I would feel the same about anyone working in augmented/virtual reality who hadn't read "Rainbows End" or watched any number of XR-focused anime.
What do you mean, you can't come up with anything to do with these devices? What do you mean, you're hiring webdevs to make another Snap filter? If you're on the cutting edge, I would expect that your knowledge base includes niche, related texts.
The quality of the prose, the actual craft displayed in the writing of TFBook is... Not great.
I tried to read it but couldn't.
Merely existing does not make a book worthy of being widely read. It's insane to criticize the openclaw team for not having read it.
It was one of Stross's first books, a fixup of older short stories. He gets better.
It was a pretty prominent work of the singularity subgenre. At least I remember it being the first one featured in this Popular Science article about the future of science fiction:
https://books.google.com/books?id=yaHf5PavpB8C&lpg=PA93&dq=%...