Robot dogs, tech bros and virtual Geisha girls: when SXSW came to Sydney

A simultaneously familiar and slightly terrifying robot dog wanders through the audience of a session at the Sydney edition of South by South West. On stage, the panellists opine about a future increasingly defined by artificial intelligence and automation. "It's going to get much, much more significant," says Ed Santow, the former human rights commissioner and current director of policy and governance at the UTS Human Technology Institute. "And for many people that will be a good thing, [but] for a lot of people it'll be really, really hard." The robot is creepy but its fan is as noisy as a ps4 so it's not sneaking up on anyone.