William Hertling

Science-fiction novelist whose near-term AI fiction anchors the long read How To Predict The Future (by Brad Feld). Feld’s piece opens by crediting Hertling as 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.”

What draws Kyle to Hertling is method, not just fiction: he “used linear trends… to predict the timing of non-linear events (technology disruptions) by calculating when the underlying hardware would enable a breakthrough” — the Forecasting technique the Feld essay lays out (“look at the hardware trend,” not the software). Kyle flags the same in his essay Relationship Liquidity: a “pretty impressive overview of the process that William Hertling used to predict a number of different technological shifts.” The work sits squarely in Kyle’s Historical Futurism cluster.

Where this appears

• How To Predict The Future — Brad Feld’s essay, which opens by citing Hertling’s novels and his hardware-trend forecasting method.
• Relationship Liquidity — Kyle’s essay cites the same piece as an overview of Hertling’s process for predicting technological shifts.