What: GridTalk Tuesday With Science Fiction Writer Charles Stross

When: Tuesday, Nov. 13 at 8 a.m. Second Life time/Pacific time

Where: Dr. Dobb’s Island Amphitheater

Description: Our guest for our next GridTalk is science-fiction writer Charles Stross, whose most recent novel Halting State, is set in the near future — just 11 years from now, when virtual worlds, massively multiplayer games, advanced mobile computing, and augmented reality are a part of daily life.

Stross will discuss the world he created for Halting State, and how networked technologies are likely to evolve and affect our daily life and business over the course of the next decade.

It’s really hard to predict the future on the scale Stross does. Imagine yourself in 1996. Back then, would you have predicted the ubiquity of smartphones, user-generated content on the Internet (blogs weren’t even invented yet), Facebook, MySpace, the massive American entertainment industry grinding to a complete halt over a dispute over Internet video, and post-9/11 geopolitics? Could you have imagined, in your bones, what it would be like to live in that world?

Second Life URL.

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