A brief update on my book plans and progress. The optimistic roster of forthcoming books is something like this:
- Bioelectricity, what it is and what it means, written with Oné Pagán. This trade book (i.e., for the general public) will be out from W. W. Norton & Co. in 2027. The content has been finished for a while; we’ve received editor comments, made the needed revisions, and sent it back. It’s well on its way! I’m very excited to see it out.
- Next comes a series of co-written trade books with less firm schedules, but some of them should be done in late 2026 or in 2027 and out in 2027 or 2028:
- With Richard Watson, on a new way to see evolution, the engine of change in life and mind, and the implications from personal to societal levels.
- With Olaf Witkowski, on our future with novel beings of all kinds, and their future with us.
- With Marsa Hickey, a children’s book introducing concepts of diverse intelligence, aimed at both human children and the unconventional new minds entering our world.
- Next should come my own magnum opus on diverse intelligence. This will be an academic book (rigorous, fully referenced, technical in places, but still written to be understandable to a very wide audience across fields). It will cover my view of the origin, scaling and transformation of minds, in evolved, engineered, and hybrid embodiments, and the implications for our future.
- At some point will come a trade book on the Platonic Space. Part 1 will be rigorous and explain everything we know about non-physical causal forces in biology, computer science, and cognitive science. Part 2 will be a bit of a departure for my outward-facing work – it will contain personal speculations on bigger questions I don’t normally talk about in public.
- There’s also a large menagerie of miscellaneous things I’ve been toying with – fiction, philosophy, and some other stuff. No idea if or when I’ll actually get to these, but there are tons of notes and outlines and such.
I should say a few words about the glacial pace of these… It annoys me terribly – all of these are somewhat already formed in my head and burning to get out. I actually write pretty quickly, and could get much of this banged out on a reasonable schedule (#3 will be the hardest). The problem is that all of this has to be done in the spare minutes in between writing primary research papers and running a large lab and 2 Centers (not to mention other things). I’m simply not ready yet to let the pace on regeneration, cancer, aging, and birth defects research slow down in favor of expository writing. I may get there, and retire to write books in the woods, or I may drop dead in my office while on a zoom meeting looking at Anthrobot data or something, I haven’t decided but the latter seems more likely. People tell me it’s important to inspire others to do things, and I agree; but then again, it kind of seems wrong to slow down progress to address human suffering in the hope that someone else will be inspired to do it (unless they too decide to slow down and write to inspire yet others, and then no one does anything). There’s a balance here somewhere, and I’m trying to find it but no one knows the best mix. At some point I’ll show a pie chart of the emails I get telling me to drop X and spend more time on Y. Let’s just say that every possible combination of {X,Y} seem to be represented.
Some people suggest a ghost-writer, or AI. Here’s the problem. I recently tried AI in this context – it does a really good job. Maybe soon it will do a better job. But no one needs me to put out an AI-written book on my work – if you want that, you can feed your own preferred AI with my published papers and talks, and get it to tell you the story at whatever level of detail you want. You can already do that – I’ve put out tons of material that is publicly available; a massive number of AI-written books on my ideas and our data awaits, if anyone wants that. The only reason for me to put something out is if I have personally gone over every line and it says exactly what I want it to say. I’m not putting my name on anything that isn’t just what I wanted to say, and re-writing half the lines of an AI- (or ghost-writer-) generated book saves me no time. I might as well just write it myself – editing others’ writing takes me longer than getting it down in the first place. And I’m very picky, so it really will be editing every line, for better or worse. I just don’t have the bandwidth for much of that now.
In the meantime, I’ve got many decisions to make. First, should these even be traditional books? I love physical books; I grew up devouring books, ever grateful to the authors. But publishers nowadays don’t even want us to use color (can you believe that?), nevermind enable interactive figures or a non-linear traversal through the material. The whole medium seems very stuck in the past. Maybe there’s no point in a “book” at all, maybe it should just live online with glorious color, VR, animation, interactive code notebooks, etc. Do I really want to confine it in the pages of a paper book? But then, could I stand not being able to hold the thing in my hands? My grandfather wrote a book on radio electronics, my father wrote several books on history, they are here on my shelf behind me and I can touch them and flip through the pages. Am I going to break the streak? ugh…
Then there’s the issue of what else to write. The primary data (experimental, computational) papers need to come out, that’s a given. But what about those lengthy reviews and perspective chapters I write? I had to fight the journal hard for permission to publish the ~30K words of my TAME paper for example (digital journals have length limits why?!), then debate with reviewers over content, then pay the publisher thousands of $ for the privilege of handing the rights over to them. Looking back, I wonder if there is any point in this now – maybe I should just save all that material for my own books and skip the journal publishers, but that stretches out the timeline. Plus, I don’t know if people read the long perspective pieces anyway, nor whether anyone has time to read the books. I’ve got a stack of amazing papers and books sitting here that I have no time to get to, and I assume everyone else who can make use of this stuff are just as busy. So I’m back to the guess that most people who are in a position to move the needle based on my ideas will be too busy to read the whole thing anyway, and may ask AI to summarize it for them. So then, should I be writing long-form at all? AI’s don’t need all the filler text, they don’t care about grammar, or any of the other stuff that editors make us polish, freeing up research time if I can just get the ideas down and move on. Should I be writing for the AIs, who will inevitably be the largest audience (whether prompted by humans, or soon, by their own interests), to optimize their understanding and ability to re-tell my story to whatever entity wants to hear it? I can’t tell. So for now I just go with my gut and write things when they tell me they want to be written “right now”, in whatever way they say they want to be written.
Featured image by Midjourney.
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