Hugh Howey's Blog, page 3
March 16, 2024
WonderCon 2024 Schedule
WonderCon Anaheim is right around the corner, and I’ll be wandering around most days trying to figure out where my next panel might be. So come give me directions!
Friday:
11:30am – Author Signing Area – Special Guest Signing
Bring books / comics / whatevs. I’ll bring sharpies.
Saturday:
11:30am – Room 208 – “Writing: From Earth and Beyond”
SciFi authors talking craft.
12:45 – Author Signing Area – More book defiling
8pm – Room – “Hypnotic Language and Storytelling”
Not in the schedule, but I’ll be there. Trust.
Sunday:
11:30 am – Room 208 – “Spotlight on Hugh Howey”
An entire panel about me. Yikes.
1pm – Room 209 – “World Building and Breaking”
Pretty self-explanatory
2:15pm – Author Signing Area – “Writing My Name in Your Things”
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January 11, 2024
Attention is a Muscle
Most moments slip by, barely noticed. Our bodies are not optimized for constant delight; they are built for survival. And the more comfortable we get — the more we fall into routine — the more our bodies and minds are able to relax and go into auto.
This is why the first time you drive your first car down a country road feels so much different than the 40th time you drive that same route to and from school or work. That first time is exciting. Dangerous, even. You are in full-on survival mode. But later, after much repetition, you’re able to navigate the twists and turns while thinking on other things. You may even go several miles without “seeing” the road at all, a fact that can jolt us with fear when we realize we were driving on full-auto.
The first time I told my wife Shay that I loved her, I was so hyper aware and full of panic and fear that I couldn’t really say it at all. Part of me thought it was too early to say it, even though I knew on the day she kissed me for the first time that we would spend the rest of our lives together. Telling her I love her was and remains an electric sensation. Now, I can say it all the time. And I do.
But sometimes I say it with all the attention I can muster, and it’s different. It’s different in a way that makes me realize many more of our moments can be different. Instead of just saying “I love you,” I can hold her, take a deep breath, look her in her eyes, and even with this bit of pause and hesitation, I get her full attention. And then slowly, with our gazes locked, tell her in a calm and steady voice — “I love you.”
It brings tears to both our eyes, so different is this kind of directed attention to the moment. And it’s something we can do often and get better at. Attention, it turns out, is a muscle. A mental muscle. And it atrophies if we don’t use it.
Two of my favorite people and dearest friends in all the world are two of the people who are best at bearing their full attention on the moment they are inhabiting, or the thought that is currently swirling. Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand have retained a childlike wonder about the world partly because they regularly exercise their attention muscles. To be in their presence makes you feel present.
Kevin and I love to delight in the moment we are having by reminding ourselves, even if it’s just when we are eating fish and chips at a picnic table by the beach, that we are “doing the thing.” It’s as grounding in the moment as taking a friend by the shoulders, pausing, taking in a deep breath, and telling them that you love them. Holding them there in that moment. Like a drive on an unknown country road.
Kevin and Stewart have been friends for decades. Over forty years? An entire lifetime of knowing and respecting each other. During the pandemic, I was spending time with one of them and then the other, and something hit me: I have friends today that I will grow old with the same way that Kevin and Stewart grew old together. And it’ll happen with or without my attention. For most old friends, it happens without. You are young people who love each other, and then one day you are old friends who love each other. What you very rarely do — myself anyway — is imagine being old with your friends the same way you imagine being old with your spouse. But it still happens.
Sometimes you get miles down a road, around many twists and turns, without noticing you’re driving at all. A fact that should jolt us with fear and panic.
I’ve been lucky in every facet of my life: love, family, health, art, work, money… but if I had to rank one single place where my luck seems to know zero bounds, it’s been in the friendships I’ve enjoyed. I know everyone thinks this, and for everyone it is true, but I have the best friends anyone could ever ask for. So many that a constant worry is that I’ll never get enough time with any of them, much less all of them.
I have several friends whom I would consider a “best friend.” Yes, there can be more than one. It’s a category, not a superlative. It’s a very small group, and they know who they are, because I’m getting better and better in life with grabbing people and pulling them out of autopilot and into a moment with me and telling them how I feel about them. My best friends know they are my best friends. (What is a constant shock to me is when I discover that this is sometimes reciprocated. I never expect my best friends to consider me their best friends. I always assume they have an even closer relationship with someone else. That’s a different blog post.)
One of my best friends is a guy named Matt. I’m not his best friend, but he’s one of my very best friends. For a couple of reasons: he’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. And by “best,” I mean that I’ve never known anyone with a heart as pure as his, a curiosity as bright, a soul as searching. Even his imperfections are assets. He has one of the highest combos of EQ and IQ that I’ve ever come across. But there’s more than that: He’s one of the handful of people with whom I feel “at home.” Perfectly at peace.
I had surgery for the first time two years ago. It was my first time going under general anesthesia, a pretty scary experience. When I woke up, groggy and full of drugs hours later, I thought of two people: my mom and Matt. Those two people were home for me.
I try to express this to Matt as often as I can, and I love watching him try to absorb it, because he isn’t great at taking compliments. He’s not great at asking people for help, or asking for anything at all. Which is why it’s important to grab some people by the shoulders, or take them into our arms, hold their gaze just long enough that it’s almost uncomfortable, and say, right to their faces: “I love you.”
Start slowly if you must. It’s a muscle, after all. Don’t pull something. Begin with a breath, a simple inhalation, something we do a million times on autopilot without appreciating the life-giving chemical miracle of it all. Tree farts sustain us. Our yawns give them life in return. It’s a miracle any of this happens, or that we got down the last forty miles of road without an eyeblink of awareness…
But forget that. It’s in the rearview. Right now, we are alive and young and here with so much new, open, empty road ahead of us. We have the best friends any of us could ever ask for. We will get to grow old together. Pay attention together. And over and over again, we get to find our way home with one another.
Happy birthday, Matt.
Deep breath.
Wait for it.
You know I mean it.
I love you.
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December 18, 2023
Beacon 23 Season 2!
Lots of reporting this weekend about another season of Beacon 23! The first season is wrapped, and MGM+ has released a teaser for what’s in store for next year.
Also happy to report that SILO is filming again on season 2, so working to get you more of both shows as soon as possible. :)
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December 11, 2023
Book Signing Live!
Shay and I will be signing the rest of your orders and shipping them out this week! Come join us on Thursday around 8pm EST. We’ll be in our jammies with hot chocolate listening to holiday tunes. Happy to answer questions and chat while I scribble in your books.
The above video should go live at the appointed time. And if you want to snag one of the few remaining books, there are a handful left at: www.broadreachpublishing.com. When they’re gone, they’re gone! We’re basically cleaning house, so everything has to go.
Oh, and every signed book is getting a special Silo stamp that we made for the TV show premiere. And Elinor Taylor is sending signed postcards for anyone who orders Balloon Hunter and Death to Anyone Who Reads this as a combo set! Best way possible to get both our signatures in these amazing books (which you should totally read anyway).
See you soon!
(Also, when you are ordering books, I’ll sign them to whatever first name you put in the shipping instructions. If you just want them signed with no inscription, put “Bernard” for the first name!)
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December 8, 2023
Signed Books for a Limited Time!
The “too long, didn’t watch all your YouTube video” version (TLDWAYYV): I have a very limited number of books lying about, and so Shay created a website to sell these to you all!
These are for the collector / gift-giver and are priced due to rarity (first printings, first editions, out-of-print editions, etc.) Shipping within the US only, unfortunately. We will try to get these out as soon as the orders come in, so despite what I say in the video, should have them to you before Christmas if you order in the next week or so (USPS willing).
When you check out, I’ll sign the books to the name in the shipping information. So if it’s a gift, use the recipient’s first name. If you don’t want it personalized, put “Bernard” in for your first name and I’ll flatsign it.
Go here for more: www.broadreachpublishing.com
Love you all! Happy Holidays!
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November 21, 2023
A Common Misunderstanding
I recently attended an interview with the great filmmaker and writer Werner Herzog over at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. It was a wide-ranging discussion full of insights and laughs, with Werner being his usual charming and quirky self. But he said one thing that I disagree with, something that I’ve heard several times before. He lamented the extinction of human language. He went so far as to say that the loss of human languages was as grave a threat as the loss of animal species.
Werner is not wrong about this happening. Some of the numbers from The Language Conservency:
Right now, 9 languages a year, or one every 40 days, cease to be spoken. By 2080, the rate will rise to 16 languages per year. By the middle of the next century, we will be losing our linguistic heritage at the rate of 26 languages each year—one every two weeks. If we do not tackle the problem of language loss, more than half of all languages will become extinct in the next 100 years.
Yes, it is happening. And I think this is a very good thing.
Change is scary. So much so that when change happens, we tend to get scared right away without asking ourselves whether or not the change is an improvement or a catastrophe. We tend to assume catastrophe. We are wired this way.
It makes sense. To be here at all means the world was amenable to our existence. Change might threaten this. But may I suggest a thought experiment when we notice something is changing: play the film in reverse.
Let’s imagine some weird sci-fi scenario where every day we woke up and some portion of the human population could not speak with some other portion. New languages were appearing at a rate of 9 a year. Growing to 16 per year. Folks who could formerly speak to one another were now needing to do a lot of work to translate their thoughts. Languages and cultures were becoming more distinct and fractured. Human culture became less global and more tribal, shrinking and shrinking as the number of new languages continued to explode!
This dystopian nightmare is how deities were said to have punished humans in our religious myths. It’s the Tower of Babel, a story in which we lose our collective power because we can no longer communicate, coordinate, pool our thoughts and wisdom. The loss of language is a reversal of this punishment. It’s a coming together, a union of the human spirit and soul, a growth of communication and understanding. The opposite would be far worse.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t preserve and record human languages for prosperity if possible. They are unique and interesting, and it’s a worthwhile hobby to spend some energy on. But the gnashing of teeth is a bit overdone.
A big change that poses a major problem for us is global warming, but here again it’s worth employing our thought experiment. By many estimations, we should be going into another ice age right about now. Industrialization may have staved that off, and in fact may have made future ice ages unlikely to ever occur. It’s easy to imagine the effects on civilization if the change in temperature that we are concerned about was heading in the opposite direction. Glaciers would encroach and then topple cities, gouging out the very land on which they rest. The habitable zone would shrink, compressing mankind toward the equator. We would be racing to expel greenhouse gasses to stop the cooling and save all the ecosystems destroyed by the gathering ice and shrinking seas.
We aren’t going through that, thankfully. The change that’s happening is far from ideal, but it might not be as bad as the inverse. Trees and plants have more food in the atmosphere, rather than less. Ice is receding rather than marching inexorably toward our homes and cities and fragile ecosystems. We will likely find that we can limit the rate of warming and find a stasis, and that future warmings and coolings will be solvable problems.
Or we might discover in some distant, hopeful future, that change in and of itself is not the worst thing imaginable. We are just wired to think this is so, and to mutter about it incomprehensibly amongst ourselves.
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Limits of Knowledge
Many of the fears about what AI might do in the future come from curves like this:
And curves like this:
But there’s an assumption in these curves that don’t follow from any observation, and that’s the assumption that knowledge and speed have no upward bound. The arrow points almost straight up, as if a vertical asymptote exists along the X axis. As if there’s a becalmed future that cannon exist.
But it’s far more likely that the asymptote lies on the Y axis. It’s far more likely that there’s a limit to things-we-can-know and speeds-with-which-we-can-compute.
The graph of future computation probably looks more like:
This is a sigmoid curve, or a classic s-curve (of which there are many varieties). It has a lower and upper bound. Of all the things we could assume about the future of AI, it seems more reasonable to me that the space of knowable things is finite and the speed of compute is finite. There’s a finite amount of silicon in the universe. There’s a finite amount of energy pouring out of the sun. There’s a finite amount of mass to fuse and fissure and extract energy. There’s a finite amount of heat we can pour into the atmosphere without boiling ourselves alive.
We could thus prove that the AI takeoff curve has an upper bound. Which means we can dispense with the curve that points to infinity and beyond and talk more rationally about where the upper asymptote lies. Because — and here’s my real hot take — I won’t be surprised if we discover that humans have already gobbled up MOST of the low-hanging fruit of things-to-know.
We may have already accomplished, intellectually, 80% of everything there is to accomplish. One might argue that it’s only 20%. Or as low as 1%. But I believe we will find that our most advanced AIs are only slightly more capable than we are, rather than the thousands or millions of times more capable one may assume from the curves that point toward infinity.
When ChatGPT 3.5 released one year ago this month, it achieved a level of usefulness far greater than anything before it. If we think of training tokens as neurons, we’d finally wired up enough of them in a useful enough way that an emergent property arose from the ether. Much as human intelligence and consciousness is an emergent property of our brains reaching a certain size and and neuronal density.
As we train much larger models with more advanced techniques, these LLMs will get even smarter and more capable. Perhaps twice as smart. But if we get flummoxed or folks seem confused about diminishing returns, I think a sigmoid curve might be a better model to keep in mind than an infinite curve. We may have already taken up most of the space of what’s possible.
What will be left, then (and what ChatGPT already excels at) is speed. That will be the useful feature of AI in the future. I argue that it’s already the useful thing about AI. I can use an image generator to get art immediately rather than waiting hours or days to get a human to create it. I could ask ChatGPT to churn out this article in under a minute, rather than the days of thinking and hours of writing that it will take me. Right now, the result of either is slightly worse than the output of a human. But the speed is so much quicker that the trade-off is worth it.
Pretty soon, we will enter an era in which AI is slightly better than us at almost every endeavor. I don’t understand the assumption that it will go from there to infinitely better. Or even ten times better. The fears we have about AI in the future are based on a strange assumption that has no foundation here in the present.
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October 18, 2023
Beacon 23 is Spinning Up!
Two episodes dropping in just a few weeks!
https://screenrant.com/beacon-23-show-trailer-lena-headey/
https://collider.com/beacon-23-trailer/
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September 29, 2023
New York Comic Con 2023
New York Comic Con is almost upon us! Did you know that this is the biggest such con in the US? Around 200,000 people converge on the Javitz Center every year to celebrate all things geekdom. San Diego Comic Con (also amazing) gets around 130,000 or so attendees.
Shay and I went last year and had a blast. I signed some books and spoke on some panels to celebrate the release of Across the Sand.
My usual routine at cons is to go to my panels and signings, and otherwise walk around and enjoy the con as a fan. I drop in on friends, find folks at their booths, and roam around. However … I learned something amazing at Tampa Bay Comic Con this year when Galaxy Press set me up in their booth for the duration of the con: It’s so much better to have a place where folks can come find you.
I’ll have a table in the Writers Block section of Artist Alley. It’s on Level 1, Hall 1B, down near the Barnes & Noble booth. I’ll be set up at table 14. Here are a couple ‘o maps to help you find your way:
Something very new for me: I’m going to have books on-hand for you to purchase directly and get signed. I’ll also sign anything you bring along. I’m going to bring some fun artifacts to check out as well, including some rare old editions of my books, a ton of behind the scenes photographs from the sets of Silo and Beacon 23, and perhaps a few other surprises.
Come by and say hello, pick up a book or two, or take a selfie with me!
with a stellar collection of authors in Jim Butcher, Delilah S. Dawson, John Jackson Miller, and Alex Segura. They will be discussing the art of writing in other people’s worlds, something I’ve experienced from both directions (writing in Kurt Vonnegut’s world of Slaghterhouse Five and having others write in my Wool and Sand universes). Should be an incredible discussion!
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Beacon 23 Release Date!
Big news for Beacon fans! The TV adaptation lands on November 12th, less than two months from now! It will premiere on MGM+, which is owned by Amazon, so I suspect it’ll be an add-on to your Prime account. I know, I know, someone should invent cable and bundle these things together…
Starring Stephan James and Lena Heady, Beacon 23 tells the story of a lighthouse operator in outer space. There are two seasons filmed. The first season was created and showrun by Zak Penn. The cast, crew, and sets were absolutely epic. Can’t wait to share the story with you all!
More here:
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