For a general overview of the event, here’s Part one.


Part Two will focus on insights and learnings. No fluff, just the meat. Most links go through to photos on Flickr (here’s the full album).

Reflections on the pandemic

Several speakers talked about how the pandemic and associated lockdowns drove us to re-focus priorities. The U.S. Surgeon General (Vivek Murthy) talked about how loneliness, isolation and solitude were all receiving significant attention from his office - the pandemic pushed us away from the ones we love. People on their deathbed talk about wishing they’d spent more time with their close friends and families - it’s a deep-seated human need - and so there’s no surprise that the recent forced separation has created an epidemic of mental health issues. He reflected that we’re born with this great power, the ability to give and receive love, and urged everyone to “become a beacon of love in your community” as we emerge into a post-pandemic world.

In a more intimate session, Catherine Price (author of “How to Break Up with Your Phone”) reflected on the addictive nature of social media (“fake fun”), but also how the need to pursue stimulation and human interaction during the pandemic led to the adoption of better habits. She took up hobbies, remotely and socially distanced, that she can now maintain. She encouraged us to reflect on whether the things we’ve categorised as fun actually are fun….”the things you choose to pay attention to define who you are” (some wisdom right there). Everyone, and kids in particular, would benefit from being more purposeful about how we spend our time, especially where social media is concerned - time spent there is rarely timeboxed. She shared a venn diagram of what constitutes legitimate fun - playfulness, connection and flow. You can learn more at her website, Howtohavefun.com.

The existential threat of social media

The pandemic pushed a lot of people deeper into corrosive behaviours, and Frances Haugen (the most famous of the Facebook whistleblowers) talked about the policies and actions behind the scenes that drove this behaviour. It was astonishing. The algorithm is designed to drive attention (more attention = longer sessions = greater ad revenue), and the most controversial content achieves this goal - so the algorithm promotes it. But here’s the kicker: although there are thresholds in place to restrict dangerous or misleading content, and therefore 100% of such content should be removed from the platform, only 3-5% of this content actually gets removed. They claim that AI-driven moderation is the way forward, but everyone knows that doesn’t work. They are wilfully dragging their heels to increase revenue, consequences be damned. The only way we can change the situation is through policy. Governments have to enforce this, because Facebook can’t.

And governments in many cases benefit from the status quo. We were joined by an opposition journalist in the Philippines, Maria Ressa, who had to attend via Zoom because they dragged out her departure application until minutes after the flight had left. She argued that “Disinformation networks exploit the algorithm, reinventing dictatorship for the 20th century”, gradually unravelling the victories of democracy achieved during the 20th century. Without truth you can’t have trust. Without trust there’s no shared understanding of reality. It was a sobering and urgent call to put guardrails up around the tech. And even though things are bad in English-speaking countries, they’re even worse elsewhere because the fewer the number of people speaking a language, the lower a priority it is to fix the problem.

The long term outlook

Obviously there’s plenty more doom and gloom on the horizon, much of which is driven by Climate Change. But, this being SXSW, there were optimistic lenses that can be put across even the gloomiest of outlooks. One panel, featuring none other than Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones, didn’t sugar coat the issues and especially how our leaders are making things worse (we currently subsidise the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $1trn per year), but did suggest we might try compassion and humour to nudge people towards better behaviour where fear-mongering hasn’t already worked. They shared a video that they’d produced to illustrate the point - 2 minutes long, worth checking it out.

Several other panels and presentations focused on innovation with sustainability a recurring theme. When it comes to transportation, autonomous trucks were in the expo hall, the latest electric VW people carriers were trundling around Austin, and attention was now turning to the next greatest clean innovation - hydrogen cells. These have the potential to disrupt the aviation industry, partly because it’s now possible to convert waste to hydrogen without combustion - there’s potential for having hydrogen production at local airports to begin with, and then scale this up to larger airports over time. Hydrogen is the most energy-dense, commonly available fuel by weight, so we might well see it catch up and then overtake electric vehicles in terms of cost effectiveness and popularity in the next few decades. There are already hydogen-cell driven planes (check out this nacelle) in the air that are capable of flying 5kg a distance of 600km in one go. Useful for e.g. transporting emergency organs, but they expect a manned flight of up to 3,000km by the year 2024.

New ways of living

Solving climate change will require several initiatives working in concert, and we saw at least two significant advances in sustainable living. The first was the City of Telosa, an ambitious project being led by serial entrepreneur Marc Lore. He’s creating “a new city in America that sets a global standard for urban living, expands human potential, and becomes a blueprint for future generations” - a more equitable, sustainable future. By designing and building a city from scratch, we can eliminate many of the problems incumbent with current cities (exploiting renewable energy, vertical farming, reduced pollution, autonomous transport, smarter use of data, and much more). They’re currently scouting locations in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian Region, and expect residents to move in around 2030.

One of the most interesting sessions was focused on living on water. People are already flocking to cities (about 3 million people every week), and cities are often built around water - and of course many have already built out onto the water. In the Middle East we’re already pushing sand into the sea, 1,000km squared every year for the last 30 years, and 24% of Singapore is reclaimed. I’ve seen smaller floating communities on Lake Titicaca in Peru and Tonlé Sap in Cambodia - it isn’t a new idea, but doing so in a sustainable and equitable way at scale is what makes this special. The company leading the initiative, Oceanix, is building their first prototype in Busan in the next few years. These floating cities will be huge - capable of supporting thousands of people. They’ll be their own sustainable ecosystems, with vertical farming above the water and fish farms below. I would encourage you to check out all the concept images - they’re really something - but there’s a taster below. Waterworld, this ain’t.

The future of healthcare

I could go on all day about the future of healthcare, but I’ll pull out just a few highlights. There was a fascinating session about Alzheimers and AI - diagnosis is often late, painful and expensive (spinal taps, brain scans). A new model has evolved to pick it up early, looking for “speech biomarkers” that can be picked up over a phone or video call. It analyses how often rare words are used and changes in sentence structure over time to determine whether you have early symptons. Nicklas Linz from ki: elements has already developed this method for 8 languages. Public access isn’t too far away.

There was also a fascinating panel about the Ethics of psychedelics - not so much whether people should be allowed to consume them, but more generally about their use in the medicinal field and whether lessons can be learned by trailblazers in the cannabis space. Worth noting that the dispensary of antidepressants has increased 5-10x in the past few years, but cases of depression haven’t gone down at all. Psychedelics used in carefully controlled doses have already shown great promise in helping people with mental health challenges, especially those with PTSD. One interesting sidenote was that native Americans have been consuming peyote for generations, and there are concerns that efforts to regulate the distribution of psychedelics might have an adverse effect on them. The other side of the coin is that protections can be put in place on religious or cultural grounds - but then it’s uncertain whether the cost and risk of consumption would be covered by insurance.

Another interesting panel explored why our lifespans are increasing, while the duration of healthy life (“healthspan”) remains the same. The public expenditure of healthcare in the uk has increased from 20% of GDP to 40% in a few short years. Scientists are trying to understand the molecular causes of ageing to delay the onset of chronic Illness, and medication has been produced that are having promising results in pre-clinical / animal trials. There are also great strides being made in reprogramming skin cells to turn them into stem cells or brain cells, opening up the potential for any organ to be replaceable with one grown from identical DNA in the next few decades. Who wants to live forever? Turned out about half the audience did, then about a quarter interested in living for 200 years, with the remainder at 120 or below. It triggered interesting questions around societies benefitting from older, wiser people who may a huge amount to contribute.

Last but not least, there were some interesting healthcare activities in the expo hall. VR / XR headsets were everywhere, and these folks from Japan were showcasing a clinical training tool for surgeons. In the headset I was encouraged to mimic a set of surgeon’s hands to learn how to suture. VR has been fairly slow to emerge given it’s uncomfortable to wear for extended periods, but it still feels as though some helpful use cases will emerge - maybe this is one of them.

To the stars

Space exploration has always featured heavily at SXSW, and this die-hard trekkie loves it. At the same time, I’ve got to acknowledge that it feels a little disingenuous celebrating space exploration while there are so many greater problems closer to home. In the end though, to deny exploration is to deny what makes us human - for better or worse.

There was a wide ranging discussion around what life on Mars will be like. We’re on track to arrive in 2035, and so people are busy trying to make life as bearable as possible there. One challenge would be providing healthcare and medication - even if you take medicine up there from Earth they would have an expiry date, so we’ll have to manufacture locally at some point. Specialist advice can be delivered remotely, but with a time delay of about 20 minutes. There are also ethical considerations around getting pregnant once we’ve left Earth - we really don’t know how pregnancy in a weightless or reduced gravity environment will affect the child. Another consideration is what happens if you visit Mars to do a job and then lose that job. How do you get home? There were also concerns about introducing microbes from Earth onto Mars and maybe vice versa. Some of these concerns have been addressed during the moon landings, but Mars is going to be very different - it has an atmosphere for starters. Finally we’re going to have all sorts of legal challenges when it comes to ownership of land and property, currency, legal systems, and everything else we’ve got here on Earth. Who will be in charge?

In the meantime, if you want a taste of space (sort of), Arizona based company World View will offer commercial flights beginning in early 2024 - going up 100,000ft by balloon, with Grand Canyon National Park as the location for its first spaceport, and the Great Barrier Reef for its second. Trips are priced at US$50,000 per seat. You get to spend a few hours up there and get a nice meal when you get back..!

Side note: There was a replica model of the James Webb telescope at SXSW back in 2013, and it was fun to think that it’s now up at Lagrange Point L2, cooling down ready to capture some new images! Can’t wait…

Other fun stuff

There was loads of other stuff going on at SXSW. Some bullet point highlights:

• Amy Webb’s Emerging Tech Trend report (download from here)
• Beto O’Rourke talking about his run for Governor of Texas (I shared an elevator with him and was too stunned to get a selfie!)
• Smoked meat from Franklin BBQ….and from Terry Black….so good….and got to meet BBQ Royalty, Aaron Franklin himself!
• Future US President Pete Buttigieg did a Town Hall
• Quantum AI from Google (some interesting videos of their campus here)
• Saw Beck live! Life-time highlight for me…and Kristin Hersh opened for him, she was amazing too
• Food trucks! Always a pleasure.
• Basketball! Popped down to San Antonio to watch the Spurs vs Minnesota Timberwolves.
• Popped into the Broken Spoke for some country dancing, and met Terri White fresh from her appearance on Queer Eye
• Weird humming thing
• Man on a horse
  
  

I could go on! But that’s about it for now. My brain has been rewired and it was fantastic. Hopefully see some of you at SXSW23.