I’m William X. Adams, a cognitive psychologist who left the academic classroom for the computer industry to find out if the mind is like a computer. I began as a lowly software engineer and eventually became head of technology for a national nonprofit serving homeless children. I started writing fiction to dramatize what I had discovered about human and AI minds.
My degree is from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, specializing in human memory and perception. I did a post-doc in visual perception with James Gibson at Cornell. It took me years to understand his ideas. I then taught psychology at a liberal arts college, got the travel bug and signed up with the University of Maryland’s overseas division. I traveled the world with them for several years, teaching military personnel and dependents in Europe, Asia, and the Middle-east.
Returning to the U.S., I worked as a software engineer in “human factors,” helping to design cockpit instrumentation in commercial airliners. I moved on to other software engineering firms, writing code, studying artificial intelligence. I eventually made the mistake of going into management, where I became head of technology for a large corporation. I was a terrible manager. I assumed everyone would do the right thing. Why wouldn’t they?
Fleeing the corporate world, I returned to the classroom, teaching courses with a large online component. I migrated to all-online teaching, which is a different, but effective form of education (when properly done). It also has the advantage of geographical freedom.
My Psi-fi books are an outlet in fictional form, for ideas I’ve developed about psychology and science. I write under the pen name of William X. Adams. The “X” is “unknown” as in algebra. You solve for it. But it’s distinctive, and William A. Adams is a too-common name for searchability. Same person, in case you were wondering.
Psi-fi musings and sci-fi book reviews are at www.psi-fi.net. I hope you’ll give it a look and leave some comments. This site focuses only on completed psi-fi novels.
I’ve reviewed 350 recent books on Goodreads. If you like my take on books, see those reviews at www.goodreads.com/review/list/9498305 . They’re mostly literary novels and nonfiction, which is about all I read anymore.
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