Live From SXSW 2022: Opening the Doors of Reperception
Back for its 35th year, this SXSW is all about the metaverse, blockchain, AI, and Ukraine.
SXSW 2022 in 50 Words
On stage, everyone is talking about the metaverse, blockchain, and AI. Offstage, Ukraine and Texas’ regressive lawmaking dominate the conversation. There are fewer attendees and big brand activations, but there are still lines for the bathroom and after-hours parties. The marquee speakers, Beto O’Rourke and Lizzo, spoke to 2,000+ crowds.
Top Tech Trends for 2022
Everyone comes to SXSW hoping to get a sneak peek at the future. Usually, this involves hours of sitting in panel discussions, listening to the dreams of techno-utopians, and parsing the hype heaped upon you by the marketing departments that fund the event. Or you could just spend an hour with Amy Webb.
Webb is the founder of the Future Today Institute, and yesterday she presented her Top Tech Trends of 2022 report. The report itself is 668 pages long and includes 574 tech trends. She did not get to all of them in her hour-long time slot. If you are interested, you can read it all here. She has some fascinating and disturbing takes on AI, the metaverse, and synthetic biology. Here are some of the key themes.
Look for Signal in the White Space
Webb started the talk by showing the crowd this image and asking what the group saw. As an image, it makes no sense. “Your brain naturally focuses on the dark spots,” Webb explained. “You are missing all of the white spaces.” Even being told there is a cow in the photo does not help the image resolve. And yet, it is impossible to unsee it once you identify the beast, known as the Dallenbatch Cow. Webb calls this “reperception” and is one of the major themes of her report. “The facts don’t change, but your perception does,” Web explains.
AIs Will Change How We Communicate
In 2012, Google trained its image recognition software to recognize cats by scanning thousands of hours of cat videos from YouTube. In her 2019 presentation, Web used an AI to generate original cat images. They were terrible--think cats in a blender. Today, she can generate new cat images that are indistinguishable from real cat photos in seconds. This technology is not limited to cats.
Simulated humans are constructed the same way. Indeed, they are already populating our various metaverses. Researchers optimize these machine-made people to maximize empathy and trust. These artificial faces are actually more trusted than real-life human ones. The same way advertisers test multiple social media posts to find the most engaging, or enraging, message, social media messages, these simulated people are being programmed to manipulate us.
Forget Facial Recognition, Here Come Heartbeat Recognition
Facial recognition generates a lot of controversies, especially when deployed in public areas with no public notification. But technology is quickly moving beyond scanning faces. The Pentagon has developed a laser that can identify you based on your heartbeat. Using vibrometry the system can detect your unique cardiac signature at a range of more than 200 yards. Combined with the emergence of gait analysis, breath reading, and the growing ubiquity of automatic license plate readers, suddenly face detection seems quaint.
NFTs Are Just the New Shiny Thing
Webb isn’t terribly impressed by the NFT buzz. The $650K Metaflower Super Mega Yacht is unlikely to hold its value in a digital collectible market that will soon hold millions of virtual variants. More important is the underlying technology of smart contracts that will enable trust-less transactions. Those solutions aren’t built yet, but building JPEGs into the blockchain is just one byproduct of the process. “They are a stepping stone for what is next, Webb says. “It is the infrastructure that really matters.”
Your WiFi Will Be Watching You
The IEEE is working on some significant upgrades for 802.11bf and they are not about boosting throughput. The new 802.11bf may have the ability to track your movements, respond to gestures, and even monitor your heart rate. Privacy considerations aside, this technology could jumpstart the home AR market by creating real-time maps of your home environment. Even if it works as a primary motion detector, it is a huge step forward for what WiFi can do.
Synthetic Biology Is the Next Big Thing
“Computers and biology are becoming one, ” Web says. She thinks ten years from now we will be talking about synthetic biology the way we talk about AI today, Indeed, we can already program biological systems much the same way we can program computers. Unlocking the data density of DNA, for example, could deliver nearly unlimited storage capacity. As Ryan Whitwam at ExtremeTech puts it:
DNA is a very dense storage medium. The researchers note that the world creates several petabytes of new data every day, and a single gram of DNA could store it all.
Post-COVID SXSW is toned down from previous years, but it is still a firehose of information and inspiration. All of the ideas above deserve more exploration and I will be unpacking them in future issues. For now, I’m collecting the seeds of ideas, like the stems of a music track that will be assembled later.
As always, if you want to send me ideas or ask me questions hit me up at dc@dancosta.com.
Next issue drops Wednesday!
Other Bits
Facebook’s Metaverse Vision Questioned by Gaming Veteran
More a statement than a question. “Facebook itself is not an innovative company,” according to Reggie Fils-Aime.
North Dakota manufacturers going full steam ahead on automation
‘Autonomous’ border towers test Democrats’ support for surveillance technology
Watch Amy’s full talk below.
First!