A Tech Festival Where They Boo Tech – SXSW in Texas

South by Southwest 2024, a combined tech conference and entertainment industry festival held in Austin, Texas, a regressive city inhabited by conservatives like Greg Abbott, Elon Musk, and Alex Jones, ran a minute-long promotional video featuring brief clips from panels earlier in the conference. In each clip, the speakers were either explicitly pro-AI or emphasizing the nascent tech’s importance. The crowd watching the clip burst into a chorus of boos, according to footage shared on social media by film critic Marcelo Pico and by Variety.

True to Texas, the clip opens with a twangy, “Welcome to Day 4, Y’all” before the AI clips begin. 

Footage began of Josh Constine, a partner at the San Francisco-based venture capital firm SignalFire. The crowd started booing when he said, “If you look out into this room, you can tell that AI is a culture.” The video cut Constine there, but during the session featured in the clip, he continued, “There were the beats, the hippies, the punks and now the developers.” Loud boos continued through a clip of Future Today Institute CEO Amy Webb proclaiming AI’s present-day importance and another of journalist Kara Swisher saying every company will be using AI. Indeed, most are at this point, but people are so dumb they don’t realize how their lives depend on AI in the present.

If any of the booing morons had bothered to read articles about AI, including this one from the Brookings Institute that dates back to 2018, they’d know that AI is all around them and serving many useful purposes. AI is a tool, and a powerful tool. Like all tools, it can be put to good use, or as used by others, it can be not-so-good.

Beyond AI in robotics or accident prevention in our current automobiles or as used in various search engines, a recent article by BerkeleyExecEd has a nice article on how to use AI successfully in business. As written in Forbes, Pieter den Hamer, Vice President of Research at Gartner, notes, “Every job will be impacted by AI… Most of that will be more augmentation rather than replacing workers.”

So, instead of booing, learn about AI, embrace it’s positive aspects and work hard to not allow AI to be used for evil intent. It’s up to us, the people, because all change, all revolutions are created from the bottom up – from the people.