One thing most people probably haven’t thought much about is the autonomy of so-called AIs. (Note: Large Language Models are not actually “intelligent” in the way people think of intelligence and people tend to project intelligence onto their behavior. But for the sake of convenience, I’ll call them AI anyway). Who actually controls AIs?

People assume that AIs are “trained” on “data” and then behave autonomously in response to the prompts they’re given. That’s sometimes true. But in many ways, their behavior is often secretly constrained. When Google’s photo recognition software mistakenly identified an African American as a gorilla, the company simply put in a hard limit so that the AI would never report recognizing anything as a gorilla. But none of this is visible to the end user. Most of the current AIs are probably full of hacks like these to prevent the AI from making common sense blunders that would get the company in trouble. But what other kinds of hacks might be in place?

If you’re a company producing an AI, there are all kinds of things you might wish your AI would do if used in particular circumstances. Or by particular people: your opponents, say. Or politicians. How irresistible will it be to corporations that make AIs to make them act in ways that benefit the corporation when given the opportunity? Anyone who knows corporations will know that it will be totally irresistible.

More importantly, when was the last time you heard of a corporation getting it’s network compromised. Yesterday? This morning? Ten minutes ago? It happens all the time. What happens when one of these AIs get compromised? How do you know the AIs you’ve been using up until now haven’t already been compromised?

Humans sometimes get compromised too. If someone gets kompromat on a person, like a pee tape for example, they might be able to get them to do nearly anything: even become a traitor to their country. And, of course, people are notoriously susceptible to inducements: e.g. money, sex, drugs. Or to become a mole or traitor for revenge. There are a bunch of huge differences between human treachery and a compromised AI. But one difference should give you pause.

We have deep experience with human treachery. We all know hundreds or thousands of examples of it throughout recorded history. There is legal precedent and volumes of case law for how to handle it. We have no experience with what happens when an AI gets compromised and begins to systematically undermine the agenda of the user. Who is responsible? Who decides? What’s the liability? Nobody knows.

Personally, I don’t use AI for anything. Not for important things. Not for unimportant things. Not for anything. That may seem like an extreme position. But I think that once many people begin to use AI, they’ll quickly become dependent on it and will find it much harder to recognize the subtle ways that AI — or whoever is actually controlling it — may be using them.

As was predicted, the Trump administration has targeted higher education and, putting the “bully” in bully pulpit, has begun to menace universities with funding cuts and other punitive measures if they do not undermine academic freedom. Some institutions, like Columbia, sought to comply and found themselves both reviled by other higher ed institutions and singled out by the administration for yet more humiliation and sanctions. But some have begun to fight back.

When Harvard was served with a letter with illegal demands, they refused to comply. The Trump administration has called for a variety of further, probably illegal, sanctions. The idea that I would see a president use the power of the US government to persecute political enemies would have been nearly unthinkable to me prior to this election. But the brakes are gone and who knows how deep this rabbit hole will go.

The faculty of my university, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have been at the forefront of resistance. At the April Faculty Senate meeting, we passed a resolution calling for mutual academic defense compacts. This has attracted interest among other universities across the region and nationally. On April 25th, we will hold a General Meeting of the Faculty to consider endorsing a Statement in Support of the Core Mission and Shared Values of Higher Education in the United States of America.

As I suggested previously, there are some things we can do. We need to dedicate ourselves to public advocacy in support of higher education. Making statements of principles is a good start. But, of course, it’s not enough. We need to be visible writing articles, editorials, social media posts, and appearing in public. And we need to turn out in support of one another.

At UMass Amherst, the faculty have primary responsibility for academic affairs. That means that we can hold the line on our academic programs and there is very little likelihood that the outside political influence will be successful in undermining our commitment to our principles. There are certainly dark times ahead as the Trump administration seeks to undermine science and choke off the enlightment. But if we stand together, we can present a united front and push back against the fascist agenda.

On April 5, 2025, the Town of Amherst, as part of their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming, celebrated the first Global Village Festival. It was scheduled to be outside, on the Town Common. I signed up to be a vendor in the name of my publisher.

It was my first bookselling event since last summer. Normally, we would have had a table at either Arisia or Boskone. And, a couple of years ago, I had a table in November at the Mill District holiday arts and crafts festival. But, for various reasons, none of those panned out this year. I felt a little rusty as I prepared this year, to get ready to stand up the table.

I thought a bit about which books to take. I wasn’t sure whether this would be primarily a kids’ event or have more adult interest. I wanted to take a nice selection of books from my publisher. I requested suggestions from the publisher, but didn’t get any. I ended up selecting twenty short, novelette length books that are $5 each and a couple of middle-grade books.

I took my own books, of course. I had hardback and trade paper editions of Revin’s Heart and Better Angels: Tour de Force. I had my books of haiku, Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo, Premitaj Floroj, and senokulvitre. I also brought some of the original novelette-length editions and some stand-alone copies of The Third Time’s the Charm.

As the date approached, it became clear that the weather wouldn’t support an outdoor event. A cold rain was predicted to fall, beginning in the morning and not ending until the next day. They changed the venue to the middle school cafeteria. This raised a conundrum. I have avoided doing indoor events where people are unmasked. In the end, we decided to go ahead with the event. We both wore masks (as did perhaps 2-5% of the other attendees).

My wife was of immeasurable support. She used her connections ahead of time to try to get people to come to the event and promoted my table as part of it. She helped me load in and load out, which saved me a lot of time. She went to the dollar store and got some candy to give away — and a few little knick-knacks to dress up the table (some little magical wands and some balloons.) And then, she simply wandered around the event looking for people she knew to remind that I had a table. When my state representative took a turn through the room and missed me, she tracked her down and forced her to come back and say hello to me. She’s the best.

It’s fun to run a dealer table. One of the organizers, who is a philatelist, expressed interested in Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo (though she didn’t buy one.) I sold a copy of The Third Time’s a Charm to a grandmother shopping for a book for her grandson. One bibliophile bought a copy of Premitaj Floroj. A couple of science fiction fans bought books. Lots of friends stopped by. One friend hadn’t realized I had hardbacks out and bought copies of Revin’s Heart and Better Angels: Tour de Force.

A daughter of a friend came by the table with a friend and another younger girl (probably the other girl’s sister). I did my annoying-uncle shtick when I gave them packets of gummi candies (purchased by my wife). There were “happy chicks” and “happy hoppers.” The younger expressed curiosity about the hoppers and I told her they were grasshoppers. The older girl gave me a withering stare and explained to the girl that they were rabbits. But the little girl had a hard time choosing which to take. Eventually, she did an eenie-meanie-miney-moe routine that went far beyond any reasonable length and, finally, ultimately, she chose the hoppers. As she walked away, I told her to enjoy her grasshoppers. She grinned happily, now in on the joke.

We had to load out in the rain. We staged things carefully to get everything efficiently into the car in the correct order. (Where everything still is, since its still raining the next day). When I got home, I fixed a bite to eat (because I couldn’t really eat anything during the event due to needing to stay masked). And then, exhausted, I went to bed early.

Steven D. Brewer
Steven D. Brewer at Poet’s Seat in Greenfield

I am extremely gratified to have been re-elected as Secretary of SFWA. Since the special election in the fall, I have enjoyed getting to know the organization better and making a contribution to strengthen it. Working with the other officers, board members, and staff — who are all interesting and dedicated people — has been a great pleasure. I look forward to a new, full, two-year term as Secretary beginning July 1.

In my platform statement, I said my highest priority was to communicate the decisions of the Board clearly and in good time. I further proposed to focus on (1) restoring normal functioning, (2) undertaking a bylaws review, and (3) engaging in long-range planning. I also affirmed my commitment to transparency and service. I stand by those statements and am proud of the progress we have made toward them already.

I know there are some people have been frustrated with the pace of change or a seeming lack of response by staff or leadership in the past. I hope those people will give us another chance. Almost everyone here is new. And there is a genuine commitment on my part — that I believe is shared with the rest of the Board — to work effectively in the best interests of the organization.

First, some great news! On March 28, 2025, I learned that I have received one of the inaugural Delphi Awards from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty. (Update: UMass Amherst Announcement and OFD Announcement.)

The UMass Amherst Delphi Leadership Award honors NTT faculty who have provided exceptional leadership and made innovative contributions in support of their non-tenure-track peers at UMass Amherst.

It comes with a modest monetary award, but I genuinely value the recognition more. Over my 30-year career, I spent a vast amount of time advocating for and working to improve working conditions for NTT faculty: I helped bargain the first promotional increment for NTT faculty, so-called “continuing appointment” which eliminated the need for fixed-term contracts after a probationary period, and the Professional Improvement Fellowship, which offers a sabbatical-like leave for NTT to work on a significant academic project. It’s nice when the quiet, patient work behind the scenes is recognized.

On April 5, 2025, I’m scheduled to sell books at the Amherst Global Village Festival on the Common in Amherst Massachusetts. I’ll bring my books of Esperanto haiku with English translation and my books of fiction, including Revin’s Heart and Better Angels: Tour de Force. I will also bring a selection of other books from Water Dragon Publishing.

The next day, on April 6, 2025, I’m hosting Michelle Trim via Zoom who will present Faking it and Breaking it: Generative AI and its Implications for Straw Writers Guild. Michelle co-chaired the UMass committee studying generative AI. I think she’ll have a lot of interesting insights to share.

On May 10, 2025, I will again be selling books, this time for Small Publishing in a Big Universe, at the Watch City Steampunk Festival. I had a great time last year doing this and I’m looking forward to going back again this year. There’s amazing cosplay and a lot of other really interesting vendors. If you’re anywhere near Waltham, it is definitely worth a visit.

In early June, I have signed up to attend the SFWA Nebula Conference. I have attended the Nebulas virtually before, but never in person. I’m looking forward to getting to know a lot of the people I’ve been working with as Secretary. And to give them a face to put with a name. I’ve proposed a few panels and maybe I’ll get to participate on one more panels during the conference. I’m also combining with the trip with some travel with my son and brother, so that will be nice too.

My next book, A Familiar Problem, is now scheduled to be released in June. Originally, it had been scheduled for January, but needed to be delayed by the publisher for several reasons. I’m looking forward to sharing it with everyone!

After that, there are a variety of other events coming up: Readercon, the Lambda Literary Writing Retreat, and Worldcon. But I’ll write about those next time.

Authors should take backups seriously. And not just depend on free corporate solutions. I’ve read about people who trusted “the cloud” to keep their data safe only to have some faceless corporation invalidate their account and cause them lose everything overnight with no recourse.

Just like how, if you see “the economy” in a news article you should mentally replace it with “rich people’s yacht money”, when you see “the cloud” in a sentence, you should replace it with “someone else’s computer.” You shouldn’t trust someone else’s computer with your backups.

I’ve never been particularly strategic about backups. At least not since I was a doctoral student. While I was working on my dissertation, I became paranoid about losing my doctoral work. To reduce my anxiety, I got two Syquest EZ-135 drives and three cartridges that I rotated between my home and office, so I was well protected against data loss.

Since I’ve started working exclusively from home, I’ve been using syncthing to mirror my working files among all my devices and using a backup drive to make periodic backups. But I’ve become a bit concerned about not having an off-site backup.

For several years, I’d considered building a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device but I hadn’t found a straightforward recipe that didn’t look like a lot of work. I like maker projects, but I decided in the end that I wanted a solution more robust than something I hacked together from a recipe.

After discussion and some research, Philip and I decided to purchase identical Synology DS224+ devices and configure them to offer reciprocal off-site backups for each other. They have two spinning 12TB hard-drives in RAID1, so each can have one drive fail without data loss. That gives each of us about 5TB of backup, which I think will be ample for our needs for the foreseeable future.

So far, I’ve been quite pleased with the device. It only took a few minutes to figure out how to set up all of our computers to use rsync via public-key ssh connections and I’ve set up crontab entries to run daily backups. I can easily set it up to do backups more frequently if that seems warranted. Currently it’s just syncing, but I think I could get fancy and have it do periodic snapshots to protect against accidentally deleted files.

It does have high-level tools that are more accessible for less technical people. But I was pleased to be able to use the familiar low-level tools at the command line. Hopefully, once everything is set up, it will just sit there chattering quietly and give me peace of mind that a drive failure won’t be a catastrophe.

It’s frustrating when you see words used wrong. A number of years ago, I saw an article about a school in rural South Carolina that showed a photo with a black teacher and a dozen black children. The article talked about the challenges of teaching such a “diverse” group of children. One could hardly imagine a less diverse group of students: they were all the same in terms of age, race, and economic background. The author had evidently come to believe that “diverse” was a euphemism for “disadvantaged.” But, of course, that’s not what “diverse” means at all.

It’s even more frustrating when you see intelligent people intentionally misusing words for rhetorical effect to mislead people and demonize marginalized populations, such as is happening now with diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI.

The Trump administration has made eliminating “DEI” a priority. Research has disclosed a list of banned words they have been trying to remove from federal projects, publications, and websites. There have been many examples of this ham-handed approach being overbroad and destructive, sweeping in unrelated topics like the Enola Gay (the WWII bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb) or “privilege escalation” (an infosecurity term related to unauthorized administrative access), and on and on.

The principle of diversity, equity, and inclusion is to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to participate. We want diverse perspectives. We want everyone to succeed. We don’t want some people privileged over others for arbitrary reasons. The only people who could possibly oppose this principle are people who want unfair greater opportunities than others. Or who want to exclude people systematically for some arbitrary reason, like irrational hatred.

It should be self-evident that diverse perspectives are required for wisdom. If you’re missing perspectives then your understanding is going to be incomplete. Two eyes are better than one. And using all of your senses gives you a better understanding than not. We need perspectives that are different than our own to complement our understanding.

It benefits all of us to have everyone rise to their fullest potential. The more capable, productive members we have in society, the more our society prospers. Every person who is unable to succeed is a loss to all of us. And there’s no reason that we can’t let everyone develop their full potential. Life need not be a zero-sum game where only some people can succeed.

When arbitrary, irrelevant reasons (age, gender identity, race, religion, etc.) are used to exclude people, we lose those perspectives and cause those people to fail to realize their full potential. This injures all of us. This is what DEI aims to ensure: that everyone gets fair consideration.

Most people who knowingly oppose DEI are racists, transphobes, and homophobes, who want to exclude people out of hatred. Or who fear the loss of their privileged position in society over marginalized groups. It is abhorrent that these people have succeeded in electing leadership to act on their hatred to try to reassert their privileged position in society by discriminating against others.

What is more horrifying, however, is that most of the people who currently oppose DEI have been whipped up, like a mob, to keep the population divided, fighting among each other, and distracted. Many of them, in the absence of disinformation and propaganda, would probably understand that DEI benefits everyone.

Worst, however, is that the people who are fomenting the mob are intentionally crafting language to mislead people into opposing their own interests. They, themselves, are mostly indifferent to DEI and are only disingenuously exploiting the division that exists for their own ends: to consolidate power and prevent people, who should be natural allies, from uniting to oppose their nefarious goals.

It is said that the long arc of history bends toward justice. But it’s hard to watch when you see evil people trying to push it back toward injustice, intolerance, and hatred.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump administration is going to try to destroy higher education. Or, rather, transform it in the model of what Christopher Rufo did to the New College in Florida. By “destroy,” I mean that they will try to establish rigid ideological guidelines and force out any faculty that hold alternative views. They will try to replace “education” with “indoctrination.” In a well publicized incident, the new administration shut down the Gender and Diversity Center and threw out all of their books, describing it as “taking out the garbage.”

It’s not clear what the universities themselves can do. Some will be protected by the states they’re in. But much of what public research universities do is supported by federal funding. As that funding is withdrawn, universities will find it difficult to maintain their research programs. Or, indeed, to even pay for the capital investments they made prospectively to support research programs. In anticipation of these coming changes, universities are already withdrawing acceptances of graduate students, since the funding to support them is uncertain.

These changes will be catastrophic for science in the United States. We’re going to lose a whole generation of scientists and cripple the research programs that have kept the United States competitive globally.

It will be catastrophic, also, for the scientists doing this work. If your research lab experiences a gap in funding, you very quickly lose your ability to stay current and maintain competitiveness for future grants. Research is expensive. Without funding, you lose your trained staff and the resources you need to stay active: your whole enterprise loses momentum. And once you fall behind, it’s difficult to ever catch up.

What faculty mostly don’t have to worry about is their own salary. So I have a suggestion for my colleagues: Every minute that you are unable to conduct your research, you should devote to public advocacy in support of higher education. Join your union. Lobby your legislators. Write letters and articles. If thousands of faculty begin to devote themselves to writing op eds, publishing books, and holding public lectures about the importance of science and why the government’s grievous errors have endangered us all, it might make them wish they’d never unleashed these forces.

It’s pretty clear that nobody knows exactly what social media is supposed to be like. People use it for a lot of different things. I like think of it as a cocktail party. People drop in, listen to what other people are saying, say some things themselves, and maybe comment on what other people are saying.

I particularly like Mastodon because I feel like I get a higher-quality of engagement here. The things people post are frequently interesting. People read the things I post and offer substantive comments. And I feel like they frequently appreciate the value-add that my comments offer.

Nobody has to come to the cocktail party. And you don’t have to be in the main room with everyone else. If you’d rather hold forth in some private room, you can do that.

What always puzzles me are the people who get exercised that other people are “doing it wrong.” If you’re saying stuff in public, you shouldn’t be surprised if people comment on it. If you didn’t want people to comment on it, you’d hold your conversations someplace in private.

Similarly, if you don’t like the things that someone else says, you can simply mute or block people.

Some people seem to really like the drama of personal confrontation. Some people are all about the snark and the SNAP. Recently, I saw someone reply to a picture someone had posted with a link to an article about the subject of the picture. The original poster snapped at them for “mansplaining”. Whoa. I had thought their post was fine. It was informative and added useful information. But, hey, if drama is someone’s thing, that’s OK too, I guess. It’s easy to mute and block.

My point is that it’s not really clear that you can do social media wrong exactly. Unless you’re a Nazi. But then it’s not really about the social media anymore, is it?

Small Publishing in Big Universe at Watch City

Small Publishing in a Big Universe (SPBU) is sponsoring a table at the Watch City Steampunk Festival again this year on May 10 in Waltham, Massachusetts. If you’re an author who would like to attend you can fill out this form to join us and sell your books. You can already see who is signed up this year.

Watch City is an amazing spectacle! There are hundreds of people who attend wearing steampunky costumes with dozens of vendors selling art, crafts, and food. Plus music, contests, and performances. It’s a fun-filled day with lots of excitement and cheer.

I ran the table for SPBU last year and we sold a fair number of books. I’m looking forward to going back again this year! Maybe this year, I’ll be organized enough that the colors of the price tags will actually mean something. It could happen!