At SXSW, AI talk focused on pragmatic, near-term possibilities

Maybe Ed Doran really does like to listen to Jamaican-infused Nordic metal bands, maybe he doesn't. Either way, there are times he wants to crank the music up to 11, and times it's better muted. Unfortunately, artificial intelligence can't always tell the difference, and that missing context ranks among the key challenges developers face as they try to craft a smoother and more-useful interaction between humans and machines, the principal program manager at Microsoft Research AI said at South by Southwest earlier this month. Despite the occasional bold prediction or prophesy of doom, the discussions about AI at this year's SXSW festivities took a more pragmatic tone this year than in the past. While several panels still contemplated our long-term future -- one, for example, considered the possibility of consciousness in machines -- most of the researchers, developers and pundits set their sights on the challenges AI faces in the here and now. They talked about improving human-machine interactions, reducing bias in data sets and developer teams and, as Doran noted, enhancing an AI system's sense of context and human environment.