Live from SXSW: From Mars and Music to the Neural Divide and Black Mirror
Brian Crandall reports on day three from SXSW, where a surprise visit from Elon Musk turned everyone’s attention away from the main programme and to the ACL theatre as the audience hung on his every word.
The theatre rang quiet with anticipation for the arrival of Elon Musk, a legendary voice within tech and the future of, well, humankind as we know it. It was the first time Elon has joined SXSW since 2013, and the audience could not have been more excited to hear what he is thinking about the world to come. Here are five things we learned:
1. Space travel will scale and breed innovation. Elon has set high goals for his vision into space, “People have told me my goals are optimistic so I am trying to calibrate; that said, I envision short term Mars flights by the end of next year. Furthermore, “this is not just for the rich; think of Shackelton’s mission to Antarctica:.” His hope? To create base presence on the moon and Mars, much like 2001: whether this is a space odyssey or a trigger for additional funding and competition for space innovation, it is ambitious.
2. Optimism may be impractical, but when it supersedes fear of risk, new possibilities arise. Wishful thinking will breed challenges in both personal and professional circumstances. But when you empower the will and belief of others, great things can happen. Elon exhibited an enduring belief that both SpaceX and Tesla had promise, which he bet on even in the hardest of times in 2008, when three rocket launches blew up, Tesla was one hour from bankruptcy and his impending divorce was challenging his dreams.
3. Ubiquity is only possible with reusability. The cost of space travel is extraordinary and increasing. It needs to go down, and that may ironically only happen once other items, such as the cost of carbon dioxide, are charged accordingly.
4. Great ideas require dedication for advancement. He has praised the ability of his team to understand his business at a granular level as the unlock for his success. And while he runs multiple companies, don’t be fooled “80% of my time is spent on SpaceX and Tesla, and Tesla is the drama queen. The boring company is 20% of my tweets but 2% of my time, you can’t measure effort from Twitter.”
5. AI is the most powerful force and with great power comes great responsibility. Mark his words: AI is by far the most powerful and most dangerous force today. Musk believes we are close to the cutting edge of AI, “It is capable of more than almost anyone knows, and the rate of improvement is exponential.” We never expected this rate of improvement and development. He believes we will see self-driving cars by the end of 2019, which will makes roads at least 100–200% safer than today.
This paints a picture of heavy responsibility for companies like QuantumBlack, who must develop “powerful and benign” solutions of the future in AI, that balance human leadership and articulation with artificial acceleration.
The Century of the Brain
After an inspiring and thought-provoking keynote from Elon Musk I hot footed it to the Hacking the Brain: The Power of Neuroenhancement session, where the panel discussed some of the themes that Elon Musk had chatted about in his keynote. Musk talked about Neuralink and its goal to explore technology that will make direct connections between a human brain and a computer, to create human-computer hybrids. It’s anticipated that the prototype will likely be brain implants that can treat diseases like epilepsy, Parkinson’s or depression.
The Neuroenhancement panel which included Jordan Amadio of NeuroLaunch, Henry Greely of Stanford Law School, Miriam Meckel and Léa Steinacker of WirtschaftsWoche considered the main issues that are effecting the space, which includes:
- Responses from technology differ from person to person — if you don’t know the outcomes then it is not safe. If it is not safe, it cannot be rolled out.
- Privacy — if a device is going to collect data on you, you have to be aware of how this will be used, particularly when it relates to something as unique and important as your brain, said Henry Greely.
- Social inclusion — we are living in an age when the type of technology we’re talking about is enhancing our mental capacity, we talk about the digital divide, but I see this as the neural divide, stated Miriam Meckel.
- Musk’s idea of connecting brains to each other to share thoughts is fascinating, but we first must understand how the brain works. This would throw up lots of questions around identity and creativity and copyright.
- The 21st Century is going to the century of the brain — from medical devices and methods for implanting stem cells to gene therapy there are software applications to help us learn better and quicker and when we combine this with machine learning and deep learning it gets really exciting.
The panel closed with answering a question about whether there was any truth in Black Mirror, the response from the panel:
“Everything that is in the show is possible just not done very well now.”
It’s clear from today’s inspiring sessions that we are living in a very exciting time, where we are looking at solving problems and creating solutions to some of the greatest challenges of all time — the brain, artificial intelligence and space travel.
We summarised Elon Musk’s session here as a Twitter Moment.
Our hot picks for SXSW Monday 13th March:
9.30am — Dirty Little Liars: Why Are There Product Failures? (JW Marriott, Salon E): — Charlie Burgoyne of Valkyrie Intelligence, Mahin Samadani of Digital McKinsey, Charles Marcus of Vidlet and Tracy Thirion of Bamboo Worldwide.
12.30pm — Data Nerds Meetup (JW Marriott, Room 208) — hosted by Caroline Horn of Indeed.com and Gene Peters of Telligent Data LLC.
3.30pm — A Game-Changing Shift in Control of Personal Data (Fairmont, Manchester EFG) — Nicky Hickman of Inglis Jane, Karen McCabe of IEEE and Doc Searles of Project VRM; Berkman Klein Center; Harvard University.
