Human connections enhanced by gamification, blockchain, podcasting, space, self-driving cars and bots at SXSW17

Human connections at the SXSW registrants lounge with fellow South Australians, and human-focused design, taking boring content and turning it into games whilst changing behaviour, featured in a framework for actionable gamification in the first SXSW interactive session.

Like Waze’s snake monster where user generated content beat the traffic – this approach could work well for the Real Day Out (RDO) and so could Collection Sets at RDO stops.IMG_7697

A left and right brain overlay, with extrinsic & intrinsic rewards, builds out @yukaichou framework for Octanalysis.

Applying blockchain to education, knowledge, skills and capabilities, with ideas from the #IEEESXSW panel, starts with a distributed ledger that is,

“a record of assets or any other kind of content that is shared, replicated and encrypted so it becomes a verified and immutable source of truth.”

How could 21st Century Capabilities or competencies be captured, verified and shared via blockchain technology?

The inspiring work of @GirlForward and @GirlForwardTX, mentoring girls who are refugees in Austin and Chicago, was shared on the @IWJST podcast.

Digitisation and indexing of the physical world was explored in the @spaceknow session with the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI), satellitesand real time live streaming of space to mobile. Imagine you could look at all the buildings on the planet all the time via satellites and live streaming. You could find a flock of penguins in Antarctica via @googlemaps with high definition satellite imagery. How could you use this data and what new jobs will be created?

In a popular session on the real future of self-driving cars with @realgeohotz @comma_ai @OpenPilot it is possible that in terms of liability they are x100 times safer than humans driving cars.

World-first super human driving agent @comma_ai produces big data via censors, GPS and machine learning with 360 camera and a dash cam. Can you picture a self-driving car brought to you via ads with a detour to get @tacobell or another take away where you calculate the cost per person at doorstop (CPIRL) using a subscription to @comma_ai.

The sister city relationship between Adelaide and Austin was furthered in very practical ways with members of the South Australian delegation staying at Paula’s house, being introduced to local networks and participating in the Women in Austin event (down town private loft with a roof top view).

On day 2, there were long lines for the @HubSpot session on how b2b bots will help your company & career.

Rise in messaging bots to amplify human abilities and manage customer conversations presented by @dharmesh highlighted that coding is foundational for data science and AI.

“Shortest time between a customer question and an answer will be a bot.”

Q and A with @dharmesh @HubSpot suggested that the growth in bots will be speech to visual – in the future you will have a bot that represents you and talks to humans and other bots. Chat bots with automation and live support where humans manage exceptions will be the new rule for example using @facebook message to drive traffic.

The future of jobs is dark and full of terror (is it though) themes include:

  • Automation/Mass customization
  • Benefits of automation outweigh the negative consequences
  • If you were offered a universal wage to not work, would you agree?
  • Would you be more upset if you lost your job to a robot or another person?
  • What are the jobs at risk?
  • Is AI going to free us up from repetitive tasks?

And this is just the first 2 days at SXSW 2017 in Austin!

PS. Amazing to see Kate Baucherel from the UK having met her at the very first SXSW I ever went too – look forward to working with you into the future.

March 2017

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