I’ve done a lot of book events and more often than not, they kind of suck. I’ve read at bookstores in front of six people (five of whom were related to me), experienced awkward silences during Q&As, and even had my publisher tell bookstores they could disinvite me to my own readings (long story). So…
The Shape of Reality to Come, a collection of essays about VR, AR, AI, Amazon, grunge, creative cities, Microsoft, and tips for engineering a renaissance, now exists in physical form in the reality we all happen to share, or perhaps experience as a consensual hallucination. This is my sixth book, and it’s my slimmest to…
My new book, The Shape of Reality to Come, a collection of essays about virtual reality, creative economies, Amazon, artificial intelligence, Microsoft, Ready Player One, innovation, video games, leadership, immersive media, and grunge, is coming soon from Alephactory Press. You can pre-order it here. I have to admit that I didn’t realize I was even…
Navigate to the intersection of art and science and you’re liable to run into weird visionaries. Two recent books, which I read back to back, suggest that the art-science mashup has been the province of radical thinkers since at least the fifteenth century. Walter Isaacson’s illuminating biography Leonardo da Vinci walks us through the Renaissance…
I woke up this morning to another story in what seems to be an accelerating series of news items about the evolution of artificial intelligence. Barely awake, I learned that Google has developed a new Go-playing AI that taught itself mastery of the game without any human input beyond the game’s rules. My thoughts immediately…
In spring 2000, I left Amazon to join a startup called Drugstore.com. My official title was Email Communications Editor. At age 27, Amazon was the first corporation I had ever worked for and I assumed all Internet-based companies operated pretty much like Amazon. Wow, was I ever wrong. Drugstore.com turned out to be a miserable…
