A Conversation Between Two Futurists: Audio

The Obermann Center, as part of their yearlong series, Designing the Future, hosted "Imagining and Being Imagined by Technologies— A Conversation with Two Futurists—Bruce Sterling and Dan Reed."  Sterling and Reed conversed about the future on stage at the Englert Theatre on September 16 about the future of technology.  The PPC, as part of their 25th anniversary year celebration, co-sponsored the event.

Bruce Sterling, like many "futurists," has a discipline-defying career as an artist, writer, Net theorist, technologist, and cultural commentator. In the 1980s he produced a fanzine series, Cheap Truth. He helped launch the cyberpunk genre when he co-authored The Difference Machine (1990) with William Gibson.  He is the author of essays, short stories, and novels, many of them award-winng, including Schismatrix (1985), Islands in the Net (1989), Heavy Weather (1994), Holy Fire (1996), Distraction (1998), Zeitgist (2000), The Zenith Angle (2004), Kiosk (2007), The Caryatids(2009), and most recently Love Is Strange: A Paranormal Romance (2012, about "futurists in love"). His non-fiction books include Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002) and Shaping Things (2005). His lively blog, Beyond the Beyond, is published by Wired Magazine. Sterling is the founder and co-editor of  Veridian Design Movement, an environmental aesthetic movement founded on the ideas of global citizenship. He is also "visionary in residence" at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and Professor of Internet Studies and science fiction at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

Dan Reed is a computational scientist who has spent much of the last decade working at Microsoft, first as director of scalable computing and multicore computing and later as Corporate Vice President, overseeing global technology policy and extreme computing at Microsoft. His blog, Reed's Ruminations, reflects on developments in technology and policies governing technology. He has served as a science policy leader on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and is the past chair of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association. In 2012, he became the  University of Iowa Vice President for Research and Economic Development, University Computational Science and Bioinformatics Chair, and Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering.  

Listen to the conversation here: