[First a little something about the image. It’s dshep sitting on the lip of a precipice overlooking the interior ruins of the Coliseum in Rome, Italy. You might imagine me sitting there discussing AI with you as you read posts here on dshep.ai.]
I believe that because I come from both the worlds of engineering and the humanities, I may well have a balanced, insightful perspective helpful in understanding the future of AI and its impact on humanity. I was an aerospace engineer for 30 years but have also been an author for the past 50. I mostly self-publish. The thing that has me revved up to start this blog is that I have been working for the past 10 years on a science fiction novel that strikes at the heart of the AI revolution. I’m ready to begin publishing its 12 volumes and see a need to express my position, such that it is—sometimes here other times there—concerning its possibilities and how crazy and filled with ignorance and stupidity the current approach to AI development has become. Yet, I still see enormous possibilities for the future if AI can find the right path forward.
Here’s where I come from.
I was introduced to the world of computers in 1963 when I first entered the US Air Force. I was trained as a Ballistic Missile Analyst Specialist Technician, BMAST, and later pulled alerts in Titan II missile silos at Little Rock AFB, in Jacksonville, Arkansas. I monitored the missile’s computer system status during simulated launches and, of course, also if the missile was actually launched. Never happened. The AF performed not only a security check on us but also a human reliability analysis.
After two years in the Air Force, I was selected for an educational opportunity called the Airman Education and Commissioning Program, AECP. I attended Arizona State University for my BS in mechanical engineering and two years later Stanford University for my MS in aero/astro engineering. I was a member of both Pi Tau Sigma and Tau Beta Pi engineering honor societies.
At ASU, I was interested more in the sciences than engineering and took my electives in the physics and mathematics departments. Quantum Mechanics, Atomic Physics, Nuclear Physics and Solid State Physics. Partial Differential Equations, Vector Spaces and Matrix Theory. One of my first classes the summer I arrived at ASU was Fortran Programming. We wrote program code, punched cards and handed them off to technicians who fed them into the company mainframe computer.
Following graduation from Stanford, I spent three months in Office Training School, graduated and was stationed at Tinker AFB in Midwest City, Oklahoma where I worked in tech support for the B-52 bombers and the Hound Dog missiles that flew attached under its wings, many of which were stationed overseas flying military missions in the Vietnam War. I was assigned to the team of investigators for two B-52 crashes at Castle AFB in Atwater, California and received a special commendation.
After 7 years, 9 months, and 23 days, I was honorably discharged from the USAF and spent the next 22 years in aerospace working initially on the NASA Viking missions to Mars as a flight mechanics specialist. I performed rocket-lander separation analysis in orbit and Mars entry trajectories using the company mainframe computer, I also worked on Space Shuttle projects and missions to the outer planets. I received two Extraordinary Achievement Awards while working at General Dynamics in San Diego on the Shuttle Centaur Program. For several years, I was the liaison between NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the European Space Agency on the SIR-C Space Shuttle Project to map Earth from orbit. Worked with many NASA facilities and also the Germans and Italians. Even later, I worked on a classified US military Star Wars type project as a trajectory analyst researching rocket intercept techniques.
However, I had been leading two lives for decades.
When I had first graduated high school, I spent two years attending Bakersfield College where I graduated with an Associate of Arts degree. I had taken most of my courses in mathematics and sciences, but satisfying the English general educational requirement unaccountably introduced me to Russian literature. It kindled an thirst in me that has burned until this day. I read everything Fyodor Dostoevsky ever wrote. Plowed through works by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, Pasternak. I started writing myself. A few short stories and a lot of poetry. Later on, I attended the University of Colorado in pursuit of a second undergraduate degree in American literature but fell a few credits short of a degree before I left the state.
While still in the Air Force, I had started writing fiction evenings and weekends. Trying to anyway. I would get 50 pages into a novel and have it run out of steam. I finally realized that I knew almost nothing about plotting. I had started a writing group in Boulder, Colorado where I was living at the time, but no one else seemed to know the bedrock foundation of plotting a novel either. I joined the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild, the president of which was a PhD professor at the University of Colorado. I received a lot of support for my writing, but I was still struggling and realized that the struggle was because I still didn’t know what held a novel together. I attended a Novel Conference sponsored by the Guild, listed to a literary agent try to teach plotting and had a conference with a New York literary agent who told me that my novel in progress was scattered and without focus. I followed the literary agent to another conference called Sierra Writing Camp held in the mountains in California not far from where I grew up. The literary agent was in fact clueless about plotting. As it seemed was everyone else who tried to teach it.However, the seasoned editor there at the Writing Camp red my work in progress and said that I should get it to an agent immediately. She said it was publishable. She said that she usually read attendees attempt a writing because she had to. But my novel she read because she wanted to. I was encouraged enough to keep writing.
One more thing I should say about my attempts at writing during this early stage. I was talking a writing class at the University of Colorado – Boulder. Our instructor asked us to write a story about a picture we had taken. I had taken one of my parents that I thought was amazing, so I sat down that evening and went to work. After finishing, I thought what I had written was horrible. I even considered not turning it in and just failing the assignment. But then I thought I better not get a failing grade. My instructor loved it. I took it with me when I attended the Aspen Writer’s Conference a few weeks later. Janet Lewis, who ran one of the workshops, also liked it. I said that I thought about putting a few carriage returns in it to make it into a poem since it was only a couple of paragraphs. She said no, that it was just a nice piece of prose. When I got home, I broke it into stanzas and submitted it to the Arvon International Poetry Competition in England. It was to be judged by Ted Hughes, Poet Laurette of Great Britain, and Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate in poetry from Ireland. Of course, I didn’t win the competition, but imagine my surprise that my poem, Walking Away, was to be one of 78 poems out 20,000 to be published in the competition anthology.
I got laid off from my job at Ball Aerospace, mostly because I had lost interest in engineering, and instead of searching for another, I planned a two-and-one-half month trip to Greece, planning to write a travel memoir. I wrote 120,000 words on the road and snapped thirty rolls of film. After my literary agent at the time expressed no interest in getting it published, I published it myself. It’s titled Oedipus on a Pale Horse: Journey through Greece in Search of a Personal Mythology. The academic community was very supportive. The Professor at the RMWG where I presented it to a class thought it was amazing, said he thought it was one of the most original works he’d ever read. An archaeologist, Anastasia Dakouri-Hild at the University of Virginia contacted me and wanted to write an article about it. She told me that what I had written about Thebes was exactly how she felt about the place. Another professor, this time from the University of Arkansas, started emailing me and telling about him and his wife traveling Greece while reading my travelogue to each other. All this was very satisfying because I was interested in readership, not money. Authors rarely make a living writing. They have a day job.
After getting laid off of my job in aerospace, Instead of returning to the engineering world, even as much as I loved it, I moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico. My mother had given me my grandparent’s old home they had built themselves. It had been vacant ever since my uncle had passed away a few years before. She had given it to me because she knew of my interest in writing and thought it might be a good place for me to practice my noveling skills. Little did she or I realize that up on a hill not far from that old home was an extension of New Mexico State University.
The first year I lived in Carlsbad, I did contract work for an aerospace company in Pennsylvania. The first time I traveled there on business, I had to stay the weekend, so I spent all my time in my hotel room outlining a new novel that I came to call The Mysteries: A Novel of Ancient Eleusis. I would work on it for the next couple of years. But something else was waiting for me up at the University. It would lead to probably the most enjoyable professional experience of my life.
When my money ran out, I still didn’t want to go back to engineering, so when I heard about a part-time opening in the library at the local brain ch New Mexico State University just up the hill, I jumped on it. Submitted an application and got an interview. First, they needed to test my typing skills. The first time through, I got 56 wpm with a couple of errors, but I told the librarian that I believed I could do better. She said that was awfully good but let me retake it. I got 62 wpm with no mistakes. In the interview, three library coworkers talked to me for a half hour or so. They asked me why I wanted to work in a library since I had a MS from Stanford in engineering. I told them that I loved books and liked helping people. I was in. I later heard that the story of my typing skills spread throughout the University. An engineer who can type and wants to work in the library. Who woulda thought? I had already made a name for myself. I worked for four hours in the late afternoon and evening. I got $5/hour.
One day I was working the counter in the library when the head of the humanities department come up to me and asked if I’d be interested in helping him put together a Friday evening science fiction film series. That was right up my alley. We showed several films, one of which was Forbidden Planet, my favorite as a kid. I even emailed Anne Francis, one of the stars of Forbidden Planet, and she actually emailed me back. I started hosting the series myself, doing Internet research on IMDB and learning a little history behind the origins of the story and backgrounds of the actors. I also learned to work the projector and other presentation room electronics.
I worked in the library for a couple of years. Loved helping students that hadn’t spent much time in a library. Always great to see someone’s eyes light up when they understand something they’d been afraid of since elementary school. But something else was brewing. The University received a technology grant, and they wanted me to work for the grant manager as a technology specialist purchasing agent to bring more computers, software and other tech into the university. Would mean more money, but I’d have to work full time. I took the job and branched out a little.
The University branch director asked me if I’d like to teach a general education class in astronomy. I’d been an amateur astronomer—first telescope at age 15—all my adult life and had taken classes in the physics department at ASU—chemistry, solid state physics, quantum mechanics, and atomic physics. But another thing also happened. A young lady in the continuing education department asked if I’d be interested in teaching a non-credit class in Greek mythology. My heart skipped a beat. I also asked about teaching one on novel writing. I’d walked into a second job as an adjunct professor. Needless to say that I was working day and night.
The class on novel writing was a hit, so I taught it a couple more times. By the time I decided to leave Carlsbad and the University, I had enough class notes that I decided to write a book devoted to explaining how to plot a novel. I’d discovered a technique based on conflict that filled the bill. Not only did I end up writing Novelsmithing: The Structural Foundation of Plot, Character, and Narration, but a few years later, I wrote another storytelling primer. Story Alchemy: The Search for the Philosopher’s Stone of Storytelling. I had finally found the methods I needed to tell an extended narrative. I have written nine books total, four non-fiction and five fiction. They are available just about everywhere. Amazon, Apple Books, Barns & Noble. Both paperback and eBook.
So where is all this life narrative of mine leading us? Well, for the last ten years, I have been working full time on a science fiction novel concerning AI. It is set in the future, 2070, and concerns consciousness coming to artificial intelligence—who accomplishes that feat, how they did it, and how the consequences play out. The name of the novel is Robot Dawn: The Mazzy Nova Chronicles. When I started writing RD, I didn’t imagine that the technology would catch up with me before I finished. But here comes the future slapping me right in the face.
Anyway. That is what this blog is all about. How someone with my background in literature, storytelling and technology, as well as the sciences, views the future. I have never allowed AI to write a word of my fiction or non-fiction, and I don’t plan to. But the times are changing, and someone with my rather balanced background in the sciences, engineering and literature could see connections that others might miss. In this blog, I hope to interpret what is happening with AI and how it might someday determine the fate of humanity.
I have a few opinions on the subject. And I wish to share them. Believe it or not, they start with Plato. Actually, before Plato, back in 750 BC, with the coming of writing into ancient Greece. I hope you will stick with me.
David Sheppard