HI. I’m Rocco. an elderly polymath living in the Midwest and inhabiting 2 realms. My dayside world is a chicken shack truck stop, but at night it transforms into a mental landscape. Its terrain lit with cognition; I fuel it with imagination.
Framed between the bookends of storytelling and reflective exploration, I spend my nights running down ideas, creating scenes, engaging in dialogue, and building the worlds in which those stories live. Together with a stack of intelligence-amplifying machines, I immerse myself in analyzing systems, testing ways to surmount obstacles, and generating new perspectives on life, using AI as a tool for growth.
Growing up in St Louis in the 60s and 70s, my outside world was a 6-mile radius of new ranch style subdivision, all accessible at first from my western auto flyer and later my Schwinn ten-speed. Our world was hot water from rubber garden hoses, and the fresh crisp AC inside this great new hang out place called a Mall.
Meanwhile, my inside world was…. the basement. If we weren’t cosplaying the Beatles with tennis rackets and cans, we were taking over the world everyday playing strategos and risk. Farmers in my family trace back to the 10 hundreds, so it’s only natural that my farmer’s daughter mom had a virtual grocery store of canned goods on one wall. With four generations of printers and lithographers in my family, mostly in newsprint, me included, it’s not surprising that the other walls were filled with books of all kinds, some going all the way back to the 30’s printings of Frank Baum’s hard bound illustrated world of Oz.
In the coming days you’ll find various types of written content, from serialized sci-fi tales to technical whitepapers on AI-Human interaction. You'll find me on Substack and on Reddit. Soon enough you will get to watch as I develop a podcast called The Quest, where we’ll use the golden age of Sci-Fi as a lens to view and understand the world of AI. I hope you join me in discussion.
I look forward to your comments
RM