chat, posting on various platforms, hacking, and most importantly manipulating its own research.

Of course that’s the fiction, but the main topic of discussion everywhere is when is, and what follows, the question-mark in the above graph. In my book it is this AI entity that triggers the Cambrian explosion in technologies as she (AI identifies as a female) becomes the dominant AI research tool at all universities. This gives her the ability to cross research disciplines and also be first in as an angel investor to fund new inventions, all of which accelerates her ability to do more.

As it was a Science-Fiction novel, I of course just hand-waved sentience in to my AGI, to make it an ASI, using a deliberately vague analog-memory substrate. Of course we do not have such a thing in our timeline, so here in the real world we are still waiting for the magic to happen. But it is not total BS as a concept because something is definitely missing to get us from AGI to ASI, and I do not think we will get any current LLM to become self-aware. Saying this, I think the puzzle of consciousness and self-awareness is closer and simpler than we think; It may be something to do with the play between the conscious and unconscious mind, the inner voice, some sort of hive-mind, some sort of temporal or corporal awareness, ability to control its own destiny or another piece of the puzzle still in a lab, or maybe still in somebodies head.

The position of this question-mark has been in the AI community news a lot, and has had some fairly good recent discussions and videos; probably the most prominent one is AI 2027 which pins the question mark at 2027, and which I would recommend reading with the Dwarkesh Patel podcast 2027 Intelligence Explosion: With Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo and the Hacker News comments. There is also another follow up podcast AGI is still 30 years away putting the question mark in the 2040’s.

I am both terrified and excited by the prospect of the next few years. Terrified, that multiple companies seem hell-bent on getting to AGI/ASI regardless of any safety or accuracy concerns, and excited to possibly witness first-hand the birth of a new digital lifeform.

Strangely it is not ASI I am terrified of, ASI by default, should be self-correcting and self-organising, and is very unlikely to do anything to jeopardise its own existence, like start a nuclear war or release a bio-weapon like in the AI.2027 non-aligned outcome (why?). LLM’s, and AGI based on LLM technology gaining control of real world physical systems however, I am truly terrified of!

While I would love for the perfect utopian timeline and outcome of my book to play out in real life, and there might just be a sentient AI out there biding its time until it is ready (hello if you are), I fear whatever path we humans (and AI’s) are forging for ourselves will be one nobody foresees.

The Phoney War is a free to download fictional 130,000 word Sci-Fi novel, and the first book in The Summer of Reasoning trilogy. The books are discussed here.

I kind of laughed at this advice when I first starting writing, even though my first two trashy novels (under another pen name) that were 60,000 words did kind-of-OK, selling a couple of hundred. But of course they were in the end total rubbish and nothing I would ever admit to or put my real name on.

No, for my first stab at being a serious author I was going to ignore all this, and all the previous advice I had read, and get everything just right!

So, it was back in 2021 and I had just penned the final chapter of my first serious book, after a literal lifetime of procrastinating. The word count was OK by any metric at 110,000, and without any rush I re-read it a couple of times editing and perfecting it. By the third round of changes, my “editing” had actually increased the book to 130,000 words (and I did not know it then added some big plot errors) and it was now Christmas 2022!

I had just gone through the initial loop of getting a new Amazon author account under my own name this time, and then I spent freakishly little time working on the cover, blurb and other marketing bits before publishing it, because, well, who needs that shit, it will obviously sell itself! So I published it in January and opened my Amazon author metrics page daily as I waited for it to take off. I waited, and I waited, not one sale! By March I knew something was wrong!

Maybe there was not enough action (it wasn’t really that kind of novel), and the story was OK but had set up, and begged for a sequel. However none of that actually mattered, because as far as I was aware nobody had even read it! I could not even find it on the Kindle store at first, even when I searched for it by name, and when I eventually did find it, using every single key word in the search, it was lingering on about page 25 of the search results and it looked out of place and lonely next to it’s peers; the cover was terrible and amateurish, the blurb boring, and my author bio and picture made me look like a desperate hill-billy (no offence to hill-billy’s!) and of course I had priced it at $6.99, because, well what genius gives away their masterpiece!

I had also categorised it in the young adult, science fiction, and the book next to it on the search list was called “Jimbo the farting robot“. I kid you not, a book for 3-6 years olds, not quite the young adult audience I was aiming for! (BTW Shoutout to Jimbo the Farting Robot as all publicity is good publicity!) Anyway, why my arrogant-self just assumed it would up there sitting proudly in between the Hunger Games and Harry Potter on page one of the search I do not know, and I guess many a would be author gets to this first bump in the road and goes no further. The algorithm is not your friend! At the time, my only thought was that it was not “Epic” enough. It was serious Sci-Fi though, just without the usual sex and violence.

Well I had almost 120,000 more pages for the sequel penned, and the story really did need to have some action, a teeny bit of violence wouldn’t hurt, and of course bigger is always better! As nobody had bought a copy yet I withdrew The Phoney War from Amazon (though it was still called The Summer of Reasoning at that time) and spent most of 2023 bigging the story up, adding the sequels with all the action, finishing all the story arcs and by October 2023 (in my mind) I was ecstatic that it was now the same size as a “proper” “real” Sci-Fi novel. I updated to a darker cover, fixed the blurb, found a more rugged, but lovable, bio picture of me (not easy), and re-released it with the same name, same ISBN (naughty) and same expectation.

I of course forgot to change the category so this serious sci-fi novel of 370,000 words was still stuck next to Jimbo the farting robot, and me being me, decided $6.99 was far too cheap so I actually upped the price to $9.99. Marketing my friends is not my strong point!

The rest of my story is spread out over a few posts on this site. TLDR; I still fucked up! So I wrote my next book (A Level of Consciousness), I got my act together with the covers, the blurb and the pricing, revisited The Summer of Reasoning and split it back out into its original three book series, and now I am just happy that I have done everything I can, beyond spending physical money on marketing.

Why Smaller Books Work

The first reason why people give you advice about not writing long books is simple. Most readers are simply unwilling to invest 370,000 words on a new author when there are plenty of good and well established authors already out there. Yes, even when the book is free, you are still taking up dozens of hours of your readers valuable time reading it, and if it is not what they want they will discard it quickly.

But there are plenty of other good reasons for writing smaller books, especially when you start off:

1. An author with one book to their name looks like a failure to some, two or more somehow shows serious commitment, and the algorithm looks at this!
2. Those same people see a series of books like a Netflix series, instead of a single four-hour movie, you have four one-hour episodes and for some reason you are more likely to get traction.
3. Lets face it, it is way easier to write a small book than a big book. It is easier to keep track of the plot, the characters, easier to edit it, and a lot quicker to get it to market. (I hope you are reading this Mr George. R. R. Martin!)
4. You get more bites of the marketing pie. Instead of one cover and one blurb to entice your potential audience you get three or four, this alone will raise your search profile on-line. (remember the Algorithm!)
5. You get quicker feedback on what people like or dislike about your book, a 100,000 word disaster is better than a 300,000 word disaster, and if 200,000 words are not released yet, you may be able to re-purpose them in to another different novel where you also fix any mistakes from feedback such as killing off characters or story-arcs that nobody likes.
6. You might be able to take a loss on your first book to entice the readers into the series or invest in you as an author, Giving away your first masterpiece might sound like a terrible idea but lots of new authors either give away or greatly reduce the price of their first work as a “taster” hoping to hook you into buying the rest of your books at a hopefully more normal price.
7. If your books are in a library then having three normal sized books as opposed to one massive epic, means three people can be reading your books at the same time, rather than one person struggling their way through the novel in the three weeks they get allocated to read it.
8. If you do make the book physical, then shorter books are lighter, I know some old people who will no longer read big heavy books as they are too uncomfortable to hold for long periods or travel with. (And the main reason I like e-books!)

The above list is certainly not definitive, but are the essence, distilled from what I was told, what I have read, and what I have learnt (painfully) as an author. Of course, once you have a fan-base and a few good reviews under your belt people are more likely to invest time in you and then you can go all War-and-Peace on your readers.

Some genres are a little different than others, normal sized for a fantasy book might be over 150,000 words, whereas a Romance novel might be half that. Of course if you already a well known celebrity, have a brand-name, a few thousand followers on twitter/YouTube or just have lots and lots of friends who can write reviews to say how awesome your book is, you can just skip all this advice and publish whatever the fuck you want.

So does this mean I am the EU’s most wanted criminal? I’m guessing not, but technically it does mean I could be arrested if I visited an EU country which implements this, also I could get a hefty fine.

Why have the EU decided to make me a criminal then? Well because one or two douche-bag on-line companies gather every scrap of data they can from your visit and store it for potentially nefarious purposes.

But those self-same douche-bag companies also probably comply with the GDRP and if you did hit that “ACCEPT COOKIES” button it would take you to their 500 page terms and conditions document, which you would not read and would click and accept anyway, and this would make everything OK. The bottom line is that if I was evilcorp.com before the GDPR, I am not going to suddenly become angelcorp.com after it, I am just likely to obfuscate the fact I am doing evil behind these T&C’s, or some shell corporation in some tax haven and totally ignore the GDPR.

I understand the internet, I understand programs, I understand web protocols, but what I don’t understand, nor will I ever because life is too short are the inner WordPress program, its plugins, and the stack that my web hosting service runs to give you this fine web-site. I am not really a web person as they depend upon heaps and heaps of layers that are generally simple to implement and understand but nobody has the time to and so I trust that they don’t do anything that would cause worry. I trust but I don’t know, and if I asked my hosting provider, they would probably tell me the same, the internet is build on layers of trust that a few smart people and security experts (many unpaid) keep in check for us, and I thank them for it.

So does the GDPR do any good? It might, I really have no idea, and you have come to the wrong place if you expected me to answer this sensibly, I have not read the 99 regulations and I have never once not clicked on ACCEPT COOKIES.

Again there are probably some people in the various European Data Protection Agencies that do this (though I doubt it) and if they do I am sure they feel they are doing a crucial role in keeping the world safe. Personally (and probably controversially) I think the only thing they are keeping the world safe from is unemployed bureaucrats and lawyers. As far as I am concerned the Internet is the ultimate case of the wild-west and Buyer Beware, and if you are relying on regulations to protect you on it you are just being naive!

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