My 5 + X takeouts from SXSW Interactive 2016

“When the President has attended, there’s no one else left. Maybe the Pope, but that’s it.”

Bruce Sterling was commenting on the mature state of the SXSW festival in his 30th anniversary closing keynote. The festival has indeed become an undeniable national and international hotspot for film and music, startups and big business, as well as design and technology. This year’s topics addressed not just the state and future of the industry but also the state and future of national government and world affairs. How we design and build the smart things we surround ourselves with has an increasing role in solving our problems, big and small. At the same time, we’re creating new issues, as exemplified by the current dispute between the FBI and Apple. Overall, SXSW was tech positive, as you’d expect, but concerns over security and privacy, as well as the rise of artificial intelligence, were present in almost every speech and panel I attended. Read on for my key takeaways from this year’s SXSW Interactive.

1 ) Cognification

Learning systems and automated analysis, decisions, and actions for business, pleasure, and the world were arguably the biggest theme in SXSW in 2016. From cognitive startups to enterprises and the government, everyone is looking to forms of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to solve harder problems faster, be it business analytics or human immortality.

“Take X. Add AI.”

Dag Kittlaus, the co-founder of Siri, is currently working on VIV, a dynamic cognitive architecture that works a bit like Wikipedia, in that anyone can teach it anything. VIV aims at nothing less than to be the open cognitive platform for the world, letting you command all the internet in a natural language. Product designer, futurist, and inventor Jared Ficklin talked about our big opportunity being filling in the gaps between the big, rigid systems we’ve already built with smaller, nimbler, learning systems. Wired founder Kevin Kelly agreed with the notion that the “next 10,000 startups will be all about ‘Take X. Add AI.’”

Mr. Kelly, who coined the term “cognification”, also posited that we won’t have just one AI to rule them all, but instead many narrow artificial minds, each devoted to specific tasks. However, Professor Pedro Domingos, who had an exhilarating talk about the secrets of machine learning, argued that we could and should still seek to create an overarching “master algorithm” that would combine the benefits and power of many different types of cognitive systems.

The consensus was that every decision that can be computerized will be. We, as well as our computerized meta-selves and automated bots acting on our behalf, will create ever more data with our behaviors, which will make AI ever better. Ultimately, AI will become “boring.” It will be a utility that flows around us like water or electricity, and it won’t be anything special. But what we do with it will be.

From a Havas perspective, our client IBM had a significant presence at the festival. I was happy to note that IBM’s Cognitive Studio was, according to many, one of the most interesting exhibition spaces at SXSW this year.

2) VR: The Internet of Experiences

As virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) establish themselves in the mainstream, the very nature of how we interact with both online and physical worlds will change. Mr. Kelly talked about how the internet of information and the internet of things will merge into a new internet: the internet of experiences. We will use this new realm to learn, create, and entertain ourselves at the highest levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — self-expression and self-actualization. We won’t just read, watch or play things anymore, but will actually experience them happening to us.

Mr. Kelly also predicted that VR and MR will be the most social of all media, as other people still remain the most interesting objects and experiences. Creation, delivery, and monetization of these new experiences were displayed and debated at SXSW, and big home entertainment players, such as Sony and Samsung, are rolling out mainstream headsets for home, office, and mobile this year.

“Zero to PhD on a Sunday afternoon”

One of the more interesting new VR technologies mentioned was “re-directed walking.” With this technology we only need a small room to walk back and forth in, while the computer vision tricks our brain and senses into thinking we’re roaming across a vast virtual world. With all these tools, as well as some still theoretical ones, such as “virtual time dilation,” we might one day play out our lives over weeks or years in a virtual reality and wake up afterward to the real world, where only minutes or hours would have passed. Zero to PhD or a football star on a Sunday afternoon? Consider it possible.

3) Growth Through Collaboration

Getting the initial prototype right is the first step in successful product or business design. But how do you scale success over time through different phases, each with their varying challenges? Capital One’s developers and designers had a frank talk about the importance of communication, collaboration, and constant, everyday collisions to help defuse issues that might grind a project to a halt if left to grow.

“Don’t make managers of your best people.”

Marty Weiner, currently Reddit’s, and formerly Pinterest’s, CTO had a technical but intriguing talk about how to scale right and manage technologies and platforms and also how to steer people and the organization through different cycles of growth. Mr. Weiner made an important point about how becoming management should not be the only means of promotion. Surprisingly often, making managers from your best developers and creators backfire, making them and your team miserable.

In addition to internal collaboration, a key topic was collaboration between players across industry barriers. Lego and Cartoon Network had a great talk about how their partnership and complementing views spur product development and marketing on both sides. Both learn from each other and each other’s customers. And why wouldn’t Trulia and Google’s self-driving cars team up to buzz you around the houses you’ve marked as interesting?

On the biotech side, DARPA’s Justin Sanchez and Daniel Wattendorf talked about how their complementary passions for neural networks and genetics help usher in a new generation of solutions for the humankind. Mind-controlled prosthetics that feel objects and textures and feed the sensations back to the brain are already happening, and helping people with disabilities.

4) Purpose-Driven

More than in any of my previous years at SXSW, entrepreneurs, companies, and platforms with a cause were at the forefront. Gravity Payments’ CEO Dan Prive talked about how he took a million dollar pay cut, so that he could pay all of his employees at least 70k per year. The cause movement was voiced strongly by also Casey Gerald, who was in the process of running his strikingly successful company down, in order to release its message, platforms, and tools for everyone to use.

Mr. Gerald’s speech was followed by none other than President of the United States, Barack Obama, whom I had the good fortune to listen to on the spot. This marked the first time in SXSW’s 30 year history that a sitting US president has given a keynote at the festival. Mr. Obama made a point about how the US government is tackling the hard problems companies can’t or won’t tackle, and how governance can and should be drastically enhanced by the same thinking that has driven tech companies to succeed, especially over the last couple of decades. The president called on the tech community to engage and join him in this mission, even after his presidency.

“Friction drives self-improvement.”

Back on the private front, Airbnb’s Steve Selzer had a great philosophical talk on how immediacy and the absence of friction are creating a less tolerant, less self-aware world. While reducing friction is one of the great boons of technology, Mr. Selzer appealed to designers’ and technologists’ responsibility to design and build the right kinds of friction in their products — friction that enables and encourages self-reflection, self-discovery, and self-improvement.

5) Tracking Everything and Everyone

One of the basic pillars of cognitive computing is the quantification of everything and feeding all our data to the machines. This naturally worries both individuals and companies to an extent, and it also raises many ethical questions: What data should be collected? Where should it reside? Who gets access? What can be done with it? And who reaps the benefits? In his closing keynote, Mr. Sterling said that we should not fear the Big Brother scenario too much, as the ones with money, surveillance, and administrative power don’t seem hold much power, and the most monitored people, both home and abroad, seem to be the most misbehaving ones.

Mr. Domingos had a point about the ethics of AI and data being especially complex. Machines need to learn ethics from us, but how do we teach them rules that we don’t even follow ourselves? As we look to educate the machines, we also need to learn more about ourselves and our values.

“Vanity trumps privacy.”

In the end, Mr. Kelly believed that everything that can be tracked will be tracked — which will be pretty much everything. Even if we grumble about it at first, we’ll happily and willingly accept this, as “vanity trumps privacy.” This will also be beneficial in many ways. Personalization will require transparency, as the world based on imaginary averages fades away. This way, everything — from life, career, and entertainment advice to cancer medicine — becomes personalized down to the individual level, which means longer lives, and time better used.

X) Singularity: It’s Already Happening

Will technology eat the world, our jobs, and ultimately the people? This was a question asked in many panels. In a sense, singularity is already happening — with our single-function devices. Whereas before we wanted to put one $1,000 computer in every home, now we want to have 1,000 $1 computers in every home. Your home, your office, and your wearables are already a mesh of computers learning about the world and us, generating more data faster every year.

“Death by 4.7 stars”

Asked how all this might threaten us, Jared Ficklin had a hilarious but spot-on point about “Death by 4.7 stars”: machines won’t need killer robots to get rid of us, as they can simply suggest hamburgers, Jolt Cola, and ice cream to us for each meal, and we will happily oblige ourselves into oblivion. While many speakers emphasized the need to keep tech in check, the overall mood was positive, and even as many jobs will become obsolete, all the speakers were quite sure that people will find things to do, as they’ve done so far, despite the industrial and informational revolutions. These will simply be different jobs, aiming less at efficiency and more at experience, while machines take over the routine jobs with exact answers.

Regarding the question on when we’ll get to singularity, Mr. Domingos stated that while singularity is actually an impossibility in the natural world, we’ll be seeing steeper and higher S-curves in the coming decades that will render the world quite unrecognizable by today’s standards. Computers already generate and store knowledge faster than previous knowledge paradigms, from biological evolution to individual experience to natural language and shared culture. The fact that the majority knowledge is now extracted by and resides in computers is a momentous change.

In sum, SXSW delivered a swathe of inspiration, as always. I, along with many others, will be back again next year. And I believe there’s much left for tech, design, and business, as well as SXSW — even though the president already attended. I believe it’s just getting started. I leave you with Kevin Kelly’s inspirational words for those who wonder if the game is already over for others than today’s big tech:

“The greatest products of the next 20 years haven’t been invented yet. So you’re not too late. You need to invent them.”

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P.s. Do check out also Havas Worldwide’s 10 Takeaways from SXSW