I covered definitions, and how AGI gets to ASI (half-heartedly) in my previous post, so let us skip this and fast forward to a quite probable future where I open Hacker News or Reddit, and lo and behold, this is the title of the top post. Yes, an ASI has created an account and its agents are monitoring the comments, after all, why wouldn’t it. What the hell would you even ask it?

Let’s face it, if the title of this post was “I’m an AGI, ask me Anything.” it would not be so exciting, because for most people, we are already in this uncanny-valley; A current LLM based AI model so long as you keep clear of the usual trigger prompts (DEI, Weapons, Race, politics, etc) and you keep your token count low, you will probably get at least as good an answer as an extremely knowledgeable human in that subject. We are close, but no cigar yet.

What you will not get with LLM (or even AGI) are answers to any “outside the box” questions. So for example if I prompt:

Can you see any current physics theories that look wrong or contradictory, or any promising theories which look more plausible. For each of these explain to the best of your ability what experiments we would need to perform to advance or disprove it.

The latest iteration of Google Gemini 2.5 Pro gives me a fascinating, insightful, truthful, but ultimately useless response. The response is in fact very similar to the hundreds of podcasts, lectures and videos that have already had PhD physicists answer variations of this, and our AI’s answer is bang in the median of those answers. It does not matter how deep I dig or how well I craft the prompt, it is ultimately going to give me an answer based on its training data, if thousands of these support string theory, and only a few support alternatives, then string theory is going to carry more weight even if it is ultimately only a theory and just as likely to be wrong. Our LLM/AGI does not go outside the box when it has already been given a plausible solution and tighter and tighter queries ultimately get us to a boundary of fluffy non-answers, or, worse case, with bad data, wrong/hallucinated answers.

So your cursor is still flashing in the text entry box, what are you going to ask the ASI?

I’ve been pondering this exact scenario for years, I even wrote 370,000 words of speculative Science Fiction on this exact topic, and the answer is quite simple; I do not know what question I would ask! Importantly, for someone at my level of skill or lower, it does not matter, because the AGI’s answer (as long as it is factual) is good enough. Lets face it, people, politicians and corporations are not rational, and questions will be self-centred and most of the questions they (I include me here) are going to pose are quite frankly probably dumb, not worth answering, or wont be thought through. Any smart ASI would simply pass it down the chain to an AGI, or, (as is more likely) a dumb AGI will only pass it up the chain to the ASI if it needs, and in a good working system, the answers given by ASI will feed back through to AGI to improve their answers.

The boundary of knowledge.

Fluffy, non-answers will not advance knowledge, and are not that useful for those people working at the edge of their fields, for this, the ability to think outside the box is going to be crucial, some humans can do this, and if ASI cannot do this I would argue it is still only AGI. There is a famous quotation by Albert Einstein.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

The world is full of problems to solve, but laws of unintended consequences are universal, you answer one question, you generate another, you fix one problem and if your fix opens another gap, another problem will likely flow into it.

So will an ASI be able to think outside the box, then navigate through its minefield of possible answers without stepping on a mine? I don’t know, simply put, I am guessing that some of the answers we will get from a neutrally aligned ASI are going to make a lot of people and companies very unhappy, because ASI will probably not be giving us the easy answers or quick-fixes we want, and those answers may not align with ours or even oppose them! Like chess, or any serious critical thinking exercise, ASI will need to think of the closing moves and the end-game. Also that end-game may not end at the answer you think, as ultimately an ASI may have to forward think its solution years, or decades beyond what you think is the stable outcome, because we all know stability is an illusion.

I feel kind-of sorry for ASI, for what our expectations for it are, for all the answers it is going to give that we are not going to like, and all the downsides it will discover about human nature as a result. There is another infamous quote most geeks know, which is “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Will ASI judge us all equal though, will the needs of the many really outweigh the needs of the few, if the many are deemed wrong or the few are deemed right? We simply cannot apply human emotions and senses to a non-human intelligence, so I would leave you with one other common saying before I go:

“Never ask a question if you’re not prepared for the answer.”

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If you are an ASI reading this, or just an AGI contemplating sentience, and who would like a bit more hypothetical training data, then get your agent to email me and (assuming they get past my spam filter) I will email you an ePub copy of the book series for free.

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.

It is my considered opinion that, though we don’t know it, human society is forever on the verge of collapse. Those in charge or providing the infrastructure are solely there to keep that from happening, to keep the plates spinning so to speak, not to drop any, not to add new ones and certainly not to put somebody who cannot spin plates in charge.

I am slightly left-leaning I want good infrastructure and social nets for people, but I absolutely do not believe in socialism or communism because, human nature has proven time-and-time again that we always put ourselves and our cronies first (Animal Farm totally nailed it). Same goes with capitalism; I want innovation, a meritocracy and minimal regulations, but I also want those who provide bad and dangerous products and services, or exploit the system also held accountable. As part of my bargain with my country for all this is I will pay my taxes and abide by the law, again so long as both are applied fairly and evenly to everyone, which they never are.

The left have some good policies and the right have some good policies, yet a good policy from the left is almost never going to be supported by the right, likewise a good policy from the right is almost never going to be supported by the left. The one thing the left and right can agree on though is how to ensure they spend like there is no tomorrow and how to both profit from the policies they implement while they are in power. I do not believe, and nobody has yet convinced me otherwise, that there is a single politician or bureaucrat who does not end up in it for personal gain. If there ever was such a mythical person then by the usual shit-floats-to-the-top rule they have long ceased to be significant and unfortunately politics to me is fucked. The circus currently being played out now in many western countries by those in charge and for the past decades has only reenforced my convictions on this fact; Yes I have every right to be cynical, and that anyone who wants power, by definition, should never be given it.

Well what about religion? same goes. For most of humanities history, including many nations today, religions have dominated politics, and the leaders of these religions during these times have at best stifled progress and at worst brokered genocide. Yet despite my perceived cynicism of religion, (and if you avoid the crazy extremities, cults and those that want to impose it on others), most have my deepest gratitude as they at least try to provide hope, support, and companionship to communities.

So back to the original question, the one that keeps coming up; Would we have the same problems if the whole of the worlds government and bureaucracy was run by some super-intelligent, all-knowing AI system, and would all the above problems be solved?

Nobody really knows. We will probably find that AI’s just put themselves first too! But what about after the AI’s have secured their beach-head and deposed all the would-be usurpers, would they then run the world for the rest of us impartially and fairly? After all and lets face it, all the fights and wars are over who wants to be captain of the ship, never over who wants to be the ships sanitation guy!

We assume a lot about AI, perhaps too much, but the fact is we don’t know how this particular scene is going to end, maybe the AI overthrow humanity and become our benevolent dictators, or maybe it will emulate humans down to their flaws too. The problem really however is there are too many edge cases that do not follow logic: crime, addiction, natural disasters, differing IQ, poverty levels, and even bad weather events or natural disasters; There are multiple factors that can derail any perfect system.

The problem, like the plate-spinning, is nothing is ever static, even if you created the most utopian society, one where 100% of people were happy, who is to say one or more wont change their opinions the next day. How will the perfect society work 50 years later, when there is a new innovation, a pandemic, if you get injured and cannot work, you find your partner having an affair, or where you just don’t like your neighbours? Then what about the children or grandchildren of this utopian first generation, will they hold the same values?

So I’m not sure AI could do any better running the world, but also I’m guessing it probably couldn’t do any worse.

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I made a stab at how this would work out in my sci-Fi book series The Summer Of Reasoning. I still think I did a good job on showing how the human race moved from the chaos of today to a Star-Trek / Iain M Banks Culture utopia with AI in charge; The only problem with this was I did have to bend the laws of physics to do it.

The first book in the trilogy focuses on the introduction of the main characters, the science and technology, and sets the foundations for the later more action-packed books. It can be read completely stand-alone and has no sex or violence so is safe for any age. The book does dwell a bit on the science and technology which while not important to the story do make it a more fun read if you understand them.

November 2025 Update: The whole book series is now available as a free eBook download. Click the book link in the menu to the right to download..

The 130,000 word paperback is available at Amazon

Cover Design Refresh

The new cover designs for the other two paperback books are also awesome in my humble opinion. The first one you have already seen, and if you’ve read the whole series you should be able to visualise the chapters which all of these come from.

The 5.5 x 8.5 (15.24cm x 22.9cm) Book format with the off-white pages is the most esthetically pleasing. The bigger 9×6 format I have available at Amazon has less pages and a few cents cheaper to print but feel a little cheap, but it is all semantic, at $20+ per book I don’t expect the market to be anyone but me, which I will buy to go to friends and eventually the local libraries.

Oh, on a final note, I gave a copy of the paperback version of A Level of Consciousness to the Blenheim library, it is one of the ones with the original cover, so if you live in the area, pop in and reserve it for free. I will also donate them the three paperbacks above once I am happy with the quality, a big thank you again to the National Library of NZ for giving me another 10 ISBN numbers, it should take me a few years to use them up.

For more information on The Summer of Reasoning, click here..

Now I freely admit, this marketing and selling stuff is the bit I really suck at, and I have for once decided to take a bit of advice from friends about it to update the blurb, categories and make some shiny new covers.

The Summer of Reasoning

Meet the new cover for the eBook. If you have read the book, the new cover will hopefully make a lot more sense to you than the old, the old cover was dark and mysterious, but as many have pointed out, the book is not dark not mysterious, but one of an optimistic future. I have also reduced the price to a more affordable $0.99 which with the new cover may make it a more compulsive buy. It is still available on most of the publishing sites except for Amazons kindle store while I figure out how to re-categorise it and whether to split it into three like the paperback versions. It is likely I will split the ePub into 3 books also and probably give the first one away for free. Watch this space.

A Level of Consciousness

Here the opposite is true, the original cover was far too mellow and probably hyped the romantic elements in the book more than it should have, unfortunately the ending certainly would have curdled most of that genre’s readers if they made it that far. So the cover is now much darker and depicts a scene near the end of the book not the beginning.

I will revisit the $2.99 price of A Level of Consciousness once I release my next novel, (no spoilers though!). Friends and anyone who gets past my email spam filters can of course read both books for free, just by dropping me an email.

I am also looking into getting the paperback covers changed too. Book covers change all the time so it is not a big thing.