SXSW23, Day 2: Signals

It’s Saturday afternoon in Austin, still almost 30 degrees celsius outside and the end of day two’s official proceedings. The streets have the unmistakable energy of 30,000 people all cautiously gearing up for a very big night out which is kind of neat, given today has been all about signals.

It kicked off with over a thousand people lining up down the corridor, around the bend, out onto the balcony, down the fire escape and along the outside of the building to jump into back to back ‘big trend’ keynote presentations.

First up was the always impressive, SXSW stalwart Amy Webb. Webb, a quantitative futurist, introduced this year's mega-theme of focus with the help of some retro inspired Magic Eye artwork. Look too close and you see nothing. Too far away and it’s just a blurry mess. Adjust your focus slowly, squint a little, relax your eyes and then, Bingo! Things start popping out.?

Amy’s number one theme was ‘the end of the internet as we know it’. The quick take here is that for decades, the internet has become a larger and larger repository of ‘stuff’, that we’ve in turn become better and better at searching. From here, Amy posits, we will no longer search the internet. Instead, the internet will search us.

How so?

We’ve seen the meteoric rise of AI, vast improvements in computer processing power, an explosion in data storage and increasingly sophisticated cloud infrastructure. The next bottleneck is data. Everything else will continue to get quicker and cheaper, but we won't progress without more readable information to train the AI systems.?

With every website indexed and book read, engineers are now looking for anything and everything else they can scrape and use to train with. Music, computer code, where we look on our screens during video calls, whether someone is cooking in the background, what sort of cat just jumped in front of our screen. Engineers are indexing how we smell, what we’re listening to and even what our soon to be connected smart toilets are saying about us.?

The information is ambient. Its transfer is happening everywhere and we can’t see it or touch it. This evolution is invisible to us but we will all be impacted by it. It’s also moving too quickly for us to consider fundamental questions before it’s at scale. Is all data fair game? Is the data being collected representative? Do we have a say in who the guinea pigs are? Is it better in the hands of big tech, small tech, government, a combination or none?

From here, we switched gears to hear Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason rip through 15 non-obvioius trends, all under the much more optimistic title of ‘what if things go right?’.?

My picks of the bunch here were a better, more personalised relationship with food thanks to continuous glucose monitoring and the return of ‘artificial’ to glory. While today, ‘natural’ is a badge of honour, not long ago, we looked to plastics and other synthetics to save the day. With the ability to produce ‘millions of leather handbags’ from a single biopsy or ‘chicken’ that’s molecularly identical to regular chicken, but without the disease, hardship or environmental footprint that go with it, artificial could be (should be!) the next big thing.

My brain was now swimming which made it the perfect time for a little fresh air down on Rainey Street, a small, bustling strip of restaurants and bars. During SXSW, there’s a long tradition of brands taking over these venues, converting them into themed ‘houses’, filled with interactive installations by day and massive parties by night.

All of this also makes Rainey Street the perfect spot for signal hunting. Each of the takeovers require investments that easily run into the hundreds of thousands, so it’s always interesting to see which companies are cashed up and in heavy acquisition mode.

In my early SXSW days, it was all about the social media platforms and I spent many a big night at the likes of Twitter House (thanks for the hook ups Nola Weinstein and Benny ). Last year, things were quiet on the social media front but Crypto and NFT brands were everywhere, dishing out merch, staging big name bands and serving up custom cocktails with tech inspired names.?

Not suprisngly, I didn’t see a single crypto brand today. Instead, it was all about streaming. Paramount+ built out an epic, multilevel ‘lodge’ to showcase their biggest shows, while HBO, Prime and even Roku were out in force too. These brands are clearly still fighting it out for their share of wallet and are sitting on enough cash for shock and awe tactics like large scale takeovers to still be a viable option.

My day finished up with one of my all time favourite Southby speakers, Esther Perel talking about ‘the other AI’ - artificial intimacy. While AI has seemingly come so far, Perel made it abundantly clear that there’s still plenty of places that are far beyond the reach of todays technology.?

Every relationship exists in a context. While AI can talk about relationships, it does so divorced from their context. The machines don't have emotion or memories or personal experiences they can navigate by. Esther spoke about being in tears when she hears many of her patients' stories, and how her personal beliefs, the home she grew up in, her first hand experience with grief and loss and love not only shaped the way she worked but were perhaps the most important ingredients.

Relationship troubles are not technical matters that require perfectly right or wrong answers, and our pursuit of them leaves us ill-prepared for the inconvenience, the discomfort, the messiness, the bumps, the decay and the less shiny aspects of living with another human.

With that, I’m off to join some of my favourite humans at the big TikTok party (OK fine, maybe there is still one social platform in acquisition mode!) and if history is anything to go by, we’ll be singing up a storm at Pete’s Duelling Piano Bar sometime before the sun comes up.