Do You Want to Live Forever? Survive until 2045
Futurist Ray Kurzweil was booked into a room far too small for the enormous crowd who wanted to see him speak at SXSW. Even after the Hilton Austin room was…
“FUCK THEM!!!” Jane Fonda on what we should do to big oil execs and their political prostitutes
Age has not dimmed Jane Fonda, who was fired up at SXSW in Austin. She could easily have passed for 56 instead of 86 in her stage appearance with fellow…
Amy Webb: This Is an Exhilarating Time to be Alive
Amy Webb has built a career as a futurist on identifying tech trends, but as she told an audience at SXSW in Austin, those halcyon days have ended. “Trends are…
No One Is Immune to Deepfake Imagery
A cautionary tale relating to artificial intelligence surely startled many at SXSW this week. Dr. Joy Buolamwini is founder of the Algorithmic Justice League. Fortune magazine named her the “conscience…
Everything Everywhere All At Once
A theme I discerned at several SXSW sessions this year was storytelling. The best of the lot was appreciated by a very large audience with a standing ovation. It was…
Sandy Clark: The World is Going to Completely Change
How might a robot have implications for your brand? Suppose a robot delivers a pizza to your home, serves it to you with a soda, and then washes up the…
Non-Obvious Thinking
One aspect of the Featured Sessions at SXSW this year has been the description of trends. For each of the sessions I have attended in the first three days, rooms…
T. S. Eliot and the Nucleus of Modernism
Ask a group of poetry experts what the most consequential poem of the 20th century was. The majority vote will most likely be The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Written…
An Overnight Trip to Mineral Wells, TX
Lou Reed sang in his song “A Small Town” that he wanted nothing to do with the one he grew up in and had to ‘get outta there’ as fast…
Trail of Lights
The big annual event of the Holiday Season in Austin, the Trail of Lights, proved to be delightful again. I went on a rather warm December evening to enjoy the…