He’s been influenced by writers such as William Gibson, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, and Walter Jon Williams. The Last Firewall was endorsed by tech luminaries including Harper Reed (CTO for Obama Campaign), Ben Huh (CEO Cheezburger), and Brad Feld (Foundry Group). Apocalypse was nominated for the Prometheus Award for Best Novel. These near-term science-fiction novels about realistic ways strong AI might emerge have been called “frighteningly plausible,” “tremendous,” “must-read.”Īvogadro Corp won Forewords Review Science Fiction Book of the Year and A.I. William Hertling is the author of the award-winning novels Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears, A.I. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation, or become a patron on Patreon. (Special note of thanks to Agah Bahari who did the interview audio re-mix.)Īs always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full.

It was produced by Richard and Tatyana Sundvall and generously hosted by Greg and Astrid Bear. This is the second out of a series of 3 sci-fi round-table interviews with Ramez Naam, William Hertling, and Greg Bear that I did last November in Seattle. And so I was very happy to get an opportunity and interview Hertling on my podcast.ĭuring our 45 min conversation with William, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as the impact of reading Accelerando and The Singularity is Near how he was challenged to become a sci-fi author, and outlined the plot of his first book on the proverbial paper-napkin the extrapolation of current trends in software and hardware as a way of predicting technological progress the importance of theory of mind for the creating of artificial intelligence the singularity and whether it is more likely to happen in a hacker garage or a military lab hard take-off vs soft take-off whole-brain simulation and the diminishing costs thereof if an AI apocalypse is a plausible future scenario or not transhumanism and healthy life-extension… William has written several plausible scenarios for the technological singularity that were so engaging and compelling that, as soon as I finished his first book, I could not help but go ahead and read the next one too. William Hertling is a rather recent science fiction discovery of mine and the author of award-winning novels Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears, A.I.

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Ai apocalypse by william hertling