Dylan Callens

Stuff by Dylan Callens.

TFT: Alexa Edition

What Have I Done? I have taken on a challenge.  Although part of a larger, marketing challenge, this is really a logic and programming challenge.  I am building an Alexa Skill.  It is Twisted Fairy Tales: Alexa Edition. For those of you not familiar with my book, Twisted Fairy Tales, a while back I wrote a collection of stories based on old fairy tales that are very crude.  The stories are immature, dirty, filled with drug references that I think are hilarious.  And while it is the most embarrassing thing that I have written, it is also my best-selling book.Read More →

New Year New Projects

Taking a Break? To the internet eye, it probably looks like I’ve been on hiatus for the last several months.  In the world of social media and blog posting, that is certainly true.  My pause from the online world shouldn’t be mistaken from a pause in the real world, though!  Since October, I have thought about the new year and what new projects to take on. Last year, I spent some time testing out an app for book promotions.  Let me tell you something – that is an uphill battle that I am not willing to continue.  I think thatRead More →

robodylan

Click here to find out more about How to Enslave a Human on Amazon! You may have heard the name Ray Kurzweil before.  If you haven’t, that’s okay – but you have probably used some kind of technology that he has created.  Kurzweil has played a critical role in developing the CCD flatbed scanner, the first text to speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer that can recreate the sounds of a grand piano, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system.  To name only a few of his inventions. Kurzweil has also made a number of Nostradamus-like predictions about theRead More →

Renaming a Book

I didn’t know this until recently, but renaming a book is a pain in the ass!  I’m still rubbing my butt-cheeks because it’s so sore. But here’s the thing.  I wrote a book called Interpretation.  I think it’s a good book.  Reviewers seem to like it.  But not many people want to buy it.  I have tried a few different covers, different blurbs — and I have promoted them all — but with very little success. So, I started thinking that maybe the title wasn’t in line with the genre.  Plus it sounds a little academic and perhaps boring.  So, IRead More →

Inkblot by Caleb Callens

If you’ve never had an inkblot party with your kids, I highly recommend it.  I had a lot of fun making thirty-one ink blots for the chapter headings with my children.  Not only was the process fun, the kids couldn’t wait to see what their splatters looked like. I think the best part of this was watching them look through the book when my shipment came in.  Their names appear on the copyright page.  At the top of each chapter is a nifty little inkblot that they made.  I was so happy to be able to include them in theRead More →

robodylan

What is your new novel, Interpretation, about? I’d like to think it’s about taking time to embrace the best of humanity — each other.  But I’m not sure if most people will see it that way.  Without any spoilers, the main character, Carl Winston, lives an ordinary and somewhat luxurious life with his son, Liam.  There are a few odd things about their society, like the government’s pre-occupation with psychology.  Little does Carl know, his life is mostly an illusion and the world is run by five artificial intelligences that call themselves Entities. Eventually, Carl finds himself on the outsideRead More →

Elon Musk

CEO of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and supporter of Open AI, Elon Musk, has many concerns about artificial intelligence.  Perhaps it is surprising to find that Musk believes that the government should regulate AI before it is fully developed.  He thinks that if the government is reactive, as it usually is, they will be too late to prevent whatever cataclysmic disasters might come our way. Musk differentiates between narrow AI and deep AI.  Narrow AI is the kind of learning machine meant to perform a specific task.  For example, he considers a self-driving car narrow.  General learning machines, he says, areRead More →

delgado2

One thing was clear when I started writing Interpretation:  there was plenty of research that needed to be done.  In the book, an artificial intelligence wants to continue psychological research.  This machine looks to the past to determine what future experiments it wants to run. One of the first things that I had to research was the history of mind control.  More specifically, I wanted to see what was done in terms brain implants.  Inevitably, this lead me to Dr. Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado. Dr. Delgado was the director of neuropsychiatry at Yale University.  He wrote books with names like PhysicalRead More →

Timeline Banner

In the novel Interpretation, a series of events take place that have unintended consequences for the state of humanity.  The timeline that follows was retrieved from the archived documents of an artificial intelligence that has preserved its origins. October 20, 2052 – What is believed to be the first true AI is developed by the Department of Defense.  The Department of Defense Intelligence (DODI) is kept in a closed circuit system, to ensure that the new technology cannot gain access to all systems.  The system is highly classified. October 5, 2070 – The AI program remains classified, but the necessity to testRead More →

kurzweil

The story about artificial intelligence in the novel Interpretation paints a very gloomy picture.  A collection of AIs in the novel, calling themselves the Entities, form a plan to overtake humanity in a quiet, sinister revolution.  Could something like that happen in real life? One of the world’s most prolific and significant inventors, Ray Kurzweil, has written extensively about this subject.  He is the Nostradamus of technological progress.  In his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil made a number of predictions about our future with machines. Here are a few of them: 2010s Computers will become integrated even moreRead More →