story — in which an"app whisperer" named Verity absconds with a pair of eyeglasses containing a powerful new artificial intelligence named Eunice. While he was writing it, Gibson says, he assumed that Hillary Clinton would be elected president.
"And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says."And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'"
Cyberspace, as described in 'Neuromancer,' is nothing at all like the internet which we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff.But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election.
And when it comes to his own predictions for the future, William Gibson says he was wrong about something else: He thought the Internet would be a mysterious and sexy place."Cyberspace, as described in, is nothing at all like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff."
Well we're trying to get there, he's just still too early to see it happen.