Amid tumultuous change, we're holding on to what makes us human.
Author
Marie Stafford
The world converged on Austin last week for the SXSW Festival, an annual celebration of human creativity and of getting in line. And with plenty of big-name speakers in town for the conference (hello, Michelle Obama!) those lines required some commitment.
With so much political turmoil, we might have expected some provocation, but most speakers opted to sidestep the drama. The conversation that emerged showcased the dazzling pace of change, while also underlining the need to feel connected, human and grounded. Even Sesame Street’s Elmo popped up to offer us all a breathing exercise.
Here's our round-up of some of the themes emerging from this, the 38th SXSW Festival.
Social wellness
“The biggest threat to America right now is loneliness,” according to Professor Scott Galloway. The consequence he says, are hitting hard on a generation of young men who are “sequestering from society. They are not attaching to work, school or relationships.” As a result, he says, they “become shitty citizens, and we’re producing millions of them.”
Kasley Killam has a solution. The Harvard-trained social scientist argued that social health is the missing pillar of the temple of health, and that it’s built on connection and community. And it’s set to break into the mainstream. "In ten years,” she stated, “social health will be completely woven into the fabric of our culture." She encouraged businesses to take up the charge, promising that “socially fit teams are the future” and predicting the rise of a new C-suite role: Chief Social Health Officer. Focusing on social health will deliver a competitive edge in business she said, cautioning, "If your company is not prioritising social health, you will fall behind.”
Kasley Killam in conversation with Amy Gallo at SXSW 2025. Photo credit: Mike Jordan. Courtesy: SXSW.
Tackling the diminishing returns of the social media experience,Ev Williams and Molly deWolf Swetson, spoke with Baratunde Thurston about the new social platform Mozi and their mission to finally make social media, truly social. Mozi helps people connect meaningfully with friends rather than make new ones and puts the emphasis on real life meetups as opposed to online. Features include profiles that capture useful details about friends more commonly found in dating apps (like their relationship status, or dietary preferences) and details of location and upcoming plans to eliminate social friction. The design aims to get users off the app as quickly as possible to encourage face-to-face connection.
Amplifying connection in a practical way was Canadian entrepreneur Radha Agrawal, back in Austin to launch a social volunteering app called Yellow Jackets. Based on the idea that connection and empathy tackles loneliness, the app aims to encourage “random acts of social connection and love” or RASCALs for short.
Truthtelling imperative
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre by Nonny de la Pena and DNE Studios
For several reasons, from the technological to the political, telling truth from fiction is getting harder. In his conference opener, president and chief programming office Hugh Forrest put it mildly that “we live in interesting times.”
In some ways this can be thrilling. Take Light Field Lab’s holographic technology. New from the ground up, the technique, called SolidLightTM manipulates light so that hologram visuals can be seen with the naked eye, no screens required. At a fireside chat, Light Field’s CEO Jon Karifin shared that he foresees application in entertainment and leisure, but also in everyday life, where one day he says, we might record and project our memories in 3D in our homes. We’re headed for “an era of mass virtualization” says Karifin. But, asked moderator Charlie Fink, “What happens when we don’t know what’s real anymore?”
In some ways, we’re already there: in VML’s latest survey for the Future 100 2025 finds, 76% of global respondents call truth “an endangered concept” and 82% are worried about the impact of fake news. What can be done to battle disinformation?
One weapon: creativity. At a panel on propaganda, Gabriel Mattar of Innocean Berlin and Giordano Maestrelli of Stink Films shared three iterations of the First Speech campaign they created for Reporters without Borders, that won the Cannes Grand Prix for Good in 2024. The films powerfully depict how autocratic leaders who oppose freedom of the press eventually undermine freedom itself. Speakers underlined the importance of true freedom of the press and of its potential “to help us spread the truth if we do it right.”
Speakers at the How can fictional futures help us strengthen truth session, shared how future narratives can be a tool for truth, by inspiring collective action to safeguard freedom and empathy. Author Laila Lalami added that “the biggest power we have is to work in community with others.”
History can also teach us important truths, as evidenced by a powerful story brought to life at the XR Experience showcase. The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre by DNE Studios uses AI, 4D volumetric capture and animation to tell the true story of violent attacks on the black community, which had long been painted as a riot.
At VML’s panel Disabling AI, speakers Josh Loebner and Jason Carmel tackled the ongoing issue of AI bias, which leads to poor representation or erasure and exclusion for people with disabilities. Their advice included the surprising directive to “design in bias, as a feature, not a bug.” Doing this can help make people with disabilities more visible to machines and so establish more accurate representation.
Josh Loebner and Jason Carmel at VML's panel Disabling AI
New frontiers of AI: from agentic to biological
New frontiers of intelligence are emerging. A couple of weeks before SXSW, a clip of AIs babbling to one other in the machine language GibberLink went viral, pointing to the potential for AIs to cooperate to get things done without our intervention. Say hello to agentic AI, this year’s buzzword driving many a session, from futurist Neil Redding’s talk on the impending “agentic era” to IBM’s talk tracing the implications for the workplace.
Meredith Whitaker, president of secure communication platform Signal, sounded the alarm on this “magic genie bot that will take care of the exigencies of life,” that she likens to “keeping our brain in a jar.” Agentic models, she said, threaten to blur the line between the application layer and the OS, raising profound security and control risks.
Meredith Whitaker, CEO of Signal, in conversation with Guy Kawasaki. Photo credit: Jason Bollenbacher, Courtesy: SXSW
But there’s yet more on the AI conveyor belt. Next, physical AI, which comprises anything autonomous: from robots to drones and of course, self-driving cars – which are still, “nearly here”. This year SXSW attendees could experience autonomous riding for themselves thanks to Waymo’s partnership with Uber which launched immediately prior to the festival. And a few lucky Platinum pass holders got the chance to try out beginners’ autonomous flights in LIFT’s fleet of personal eVTOLs.
Meanwhile, Dr Anirudh Devgan, CEO of chip designer Cadence, said that the potential for physical AI is vast, going way beyond that of agentic AI. Co-panelist Tye Brady of Amazon concurred, describing it as “the most transformative technology that I’ve ever witnessed – just as transformative as the computer was.” In the future, a multitude of robot forms are likely to be toiling away, blending in the background, in a host of scenarios. For now, they are hardest at work in healthcare, where one of their number – a robot named Moxi, has already completed 1 million trips and saved healthcare workers 1.5 billion steps in its work in US hospitals.
Looking even further ahead, several speakers touched on the potential for biological or living intelligence that blend human neurons or organoids grown from stem-cells with silicon. Futurist and crowd favorite Amy Webb, pointed to the launch of the world’s first biological computer made with human neurons as a sign that we are “entering an era of living intelligence,” capable of learning, adapting and evolving.
Quantum era
AI might be center of attention right now, but like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), SXSW is also calling out quantum as the next big thing. Quantum computing consequently had its own track at the conference for the first time. Tech entrepreneur and investor Whurley called it a once in a generation opportunity: “Quantum will be more impactful than the Internet and AI” he said, “In 1959 who was thinking of the Internet? We have that chance all over again.”
For the uninitiated, Carina Choi, the COO from Google Quantum AI, was on hand to explain why everyone is talking up the technology in a session titled Quantum computing: the what, the why, the when. She shared details of Google’s recent demonstration of its Willow chip, while also delivering a handy explainer for the audience. She compared the research being published right now on quantum to the discovery of the human genome: it does not solve everything we need to know, but it advances our understanding. Quantum won’t replace traditional computers she said, the two are going to be complementary. Nevertheless, she described getting into the hands of the public as “the ultimate goal.”
Quantum will be more impactful than the Internet and AI. In 1959 who was thinking of the Internet? We have that chance all over again.
Whurley
Entrepreneur and investor
Neo-ancestral tech
Amid the high-tech hype, a flurry of talks and panels this year advocated for a re-evaluation of traditional indigenous knowledge and wisdom.
Neuroscientist Alysson Muotri shared details of research conducted by his lab at the University of California in San Diego in partnership with an unusual collaborator: Amazon shamans. The aim? To identify medicinal plants that could offer up neuroactive ingredients to treat conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. If the project is successful, said Muotri, royalties will go back to the tribes and to the protection of the Amazon.
A talk at Dubai’s Museum of the Future highlighted Indigenous peoples as “the world’s best keepers of intergenerational knowledge”, and asked why they do not play a bigger role in central leadership, a theme echoed in a session on First Nations economic empowerment that championed indigenous entrepreneurship and innovation.
Speakers from Earth RM at SXSW 2025
EarthRM, a female-led, Hawai’i-based non-profit, was at the conference to advocate for the integration of indigenous knowledge and traditional practices with Western science to address pollution. Their speakers highlighted their work to tackle the damage caused by the 2023 Hawai’i wildfires at Lāhainā. Bioremediation, an “age-old technology” uses local fungi, plants and microbes to heal lands polluted by fire. “Bioremediation is living indigenously” said Hannah Hartmann of EarthRM, “healing through living reciprocity with their land, their waters, their oceans, everything."
Solving aging
Longevity is a macro-trend that is set to disrupt society, business and life itself – and one driver centers on a growing body of research around how we can fend off or even reverse aging.
Alysson Muotri discussed a partnership between his lab with NASA which is using brain organoids (tiny brain-like structures grown from human stem cells) to better understand and tackle age-related conditions. Research has shown that astronauts suffer from “space related senescence” in which cognitive capacity is severely impaired and the risks for age-related conditions increase. Organoids are being sent to the International Space Station so that we can understand why and how this happens.
Next, professor of genetics and author David Sinclair presented his radical theory of aging, which he told the audience had taken twenty years to be taken seriously. “The cause of aging is not just wear and tear as we used to think, it's actually entropy or loss of information” he said. One day, says Sinclair, we could create a drug which will reverse that loss, and reverse aging. He shared details of epigenetic reprogramming research which has successfully reversed age-related blindness in mice and monkeys. In a year he said, we should know if the same technique works in people. His co-presenter, psychologist Jeffrey Liebermann said we are at “an inflection point in human evolution.”
Bryan Johnson, on stage at SXSW 2025. Photo credit: Hubert Vestil. Courtesy: SXSW.
The final festival keynote was delivered by Bryan Johnson, the “don’t die” guy. Johnson claims to be the most tested man on the planet and has the biomarkers of someone half his age. At SXSW he shared his secrets, and on the surface, there were no surprises: get good sleep, a good diet, exercise, connect with others and measure your progress. As ever, the devil was in the detail. Getting four hours of sleep or less depletes cancer-fighting cells by 74%. Not having community can cost 8 to 17 years of life. Fried chicken increases mortality by 13%. No wonder in Johnson’s household “every calorie must fight for its life.” If we harness the progress in aging research, and accelerate it using AI, says Johnson, "We may be the first generation who won't die."
On that note, the curtain came down on another SXSW and the last ever to take place at the Austin Convention Center – at least as we know it. The building is to be redeveloped over the next three years, meaning some big changes ahead for the festival, which will lose its biggest conference space. While organizers ponder how to restructure for next year, brands will have much to think about too: how to keep pace with the blistering pace of change and how to hold on to humanity in a complex, challenging and divided world. The need for empathy and connection was evident, and the power of storytelling, creativity and imagination emerged as our most potent weapons. Until 2026!
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