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SXSW Interactive closes with a prediction of our future: 'Old people in big cities afraid of the sky'

By David Gordon

March 12, 2014 | 5 min read

David Gordon, lead creative technologist at WCRS, reflects on some big predictions for our planet on the final day of this year's SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas.

The Funny or Die session on SXSW's final day

So this is it. The SXSW Interactive conference is over for another year. It is incredible how quickly the time has flown, though this is in no small part owed to the explosion of culture that goes on in here. I have spent my time here listening to and learning from luminaries, leading experts, childhood heroes and up-and-comers by day. By night I have been immersed in the sounds of pumping basslines, live bands, fantastic food and copious amounts of alcohol-fuelled conversation. There is only one way to describe this event – mind-blowing. I have been utterly overawed by what I have seen, and the hope was to be sent off in style on Tuesday, the final day.

Sadly, and being brutally honest, this was far from the best day of the conference. With the majority of the Interactive revelers catching flights home, good sessions were few and far between. The real highlights in Austin this week belong to the music festival as the likes of Lady Gaga, Coldplay and Snoop Lion take to the stages to mesmerise their fans the same way that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Joi Ito and Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson did for the departing geeks.

However, I start my day amiably in the presence of the team behind Funny or Die, who showcase some of their original content and reveal the process they go through to make their project so successful.

Afterwards I head over to hear Biz Stone – co-founder of Twitter and founder of the new image-based search app, Jelly – in conversation with Steven Johnson, an American TV host. The two take us through their latest works, discuss the early days of Twitter, how technology was used to solve urban poverty in early America, and of course Jelly.

But it's the final session of the day that I'm most looking forward to – the closing remarks by Bruce Sterling. I had a brief glimpse into the mad mind of Sterling – a renowned science fiction author and regular SXSW speaker – at an MIT event chaired by his close friend Joi Ito earlier in the week and his closing remarks are heralded as unmissable.

Bruce's infamous ranting skills don't disappoint. He tears into politicians, both domestic and international, and in doing so predicts the complete capitulation of candidates for the French and Italian presidential elections. He goes on to decry the absence of various notable characters from around the world, such as the inventor of the 3D printed gun – who he believes should have attended SXSW.

But his final comments are by far the most interesting to my mind. In the first panel I saw featuring Bruce, he sat with fellow science fiction authors Daniel Suarez and Warren Ellis and told us incredible facts about his working life such as his proximity to government agencies that sought their help to solve hypothetical (but very possible) world crises. However, they all flatly refused to make any predictions for the future as they feared the backlash they could receive, particularly from social media. So in this talk it was fascinating to hear him predict the world of the future, which he surmises beautifully in a simple sentence: it will be old people in big cities afraid of the sky.

By this he is taking three simple principles that we know about today and combining them to form an almost inevitable fate. Firstly, we know that our population is aging, and a talk earlier this week even asserted that we may all be able to live forever within another 25 years. Secondly, there is a definite trend of people moving into high populous urban environments. Finally, global warming is seemingly resulting in a spate of catastrophic weather events such as hurricane Katrina, and it is likely this will only get worse unless we are able to reverse these effects quickly.

It’s a very big thought encapsulated in a very simple sentence. Bruce concludes by telling the audience he intends to spend his forseeable future prototyping what technology that may entail. His convictions are both enlightening and enthralling, everything that we were promised before we arrived.

As the talk draws to a close I file out with the masses. It was a fantastic closing speech that just hammers home the feeling that I've been exceptionally fortunate to have been in Austin these last few days. I will return home tomorrow afternoon with a mixture of joy and sadness. Joy for the fact I get to go home to my wife and kids, whom I have missed dearly. But sadness that this utterly fabulous event filled with so many talented and passionate people is over.

I take with me some incredible memories: from the big-data-powered IBM food truck to the Glass-sporting "trendsetters" and the incredible debates that the technology provoked throughout the convention. All I can say is thank you Austin, it's been a blast.

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