Finally, all those #SXSW tweets are over

Well, the transition in Austin is complete: all of the tech rock stars have been replaced with actual rock stars. The South By Southwest Interactive Conference came fraught with new technological ideas, lots of tacos and Shiner, and a sea of green and blue t-shirts hawking the next "greatest" startup.

Of the sessions I managed to see, The Future of Making still churns in my head the most. This was a panel discussion between Tim Brown and Joi Ito, the CEO of IDEO and director of MIT's Media Lab respectively. They nonchalantly cruised past the maker movement and explored a revolution in cheap manufacturing. So cheap, in fact, that iterative software practices could be applied to hardware. They also explored the moral and social implications of new emotional-level human sensors that can tell us more about ourselves than even we know.However, Ito seemed most passionate about the advent of bioengineering. As he showed an MIT project that used silkworms to intelligently construct a pavilion, he insisted on the importance of using nature to work for us, as an antidote for the existing naïve and harmful relationship between humans and nature.We used to live in a world where we could do anything to the system that we wanted, he argued, because it was so vast that nothing we did had any effect. That's not the case anymore, and we've got to do something about it. Soon, everyone will understand bioengineering to the level that they understand the Internet today. Everyone will need to know something about it.I left feeling that we are on the cusp of another enormous shift in technology that will increase humanity's capacity for innovation by orders of magnitude. But maybe that's how every SXSW is supposed to make us feel. One of the most pervasive trends of SXSWi I witnessed lives in that nebulous anticipation of greatness. It is in the intersection of natural language technologies and increasing abstractions to the coding layer. Walking around the Exhibition Hall, I saw several companies offering create-an-app services and new ways to rapidly generate apps and systems across platforms. The line between a late-stage prototype and version 1.0 continues to blur; coding might eventually be one of many methods of creating a new technical product.Furthermore, Stephen Wolfram's debut demo of the Wolfram Language (though plagued with bugs and connectivity issues) pointed to a new future of Omnisemantic Object Oriented Programming, where the computer understands for you how a piece of information can be manipulated in the system. Wolfram thinks that knowledge of an object or a set of data should be integrated with the operations that can be performed with it. So, for instance, the phrase "the flags of the former Soviet republics" becomes an object that knows that it's a set of images and can be asked, "which one is most similar to the flag of France?" Impressive.Humans want a computer to understand us to the degree of inference. Plenty of science fiction stems from that premise. A crucial next step, though, is the fusion of our ability to instruct, so far confined to machine-prescribed languages, with our ability to communicate. The quest for a programming language that can mimic real speech isn't new. But we are certainly closer than we ever have been. Marketing seemed to be grasping for new territories at SXSW more than ever. Few, if any, talks centered on an "always listening" strategy. The industry of advertising understands the need to surpass communication on the way to full-on interaction, but seeks to discover just what the most successful channel will be. Talks such as "Reddit: You're Doing It Wrong" and "Wave Harder: Can Gesture Computing Work In Retail?" pointed to new avenues where brands can directly add value for an individual by engaging them in an experience, not merely a conversation. Communicative services appear to be retreating to their place as conduits for more meaningful engagement. I don't think I heard the name "Facebook" once the entire week.------Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW Interactive, introduced Chelsea Clinton's keynote speech by expressing the organisation's reception of previous years' feedback for more socially conscious talks. Tech as a whole may provide a new layer of atmosphere that transcends political and geopolitical boundaries, where important changes can take place. Everyone understands Twitter and YouTube's importance in the Arab Spring, in Syria, and recently in Ukraine and Crimea. Thankfully, tech companies took an early stance of "no filter," allowing for truth to spread faster and for direct sources to reign supreme. This decided stance of non-interference creates a community that who craves transparency and public data.Bitcoin certainly possesses those traits. The founder of Coinbase, a heavily venture-backed Bitcoin exchange, emphasised the cryptocurrency as the new global cash. He deflected questions about volatility and speculation, claiming only 5 per cent of his net worth is in Bitcoin. He sees the currency as part of a more global operating sphere, where market forces preside and global transactions are as effortless as sending an iMessage.Intercontinental transactions allow efforts like the Clinton Foundation to incentivise prosperity in places that need it most. Chelsea Clinton spoke of an important anti-diarrhea medication needed in Africa, that a fledgling company could make at a prohibitively expensive $8. The Clinton Foundation offered to assume the risk of mass production by purchasing a huge quantity up front, bringing the cost down to under a dollar. Companies can use opportunities for social benefit when pointed in the right direction, and the week left me optimistic about our ability as an industry to contribute to Good with a capital G. Transparency and operations in a global realm are definitely pointing us in the right direction.------Overall I left the conference with a new confidence for the year ahead. I find something exciting about a year without a clear winner like Uber, or 3D printing, or the internet. The canvas is vast and the possibilities endless. I leave with a great deal of inspiration, eager anticipation for what the next twelve months will bring, and ears ringing from the oddly awesome St. Lucia and Snoop Dogg concert.------My thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the tragedy that occurred in Austin late Wednesday night. I hope for a quick recovery for the injured victims.Charlton Roberts is a software architect at TBWA\Chiat\Day