ABOUT AUTHOR
I am a 69-year-old father of a precocious 7 year-old which should tell you a lot right there. As an IP attorney with a focus on creating conscious computers, watching the spark of self-awareness suddenly burst forth from the indistinguishable collective background of my daughter’s “wetware” had a profound effect on me and my understanding of cognition.
Infants live in a world of “presentism” without the ability to connect events, memories, and use symbolic language. A mysterious recursive event arises somewhere around the first year when they can recognize themselves in the mirror and distinguish their immediate environment from themselves. This is the beginning of consciousness.
At my seasoned perspective of age and experience, the process of my daughter becoming “Charley” caused me to rethink the underlying theories about whether we can create a truly consciousness computer. As a computer programmer/developer, I came up with a new iteration of the storied Turing Test to better adjudge the very moment computers can truly think and “feel”. I wrote about this extensively and founded a startup to create the first system to actually pass the Turing Test.
As a lawyer of 38 years, I pondered the legal ramifications of creating artificial consciousness and articulated the legal pathway from robotic slavery to emancipation and how to achieve universal rights for sentient computers. I have lectured on these issues for lawyers and may be the only attorney focused on this subject.
With deep educational roots in political science and governmental service dating back to the Reagan Administration, I am uniquely qualified to predict how advanced AI will change our society at a macro level down to our daily life. Fasten your seatbelt because it will be a wild and dangerous ride.
The books which follow expound on a smorgasbord of topics including law, AI, political science, nature, physics, technology, history, and even time travel. I also make very specific predictions on what to expect starting now to the year 2050. Rather than recount prior events and dogma, I have tried to lay out new and unique concepts to better understand complex ideas and how we are in the midst of a “phase transition” which will change technology, society, and how we view ourselves and place in the universe. Of course, this is an exceedingly tall order.
Finally, my many lives and interests over the decades add a new and credible perspective and authenticity to my work than most writers who are beholden to a single and silo specialization. I am and have been a lawyer, entrepreneur, computer programmer, playwright, author, journalist, composer, lyricist, producer- and most importantly, a dad, albeit- a rather old one. However, only my exterior is a bit gray. I remain nimble in thought and energy. I’m still naive enough to believe that I can change the world.
I hope you enjoy the works which follow and look forward to your comments.
