SXSW 2017: The point of no return year (maybe)
What were the key trends from this year’s festival? Was it a Big Year or a Leap Year? And what exactly does Disney have to to do with AI? Find out everything you need to know in Karmarama’s lawrenceweber’s summary of SXSW 2017.
There is a perceived wisdom amongst seasoned SXSW attendees that there are two types of Austin experience, Big Years and Leap Years. Big Years dump you back home, broken but wide-eyed with excitement about The Next Big Tech Thing. Then there are Leap Years — the ones you can supposedly skip due to lack of The Next Big Tech Thing which leave you equally as broken, but less sure of what you saw or heard.
Having been back from Austin for a few days, I think it’s safe to say that 2017 was a Leap Year, mostly because Artificial Intelligence — or AI — was back for its second year as SXSW’s most intriguing theme. However, it was a very important and perhaps sobering SXSW.
In 2016 AI emerged as one of the defining technical and cultural forces at SXSW, fizzing with newness and possibility but still fairly peripheral. In 2017 it loomed the largest of all of the trends, but in a much more fundamental and ominous way. This year AI was at the core of everything not the edge. This year, the prospect of a set of AIs becoming our companions (and even equals) was not just an exciting possibility, but the very likely trajectory of the immediate future.
Whether we should be hugely excited or increasingly worried about the looming fusion of human and computer was something there was little consensus on. Indeed, Hugh Forrest (the founder of SXSW) opened the conference by saying that although AI was for him the year’s standout theme, the opinions of those discussing it were split 50/50 between optimism and pessimism. That split vote was very much reflected in the talks I — and the other IPA agency contingent — attended for the rest of the week.
It’s true that the very diversity of the people talking about AI at SXSW this year suggests that, contrary to popular belief, machines will very likely invade every aspect of our work, rest and play. As the futurist and author Calum Chace put it: “AI is collar blind”.
It’s also true that every single start-up and VC I met at SXSW (more than 30 over 6 days) had AI or ML at the core of their products and pitches. Those creating and funding the future are all in.
What was equally apparent however, was that no-one in larger, more established organisations (“legacy plays” is the label given to unfashionably profitable companies by their high growth, zero-profit cousins) was hugely sure what the AI-driven future might bring them and what their plan should be to counter or embrace it.
Disney gathered a prestigious panel and a big crowd for ‘Using AI and machine learning to extend the Disney magic’. However, despite teasing us with a glimpse of AI driven robot helpers at Disneyland, there was very little to suggest they knew if and how AI would extend their magic.
Saatchi & Saatchi LA also explored the theme of AI and creativity in two panels sessions. As part of their Cannes Director Showcase last year, they secretly entered a music video that was cast, directed and edited by a series of AI’s, trained with the emotional data from the musician’s brain. The end result looked like a bad sixth form art project, but their conclusion was that AI could already copy existing creative formats and execute new instances of them. For them, the only future for human creativity is in origination.
Even the US Army admitted in the panel ‘The Future of Warfare’ that as AI is increasingly used to simulate conflict, in the future war will be more influenced by the games played by computers than the games we play on computers are influenced by war.
If it seems that we are all destined to spend the next few years grappling to find our role in an increasingly AI dominated world, then stop for a moment and contemplate the warning given by the closing speaker Bruce Sterling in his visceral endnote ‘The Future: History that Hasn’t Happened Yet’.
Sterling is a futurist and science-fiction writer of some note and you’d think he would welcome our new robot overlords. Not quite so. In his brilliantly acerbic speech, he imagined a conversation between a member of contemporary American society and someone from any past epoch.
He concluded that our ancestors would find it inconceivable that we were giving up our desire for human progress and ambition to play second fiddles to soulless software. He closed SXSW by saying “If robots were alone in the Universe they would shut themselves off, and that wouldn’t be suicide. They can’t commit suicide, but we can.”
Whether you think AI’s ascendancy is inevitable or not, it might be worth contemplating fairly soon how you and your agency might deal with it. Even if for the next little while, those scripts, emails, or lines of codes won’t quite write themselves.
Lawrence Weber is Managing Partner of Innovation at Karmarama - an Accenture Interactive company - and Chair of the IPA Brand Tech group. He will be joining the panel at the IPA’s 44 Club event on 10th April about the key learnings from this year’s SXSW, alongside the IPA’s Consultant Head of Media and Emerging Tech Nigel Gwilliam (Chair), Zak agency’s Susan Poole and James Schad of We Grow Startups. Click here to book your tickets.
To hear additional insights from SXSW — including themes of artificial intelligence, voice as interface and mixed reality all underpinned by the coming 5G revolution — catch one of the sessions with the IPA’s Nigel Gwilliam that are taking place around the country over the next month. Further details can be found here.
