At the screenings of Ryan Gosling's new movie "The Fall Guy" and Sydney Sweeney's "Immaculate" -- headlining events of the first week of this year's South by Southwest (SXSW) conference -- a reel of speakers touting the merits of AI including Peter Deng, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, was loudly booed by audiences. In other halls of the annual Austin confab, which attracts over 300,000 people each year, the tone was one of heady optimism. Companies were spinning a positive narrative -- pushing the idea that AI wouldn't destroy jobs, but rather represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize a multitude of industries. International Business Machines Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux told a SXSW panel that AI will instead alleviate labor shortages that are set to worsen as birth rates decline across developed economies. And while only a tiny percentage of jobs can be completely automated, the vast majority won't disappear -- but will change dramatically.

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.

In recent years we've seen a ton of robots designed to fill a wide range of human needs, from factory-line production to service needs at hospitals. Disney has delved into robot technology to enhance the visitor experience at its theme parks. Josh D'Amaro, Disney Parks chairman of experiences and products, attended South by Southwest in Austin to showcase several robots that roam the parks for the delight of visitors. D'Amaro pulled back the curtain on ways Disney uses robots to enhance environments designed and built for "happiness." In his presentation, Creating Happiness: The Art & Science of Disney Parks Storytelling, D'Amaro showed off robots from the tiny to the huge, going from Tinkerbell to a roller-skating kid robot.

For every problem you can think of, someone is out there pitching a solution that involves artificial intelligence. AI could help solve such intractable problems as climate change and dangerous work conditions, the technology's most eager boosters promise. It could even fix the much-maligned "Game of Thrones" finale, if you believe one of the industry's most powerful proponents and a featured speaker at this month's South by Southwest conference. "Imagine if you could ask your AI to make a new ending that goes a different way," said Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, the research group behind the conversation software ChatGPT and the image-generation module DALL-E. "Maybe even put yourself in there as a main character or something, having interactive experiences."

The first was Do Kwon, the Terra/Luna mogul who canceled his talk abruptly at a Web3 conference last year. Now it's Silicon Valley Bank executive Rochelle Stewart, who didn't appear here at SXSW in Austin on Monday for a scheduled "mentor session" (the link now produces a 404 error) on entrepreneurship and business development. Which is understandable, considering the bank's sudden collapse over the weekend is the biggest U.S. financial disaster since the 2008 crisis. The Silicon Valley Bank saga might seem at first like a pure finance story, an update of 2008 for the Uber-for-everything startup era. But that update is exactly why it's something much bigger: It is a cold-water reminder that the sprawling ecosystem of startups working on blockchain, AI and virtual-reality tech (among other things) isn't just driven by pure intellect and ambition.

"What's the problem you're trying to solve?" Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard business professor, was famous for posing this aphoristic question to aspiring entrepreneurs. By asking it, he was teaching those in earshot an important lesson: Innovation, alone, isn't the end goal. To succeed, ideas and products must address fundamental human problems. This is especially true in healthcare, where artificial intelligence is fueling the hopes of an industry desperate for better solutions. But here's the problem: Tech companies too often set out to create AI innovations they can sell, rather than trying to understand the problems doctors and patients need solved.

The Amper app allows a user to pick a genre of music (rap, folk, rock) and a mood (happy, sad, driving) before spitting out a song. The user can then change the tempo, add instruments or switch them out until the result is satisfactory. Two songs created by Amper at SXSW -- using the public's choice of pop and hip hop as the genres and tender or sad for the mood -- clearly aren't likely to top the charts. But the pieces were pleasant enough to the ear and perfectly usable as background music to illustrate a video or a computer game. Such songs are described by Amper as "functional music" as opposed to "artistic music."

They may never be able to fill a stadium for a rock concert, but computers are making inroads in the music industry, capable of producing songs--and convincingly so--as illustrated at the South by Southwest festival in Texas. Already, an album featuring eight tracks has been produced entirely with artificial intelligence, an unprecedented feat. "I Am AI" was released last fall by YouTube star Taryn Southern, who doesn't know how to play any instruments. "For my first music video in 2017, I had a lot of friction as a non-musician," the young artist told a panel discussion on Sunday at the festival running from March 8-17. "I wrote lyrics, I had a melodic line but it was difficult to compose and record the actual music."

In 2012, Moritz Simon Geist left a promising career as a research engineer in Germany to build robots and travel the world playing music full-time. He'd studied classical music in school, starting with the clarinet and piano, and toured with punk bands since he was a teenager in the '90s. That was when he started tinkering with equipment, building cheap solutions for complex audio problems and creating brand-new tools. Eventually, Geist's aptitude with electronics and music transformed into a new beast. Today, he's a solo artist who plays robots as music, relying on physical motion and contact microphones rather than electronics to create his beats.

Save time in your calendar Sat, March 9, 2019 6PM - Austin #AI Community Mixer. If you are in Austin during SXSW and want to meet some of the top AI companies in town, swing by The AI Community Mixer for demos and networking!