Dispatches on Privacy from SXSW: Jazz Improv Edition
I relate my speaker style to jazz improv, and share some thoughts on other SXSW sessions I attended.
I realized I completely forgot to mention one very important thing in the last post: what actually brought me to Austin & South By Southwest in the first place.
The main reason I went was that I was given the great honor of attending and speaking at the inaugural Women in AI Governance™ (WiAIG) AI Governance House un-conference @SXSW.
Now, I don’t know about you, but no matter how many times I speak, which is to say, any time I’m asked to deliver a presentation before more than like, my cats or five people, I wake up the day of the presentation at 2am in an absolute panic. I’m talking heart palpitations, shallow breathing, sweating, the works. I then spend time I should be sleeping, frantically reading and re-reading, and sounding out my slides/notes. I am always convinced that I’ll not only forget everything I’d come to say and what I honestly know really well, but that I’ll forget in such an obvious way that everyone will suddenly realize that I’m a great big fat phony.
In my case, this frantic rehearsal is actually counterproductive, because in addition to losing precious sleep and actually knowing the substance of what I want to say, I have the short-term memory of a goldfish. In no universe will I ever be able to memorize anything. It’s a wonder I remember where I’m even supposed to go half the time.
So, what ends up happening is that on stage I mostly end up improvising in the word department. To borrow from the musical world, public speaking for me is less like a well-rehearsed classical performance, and more like a drop-in jazz improv session.
Now, if you’ve never played an instrument before, or participated in a jam session, it’s worth noting that sometimes, musicians will just show up to sessions and play with people they might never have seen, much less performed with before. There’s loads of small venue places where the only real criteria for participating in a jam session is having a vague notion of how to play a musical instrument, and being brave/stupid/drunk enough to try. In my younger days, when I was a bit more committed to playing jazz piano, I participated in a few of these sessions. Usually with the help of some (lots) of liquid courage.
What’s funny about just rocking up to a jazz session like that, especially if you’re not actually extremely knowledgeable of the particular song you’re playing, is that you’re probably going to fuck up and hit the wrong note or chord at least once, or lose the beat for a minute. The trick, as my sage piano teacher taught me was:
1) When you do fuck up, keep going, and
2) learn the circle of fifths, so you can dig yourself out again when you’re really screwed. The circle of fifths is most often displayed as a chart that shows a progression of notes separated into fifths — C — G — D — A, etc. It’s basically a cheat code for musicians, especially jazz musicians — and once you learn it, improvising songs gets much easier.
Anyway … much like jazz improvisation, I know the fundamentals of the presentation I’m going to make, and I have learned a few tricks to get myself out when I feel like I”m losing the plot (keywords, and bullets), but truth be told, I’m always kinda riffing. This is probably why I’ll never be asked to give a TED talk, speak at the UN, or get paid gobs of money to talk at corporate events. But like improvising at a random jam session, I still enjoy speaking, at least in the moment. It’s a helluva rush.
Women in AI Governance Takes Center Stage @ SXSW
I joked with the indomitable Shoshana Rosenberg (who co-organized this amazing thing with the always-charismatic Emerald De Leeuw-Goggin), that I was most excited about the fact that I could now cheekily state that ‘I spoke at South By (at the AI Governance House)’, which always seems to be a thing that fancy, important-sounding people enjoy bragging about on LinkedIn.
But in all seriousness, I really enjoyed presenting my improv-jazz-set of a presentation on machine unlearning — and attempting to answer all the challenging, thorny questions that came after. But more importantly, I drew inspiration from all the incredible wisdom and insight I picked up from the dynamic group of women & allies who attended and presented alongside me.
The topics ranged from Tea Mustać's excellent, thorough, and delightfully snarky kickoff on the EU AI Act. She pulled no punches, and the depth and breadth of her knowledge is profound. BTW, if you’re in Dublin on March 20, she and her co-author Peter Hense, will be running a training course on the EU AI Act, and discussing all the operational details of actually complying with this 300-page beast of a law.1
I was also delighted that Saima Fancy and Shoshana waxed philosophic on AI, future technologies (hello, quantum!), and how we should really be thinking about this ethically, notwithstanding the shifting market position. Shoshana also led a thoughtful discussion with Fatma Tarlaci, Ph.D. on AI continuous monitoring and how to do it well. And let’s just say, these women know how to do continuous monitoring in AI very well.
That led to Emerald and Joanna Smolinska (Deputy Head of the EU Office in San Francisco) having a fireside chat about Joanna’s career path, and the European Commission’s wider evangelism efforts to educate US tech companies and practitioners on why the AI Act, Digital Markets Act, and Digital Services Act aren’t just regulation for regulation’s sake.
Finally, there was an engaging session with representatives from Generation Alpha (which honestly makes them sound more like space aliens than I intended) on growing up with AI and social media as all-pervasive things. I’m not sure if I’d say the kids are alright, so much as the kids are even more skeptical of our future dystopia than I am.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the much-needed final audience roundtable / therapy / rant session, where we did did a full-on Festivus-style airing of our grievances (and some hopes) regarding the state of things. This was sensibly followed by cocktail hour, along with Dr. Chantelle Larsen's engaging discussion on equity, the importance of outside perspectives, and representation. Bringing it all back to the people, see.
I genuinely enjoyed the Governance House vibe, and the opportunity to chat with so many inspiring women and men on all things AI, tech, legal challenges. Shoshana and the WIAIG team did a phenomenal job of transforming Springdale Station in Austin into a productive, inviting, and energizing venue for hashing out the thorny details — in true WIAIG style. Next year is bound to be equally as impressive.
I’ll consider that a successful jam session.
Other Highlights: Spite, Spying Cars, AI Slop, and Quantum Sensors
Of course, there’s always more that I could write about in relation to my time at South By, but that short-term memory failure thing makes recalling everything hard. Fortunately, I did take notes on a few sessions. One session I really enjoyed was the one on spite-tracking apps — where female founders develop innovative tools and applications with the goal of improving women’s health outcomes based at least in part on their own inability to be heard about their medical issues. Fun fact: Did you know that women are far more likely to have health issues ignored, downplayed, or to be gaslit by the medical industry? Or that women weren’t even included in clinical trials until 1993?
I also attended an informative (and slightly horrifying) session on exactly how much data your car knows about you (hint: a staggering amount). I did call out one of the speakers for downplaying privacy risks, but I chalk her statements up more to ignorance of the problem (which is sadly common) and not malice. I also sat in on a session discussing how AI is enabling the development of quantum computing, including quantum sensors, which was actually great! Finally, I rounded things out at the 404 Media afterparty, where I listened to 404’s own Jason Koebler & Sam Cole, and author Brian Merchant, lament about how AI slop is destroying media and publishing. Thankfully for everyone, they had an open bar.
Summing Up SXSW
Recently on LinkedIn, Lourdes Turrecha shared the insights she took from a course offered by the Wharton School on ‘Leading an AI-Powered Future’ that I thought made for a relevant way to summarize the range of perspectives I encountered over the last week. She recounted that Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) categorized people into four buckets when it comes to AI:
Doomers think AI is an existential threat that should be stopped.
Gloomers believe AI is an inevitable march toward job loss and human displacement.
Zoomers want to proceed YOLO-style (aka, e/accs) .
Bloomers are cautiously optimistic, driving forward while mindfully tapping the brakes when the whole thing starts to skid.
Since I focused on SXSW sessions & events that touched on AI, innovation, privacy, and how we are all trying to come to terms with this massive change, it’s no real surprise that I saw a range of those four archetypes at SXSW. Many people (especially in some of the more artist-focused panels I wandered into) were deeply worried — firmly in the doomers and gloomers camp. Others were all aboard the Zoomer AI hype train, and sometimes, they bordered on insufferable to listen to.
But I found myself vacillating between cautious optimism, existential dread, and excitement about the possibility of it all. In Hoffman’s AI sentiment classification, it’s probably best to say I have mood swings when it comes to AI, technological development generally, and learn more towards gloom and dread when it comes to most of the people designing, developing, regulating, and enforcing that tech in particular. Or maybe it’s better to say, I recognize that we’re all wittingly or otherwise winging it here in a collective AI improv jazz session, and there’s going to be an awful lot of fucking up and discordant music along the way. We probably can’t stop, so we just need to find our own circle of fifths to work around our collective mistakes.
Did you attend SXSW? Wanna share your thoughts?
As an aside, I'm finishing this post up while waiting for the last leg of my layover, and I once again must state the obvious that London Heathrow is Kafka's The Trial, made manifest. If I never have to fly through this infernal hellmouth of an airport again, I will be a happy, happy woman. But let’s be honest, I know I will. *sigh*