I’ll hopefully have this one available for Patreons in about two months. The novel is called The Basilisk Affair, and is a very-near-future SF novel crossed with a detective novel. When I described a bit of it to Paul Magrs a couple of months back, he coined the term “techno-cosy” for its genre…
For now, have the intro:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
San Francisco, CA
The Safe Singularity Foundation is pleased to announce our sponsorship of the 1st International Conference on Controlling Existential Threat Through Humane Artificial Intelligence, to be held on April 12th 2017 in San Francisco, California, USA.
The conference follows on from several previous short seminars, which have included guest speakers from companies such as Google and Facebook, and have featured topics as diverse as acausal decision theories, Bayesian updating on events of infinitesimally small probability, and using directed acyclic graphs for retrodiction.
The conference will include invited presentations, submitted papers, and panel discussions.
The program has yet to be finalized, but highlights will include:
- The Ethics of the Multiverse: What does it mean to make a decision in a world where every possible action is taken? Panel discussion with Scott Langford, Nick Horowitz, Peter Weill, and Hari?
- MindCoin: The economics of using the blockchain for brain emulation. Talk by Robert Harding, emeritus Professor of Economics at the Humanity Institute, Princeton.
- Entrepreneurship in an AI-Controlled World: What opportunities would a world dominated by a humane AI offer for entrepreneurship, and how can capitalism take advantage of a post-scarcity society? Discussion between Vladimir Weston, founder of BitBuy, and Carlton Richards, CEO of venture capital firm FutureStock
- SLMNF: A new algorithm for approximating Solomonoff induction in finite time. Paper by Max Steinmeyer
- AI vs SJW: When programming an artificial intelligence, how can we ensure that it does not fall into the “social justice warrior” failure mode? Panel discussion with Scott Langford, David Adams, Michelle Carlton, and Peter Weill
- Emulating nootropics in software: If human-level AI is to be achieved by creation of emulated human brains, then one path to superhuman AI would be to emulate the effects of performance-enhancing drugs. Hari? discusses his recent experiments with psychiatry blogger Eric Richards.
Papers should be submitted in the SSF conference style to the submission website.
Important Dates
Submission deadline: December 23, 2016
Notification date: January 23, 2017
Conference: April 12 2017
Submissions should be made to the EasyChair website.
Organizing Committee:
Robert Harding, Peter Weill, Scott Langford, Mary Hodges, Mike Wood (Chair)
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! 
I’m assuming this will also be available for non patronisers?
The plan is that I’m waiting til I’ve finished writing the whole thing, and then I’m going to make it available for Patreons as an ebook as a one-off post for them (so costing them the $1, $2, or $3 they pay for posts) — and higher level Patreons will get a free physical book, too.
I’ll then also make it available as physical book and ebook, at normal prices — so non-Patreons will be paying more for the book, but they pay nothing for anything else I write. I’ll also serialise it here (and possibly on AO3) — at a chapter a week it’ll take a little over a year to serialise though.
All that is, however, rather contingent on me actually finishing writing the thing. Given my rate of abandoned projects, that’s not a certainty, which is one reason I’ve not started serialising this yet — but I’ve had much of the plot in my head for five months and it wants to come out.
(When I’ve done that I may return to the Bond/Wheatley style thing I abandoned last year for lack of the skillset to write it).
I hear basilisks are trendy now. ;)