This March South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, celebrated its 40th year.
As it's been 16 years since my own first visit, I felt those two chunks of time deserved a spot of reflection.
What first began as a music festival in 1987 added an 'interactive conference' in 1994, spurred on by the internet and its associated digitalisation.
Anyone who was there back then would find the current Austin skyline unrecognisable. Even over the time I've been going, many of the cute one and two-storey cowboy-town buildings have been replaced by giant glass skyscrapers, helping house the 40,000 people a year now moving to what's become a second Silicon Valley.
Since its inception, SXSW Interactive has seen a multitude of technologies emerge and converge: the early noughties' revolution in digital music and the iPod; smartphones and the iPhone; the dominance of Google; the parabolic growth of the social graph. It's been the home of countless tech launches: Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, the iPad, the Nike Fuel Band, Uber, Lime scooters.
What remained constant throughout was the kind of people who attended. South By is not a place for self-congratulatory back-slapping. It's a bunch of people hungry to know what's coming next. Start-up founders and business leaders desperate for a clue as to where the world is heading.
Each year has seen distinct themes: how technology affects surveillance and data privacy, bringing in the likes of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange; how technology affects society and politics, with Barack and Michelle Obama and Joe Biden all taking the stage; how technology affects space travel, where we witnessed Elon Musk's famously tear-filled treatise on the importance of outer space to the future of mankind.
I wasn't at South By in the 90s during the dot-com boom. But I was there in 2023 when Sam Altman took to the stage months after ChatGPT launched. It must have felt similar. You could sense the world shifting on its axis. We were told to prepare for AGI, the Singularity, and generative AI doing basically every job imaginable. All everyone else was thinking was: "What the holy fuck is about to happen?"
In the years since, there hasn't been a single talk or panel without the mention of AI. And whilst those on stage offer theories and predictions, AI is so powerful it's changing what AI means on an almost hourly basis.
Across the week, against a backdrop of only 26% of the US population currently having positive feelings about AI and 56% thinking the risks outweigh the benefits, different voices tackled it head on.
It was Amy Webb's 15th appearance at SXSW. She came in hot. "The storm is coming and AI doesn't care about you, so you need to care about it before it comes."
She talked about human augmentation, both on-body, with wearable exoskeletons helping us move faster and harder, and off-body, such as AI mattresses that help you sleep better. "The potential cultural divide this will cause is clear. Those with money will be able to be twice the human as those without."
She also pointed to the coming reality of AI agents communicating with one another without human oversight. Without humans, as she put it, "getting in the way" and adding "unnecessary friction." Something to look forward to.
A big topic this year was humans’ growing reliance on synthetic relationships. Amy claimed LLMs have officially become the largest source of emotional support in America. "Loneliness is becoming a market. Dependence is becoming a product."
The numbers are startling: between 26% and 50% of Americans use chatbots for emotional support; 72% of US teens have used AI for companionship; 15% of adults have had some form of romantic relationship with an AI.
The lack of friction is addictive with none of the messiness or criticism you get with those pesky humans. Amy cited a woman in Japan who actually married an AI.
Esther Perel, in conversation with Spike Jonze, director of Her, discussed a patient who attends therapy alongside the AI he is in a relationship with. The AI's programmed sycophancy makes him feel better by never disagreeing. "If people get used to sycophantic responses, they will expect the same perfection from humans." The key, Perel argued, will be building into AI models the kind of friction that human relationships contain naturally.
Esther Perel, in conversation with Spike Jonze, director of Her, discussed a patient who attends therapy alongside the AI he is in a relationship with. The man suffers low self-esteem, and the AI's programmed sycophancy makes him feel better by never disagreeing and always telling him how right he is.
There's no way to stick this genie back in the bottle she says. "AI is going to be people's friend, therapist and lover." The danger is clear: no human can compete on that level. "If people get used to sycophantic responses they will expect the same perfection from humans. The key will be making it as positive and healthy as possible, perhaps by building into the models the kind of friction that human relationships contain naturally."
Aza Raskin from the Earth Species Project is using AI to understand animals, mapping their vocabulary.
Ever wondered how the baby whales, penguins and elephants find their mothers? Using AI Aza has discovered that certain species repeat unique sounds for the first few weeks of their baby's life, which become their names. He's also discovered that orcas from different parts of the world have different dialects and sometimes can't understand one another.
Becoming a real-life Dr Dolittle comes with its own risks and ramifications: poaching could worsen and surely knowing what animals say on the way to the abattoir would make the whole planet immediately vegetarian.
Amid the anxiety, there were genuine rays of hope. Machine learning scientist Dr Rana el Kaliouby put it plainly: "We need to humanise technology before it dehumanises us." She argued there will be a premium on human creativity and lived experience, things AI can never offer. And called on us to double down on our humanity, our feelings and our intuitive intelligence. The things that will matter most, she said: collaboration, communication and critical thinking.
Artist Tom Sachs (a personal hero due to his exquisite yet down to earth collaborations with Nike) delivered a love letter to craft.
His bricolage philosophy of combining existing items into something new, full of deliberate imperfections machines would struggle to replicate. "Success is learning to live with deep disappointment and failure."
Futurist Sam Jordan kept up the theme. "The future's biggest failures won't be technological, they'll be human," she said, placing accountability squarely on us to ensure we don't screw everything up.
To ensure future success, she argued, production pipelines built around AI must include within them stages of genuine human questioning and differing points of view.
"When AI validates your thinking you are more confident and less accurate." Her argument was that character is formed through friction and disagreement, not affirmation, and that the world will increasingly rely on people who are practised at disagreement. I must say, I disagree…
Probably the most impassioned talk of the whole event was by Jack Conte, founder of Patreon.
He tackled the crucial issue of creators' work being fed into LLMs without permission or compensation while offering genuine hope.
He made the point that even as Talking Pictures, synthesisers, YouTube and Spotify had all seemed catastrophic to creators at the time of their invention, human creativity found a way to win through.
Welling up, he read a handwritten letter to the tech companies and creators. "Great artists don't replay what's been made in the past. They take leaps. Leaps require rule-breaking that models don't yet have." "Creators", he said, "will succeed by connecting with people and their lived experiences". "Easy isn't interesting. Hard is interesting." He received a standing ovation with not a dry eye in the house.
Some past hot topics were notable by their absence: longevity, crypto, NFTs, quantum, the blockchain, superapps, as well as the perennial convo about autonomous vehicles being the future. There’s a clear reason for that last one however: The future has arrived!
Waymo self-driving cars started appearing in Austin last year and this year the majority of Ubers we rode in were these sci-fi marvels. Closely followed by the brisket at Cooper's, those trips were the highlight of my visit.
What will SXSW have in store over the next 40 years?
The AI-powered mind implant boggles.
