Welcome to My World

I’m Michael Swaine and I write weekly about artificial intelligence and other topics.

About Me

I’ve been a writer all my life, and computers entered the picture pretty early. With Paul Freiberger I wrote the seminal history of the personal computer, Fire in the Valley, the basis for the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. I’ve written short stories and poetry and books and columns for magazines, and have had a long and productive career editing books and magazines. For decades I was associated with the pioneering personal computer software developers’ magazine, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and I now edit books for The Pragmatic Bookshelf and blog about artificial intelligence and other topics.

About the Blog

My graduate degree in computer science focused on artificial intelligence, but the AI of today is very different from the AI I studied back in the days of dinosaurs, like the university’s CDC 6600. Keeping up with AI research and its implications for society and writing about what I discover keeps my synapses snappy. So this blog always tracks current work in AI.

But the blog is Swaine’s World, so from time to time I’ll slip in other things that interest me.

Subscribe for Free

I post to Swaine’s World weekly, and if you subscribe, you’ll get all these weekly posts, plus access to the associated website. And the price is hard to beat: a low, low zero dollars. Or zero in any currency, really. It’s free. Nothing paywalled, no premium content for nonzero money. But if you’d like to pay a little something to support the blog and ensure that I keep it up, that would be all right.