I started drafting the actual manuscript of Book 2 of The Bitstreams Thread in late January. The process has been interrupted multiple times by my day job and book-related travel, but it’s progressing. The outline is holding up well, suggesting that much of the thinking around the story has already been done and the publishing process will be more streamlined than last time. With a bunch of day job and book travel behind me, I now have more time to spend on writing.
As always, I have a sense of urgency for publishing the book because I’m afraid reality will outstrip my fiction and it’ll be too late for my books to make any difference in how AI affects our world. Many insiders are now predicting confidently that we’ll have human-style AGI within the decade, possibly as early as 2026. As I get into agentic AI technology for my day job, I can see that exponential progress is real. ChatGPT was released just two years and four months ago, and the state of the art is much, much more advanced today. As William Gibson observed, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The average person has no idea what’s coming, and we’re not even remotely prepared as a society.
Ironically but predictably, the first sector of the labor market that will be decimated is software engineering. Code-generating AI products like Claude Sonnet 3.7, Cursor, Windsurf, and Replit can generate and deploy fully functional web apps from a paragraph-long prompt. Today they’re unreliable and require expert oversight, but this market will mature even faster than chatbots did. There’s so much economic value to be obtained that a frantic scrum of startups and industry giants are scrambling for a piece of it. Within the next one to two years, a newly minted computer science graduate will have very little economic value unless they have a ton of business and soft skills. Writing code as a human endeavor has reached the top of the roller coaster climb and is about to enter freefall.
Anyhow, gunters already know where I went on my book trip. One of book 2’s three POV characters lives and works in this part of the world, where I had not previously been. In my novels, I strive not only for technical accuracy, but setting and cultural authenticity as well. The trip was very successful for scouting out specific sites where scenes will occur and getting accurate vibes of the place and the people who live there. Can you guess where I went from these deliberately obscured photos?
