Avogadro

Today’s post is a guest post from William Hertling, author of the award-winning Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears and A.I. Apocalypse, near-term science-fiction novels about realistic ways strong AI might emerge. They’ve been called “frighteningly plausible”, “tremendous”, and “thought-provoking”. By day he works on web and social media for HP. Follow him on twitter at @hertling or visit his blog williamhertling.com . I’m a huge fan of William and his writing as you can see from my review of his book Avogadro Corp . So when William offered to write a guest post on how to predict the future, I enthusiastically said yes. Take a look – and take your time. ...

I gave a talk titled “Resistance Is Futile” yesterday in Park City at the annual meeting for one of our LPs. This is a version of a talk I’ve given several times, starting at Defrag last fall. The slides don’t change, but I make up the talk each time and tune it to the audience. When I got to the slide titled Science Fiction Is Becoming Science Fact I went off on a version of my rant about the importance of reading, watching, and thinking about science fiction. I always use Oblong and co-founder John Underkoffler’s work as an example here since they have created a company around the iconic science fiction future that John envisioned for the movie Minority Report. ...