Neal Stephenson Tag

As a longtime fan of Neal Stephenson—nobody’s better at inserting long, absorbing asides about esoteric nonfiction topics into otherwise blisteringly paced novels—I was intrigued by his latest missive about artificial intelligence. Stephenson is one of those wizards with an uncanny ability to predict the future; for instance, his novel “Cryptonomicon,” which I devoured in high school, anticipated the rise of cryptocurrency by roughly ten years (although his fictional characters back their online currency with real gold as opposed to a principle of artificial scarcity). His other books have toyed with theRead More