Dolly Parton embodies everything that SXSW is about: music, film, technology, and creativity.

And Friday night, the country music superstar gave a high-energy outstanding performance to everyone attending virtually in Dollyverse, and in person at the ACL Live’s Moody Theater at SXSW.

Parton has performed live at ACL Live before, recorded music, and done movies in Austin, but the opportunity never came up until Friday to perform at SXSW, she said.

“I love Austin,” Parton said. “There is a first for everything and this is the first for me and I’m excited to be here.”

Parton minted a lot of “firsts” at SXSW. She has written her first novel, Run Rose, Run with co-author James Patterson which debuted on March 7^th along with a new album. She created her first NFT or Non-Fungible Token of a rose collectible given free to everyone attending the event. Parton also launched Dollyverse, an audience-centric Web 3 experience with FOX Entertainment’s Blockchain Creative Labs at SXSW.

Before she sang, Parton sat down for a fun half-hour chat with her collaborator best-selling novelist Patterson and Emmy and Golden Globe Award-nominated Actress Connie Britton to discuss Run, Rose, Run, the novel she co-wrote with Patterson and its music album. The book is also going to be made into a major motion picture by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, Parton said.

The book, Run, Rose, Run, centers around Nashville and the country music business including ruthless, predatory agents and managers. But it also highlights good people like one of the main characters, RuthAnna Ryder. She was once a big star and is kind of retired from the business, but still writes songs, and she still has a recording studio and a band, and she mentors the rising star, a young girl, AnnieLee Keyes. RuthAnna is fashioned after Parton, and she plans to play her in the movie, she said.

“I kind of wrote myself in a part for the movie,” Parton said.

Run, Rose, Run provides insights into the inner workings of being a country star in Nashville, the good and the bad, Parton said. One of the songs she wrote is called “Snakes in the Grass,” because “you better watch your ass,” she said.

Britton told Parton she was a great businesswoman, and she does it with service. Parton is a singer, a writer, an actress, a businesswoman, and a philanthropist. Dolly’s Imagination Library has donated more than 174 million books to children in five countries. In 2020, Parton also donated $1 million toward the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.

“It feels like everything you do, you do for other people, and we appreciate that,” Britton said.

“Once you get into a position to help, you should do it,” Parton said.

Parton finds the right people to surround herself with that are going to take her purpose into the world as she does, Britton said.

“Dolly is the smartest person I’ve ever worked with,” Patterson said.

“She is a genius and also an angel,” Britton said.

Parton said she doesn’t know about that; she’s just doing her work as a professional Dolly Parton.

The collaboration with Patterson came about because Parton has always been a big fan of his books.

“He came down to Nashville and we just hit it off right away,” Parton said. “He had a good idea it was about Nashville, and I thought well that is something I know a little bit about. So, we just got to talking.”

They liked each other. Patterson and Parton made the deal right there in Parton’s office without any lawyers, agents, or anyone.

“We just did it,” he said.

Patterson got back to his house in Palm Beach and two days later Parton sent him the lyrics for seven songs.

“That’s true,” Parton said. “That’s the way I can contribute.”

Britton asked Parton if she just had the songs sitting around in a closet.

‘The story I related to the young girl, AnnieLee Keyes, and she’s new in Nashville running to something and running from something that’s the mystery of the whole book,” Parton said.

When she started writing the characters and the stories, a lightbulb went off over Parton’s head and she thought she should write an album to go along with it.

Run, Rose, Run is a book with a soundtrack, and that’s unique, Patterson said.

“If you start by listening to the songs, it’s really cool to see where they come from in the story or if you read the book,” Patterson said.

Britton said the book provides a lot of details about Nashville and captures the place. Patterson received his MA in 1970 from Vanderbilt University, which is based in Nashville. And Parton moved to Nashville the day after graduating high school when she was 18 years old.

The collaboration has been great, Patterson said.

“You never know when you’re going to work with someone whether you’re going to like them,” Parton said. “And I don’t usually write with people that much, but he just seemed like a new old friend, someone I’ve always known.”

Parton recalled that she wrote a song with Kenny Rogers called “You can’t make old friends.”

“But sometimes you meet people, and you feel like you’ve always known them,” Parton said. “So, I’m calling him now my new old friend.”

Britton asked Parton whether songwriting was very different from book writing.

“Well, it’s about the same as far as the creative process,” Parton said. But it’s easier to write a book, because when you write a song you must think about it playing on the radio, how long it has to be and it has to rhyme, she said.  Writing a book gives the writer more freedom, she said.

Parton said she had always hoped to write a novel when she was older. She’s glad it happened when it did because it’s been a really great experience. Parton is 76.

“Isn’t it great that at whatever age, you can do something new and have a new experience” Britton said.

Most people that are creative, it shouldn’t matter what age you are, Parton said.

“I always say that I’m as old as yesterday and as new as tomorrow,” Parton said.

People often ask Parton how she looks so young, she said. She attributes it to good lighting, good makeup, and good doctors.

And she always looks like a million dollars on stage. At the book talk, Parton sparkled like a rock star but still had that underlying country girl persona in a red checkered button-up blouse accented with red lace around the collar and cuffs and blue denim shorts stitched together with red lace leggings with five-inch red stiletto heels. And Patterson wore a jacket adorned with rhinestones. Steve Summers, Parton’s stylist, and branding expert creates her outfits and helped Patterson as well, Parton said.

After a brief intermission, Parton took to the stage in a new outfit – denim capris with bright red fringe and form-fitting denim jacket top with red fringe and sparkling roses around the neck and red plaid sleeves and her signature five-inch red stiletto heels.

Parton sang three songs from her new album: “Woman Up and Take it Like a Man,” “Run,” and “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans.” And she sang several of her past hits while dancing across the stage like a teenager. She also told stories about her life. Parton has been married to her husband, Carl Dean, for 56 years. She met him a few weeks after arriving in Nashville at the laundromat. They married two years later. One story involved her husband going to the bank to see a beautiful young woman about a loan for his construction paving business. That woman became the inspiration for the song, “Jolene,” which is Parton’s most covered song and has brought in a lot of royalties over the years.

“She made me a lot of money,” Parton said.

Other stories centered around her childhood growing up dirt poor in the Appalachian region of Eastern Tennessee as one of 12 kids. Her mother sewed a coat from rags that became the inspiration for the song “Coat of Many Colors.” She gave her mother all the royalties from the song. Her father, a tobacco farmer, never learned to read or write and struggled to keep his growing family fed. But while the family may have lacked financial resources, it was never short on love, Parton said.

With her powerful voice, Parton sang an acapella version of “Precious Memories,” a traditional gospel song that she used to sing in church growing up.

But the song that brought the house down was “Working 9 to 5.” Parton sang the iconic song, which was the title soundtrack to her first movie role in the 1980 movie Working 9 to 5. The lyrics about female empowerment must have struck a chord with the audience, which sang along. After Parton finished her performance, she asked the audience to sing the song. The audience sang several verses much to Parton’s delight.

At SXSW, Parton is also featured in the documentary about the Working 9 to 5 movie, called Still Working 9 to 5, which debuted at SXSW and examines the 40-year evolution of gender inequality and discrimination in the workplace.

Parton also touches on the theme of discrimination in the music industry in her book, Run, Rose, Run. She mentions Tomato Gate, which was a real-life controversy in 2015 sparked by a radio industry consultant who advised radio stations not to play consecutive songs by female artists. He said the male country singers were the lettuce in the salad and the female singers were more like the garnish, like tomatoes. It is clear in her body of work; Parton has fought discrimination throughout her entire career.

At the event, Working 9 to 5 was supposed to be her last song, Parton said. But she decided to sing “I Will Always Love You,” as her farewell tune. Parton wrote the song in 1974 and it went to number one on the country chart.

For the first time ever, Dolly Parton will perform at SXSW on Friday at the Austin City Limits Live at the Moody Theater.

She’s also involved in SXSW 2022 in a big way.

In addition to her live performance, Parton has written a book with best-selling author James Patterson, titled Run, Rose, Run. Parton has also created a music album that accompanies the book.

Parton will sit down with Patterson and Connie Britton, Emmy and Golden Globe Award-nominated actress, at 8 p.m. on Friday to discuss their collaboration on the novel, Run, Rose, Run.

In addition, Parton is parting with FOX Entertainment’s Blockchain Creative Labs to launch “Dollyverse” an audience-centric Web3 experience at SXSW.

Scheduled to open for Parton and Patterson are Kovic, Callie Twisselman, Electra Mustaine and The Brothers Moore.

 The entire event will be streamed live for free on “Dollyverse” by Eluvio, which also will power the “Dollyverse’s” NFT sales.

The “Dollyverse” will release an exclusive selection of official and certified Dolly NFT collectibles, including limited-edition NFTs of the Run, Rose, Run music album and a limited series of Dolly-inspired NFT artwork, for purchase during and after SXSW.  In-person attendees at Parton’s performance will be able to claim a free NFT, while fans streaming the event will be able to receive tokens authenticating their participation.

“There’s almost nothing more important to me than connecting with my fans.  And I’m almost always up for trying something new and different,” Parton said in a news release.  “I’d say releasing NFTs at my first ever appearance at SXSW, with James Patterson by my side, definitely counts as new and different!” 

“I am a huge Dolly Parton fan.  Who isn’t?  She is a national treasure, whose important contributions to the world transcend her incredible work as an entertainer,” Scott Greenberg, CEO of BCL said in a news release.  “Dolly is a true pioneer who brings the highest level of quality, heart and authenticity to everything she touches, which is why she’s the perfect person to introduce to the mainstream audience an easy-to-use, Web3 experience that will live stream her SXSW event and provide them the opportunity own and enjoy her music — not just a right to stream it – all designed to bring Dolly even closer to her fans.”

“Dolly Parton’s participation in SXSW 2022 fulfills one of our longtime goals and we’re absolutely ecstatic to have her involved in this year’s event in such a unique way,” said Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Officer for SXSW.  “Beyond her legendary status in the music industry, Dolly embodies the SXSW spirit as she extends her unique brand of creativity across many verticals. Most importantly, Dolly serves as an inspirational and unifying role model for millions of fans — spanning different ages, occupations, and viewpoints — from all over the world.”

In addition to the performance, book, album and Dollyverse, Parton is also featured in the documentary Still Working 9 to 5 which revisits the hugely popular Working 9 to 5 Movie that Parton starred in along with Jane Fonda and Lilly Tomlin. The comedy brought to light the struggles of working women in the workplace. The documentary explores how the movie was made and its feminist empowerment message and the underlying fight for women to get equal rights in the workplace along with equal pay.

At SXSW, NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens, are moving beyond artwork like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Kitties and into other creative areas like music, choreography, dance and TV shows.

And Austin-based Virtual Arts, the parent company of DanceFight, just struck a deal with reality TV pioneer Bunim-Murray Productions, based in Los Angeles. Together, they have formed a joint venture called Wonderfuel, an entertainment company that will use NFT to create and fund unscripted TV shows.

“This is a moment like never before where the fans and audience can get involved and be part of the action,” said Ryan Jordan, Virtual Arts Co-Founder. “We’re excited to be enabling the shift that distributes more participation and more opportunity to the viewing audience.”

NFTs, Web 3.0 and the Metaverse are all hot topics at this year’s SXSW 2022. An NFT is a non-fungible token that can’t be duplicated and is stored on a blockchain, a form of digital ledger, to prove ownership. NFTs can be sold and traded like collectibles. The NFTs can consist of artwork, photos, video and audio.

Wonderfuel plans to roll out a full slate of shows with NFTs baked into both the funding model and audience experience to air on both traditional networks and streaming platforms as well as Web 3.0 platforms, Jordan said.

“NFTs will be minted and released alongside the shows so that fans can become NFT owners and gain access to unique rewards, from involvement in creative decisions to sharing in prizes and unique fan experiences,” according to a news release.

Bunim/Murray Productions created the hit series The Real World on MTV. Its current series include Keeping up with the Kardashians, and Lizzo’s Watch Out For The Big Grrrls, which debuts on Amazon Prime this month.

‘Bunin/Murray Productions has been creating unscripted content for three decades and we value innovation – entertainment consumption is evolving and engaging with the audience has never been more critical to a show’s success,” Julie Pizzi, Bunim/Murray President said in a statement. “The world of NFTs is a thrilling way to put power into the hands of the consumer, creating programming that the audience has a very real stake in, and taking some of the financial burdens off the platforms. It’s an exciting way for unscripted content to converge with the power of tech.”

NFTs are now being extended to poetry, film, comedy, dancers, choreography, Matt Medved, founder of NFT Now, said in a panel at SXSW on Friday morning. NFTs allow people to build a community around their work and directly monetize which is exciting, he said. However, last Sunday, Futurist Amy Webb in her keynote address at SXSW cautioned against investing too much into NFTs. She sees the movement as more of a fad than something that will endure.

Austin-based Strap Technologies won Best in Show at the 2022 SXSW Innovation Awards.

The company makes Ara, a wearable device for visually disabled people that detects the environment and the obstacles that surround them. The device communicates in a simple and distinguishable manner through vibration with mechanical actuators.

The $500 device is expected to ship to consumers this spring. It also won the best wearable device category.

SXSW announced the award winners Monday evening.  \

“The world needs more inspiration in 2022 — and we distributed massive amounts of this at the SXSW Innovation Awards last night, ”  SXSW Chief Programming Officer, Hugh Forrest said in a news release. “It felt so good to shine a bright light on so many incredible projects that give us more optimism about the future!”

2022 Winners

AI & Machine Learning:
Quicktime Next-Gen Insights for Personalized Brain Care – Omniscient Neurotechnology (o8t) (Sydney, Australia)

Health, Med & BioTech:
Pioneering the Future of Allergy Relief – Fluo Labs, Inc. (Chicago, IL)

Innovation in Connecting People:
Proto M – Proto Inc. (formerly known as PORTL) (Los Angeles, CA)

Music & Audio Innovation:
Undercurrent – A_DA (Brooklyn, NY)

New Economy:
Hydrogen Energy Release Optimizer (HERO) – Star Scientific, Ltd. (Sydney, Australia)

Robotics & Hardware:
Vulcan, Bulletproof Precision Weeding for Vegetable Farms – FarmWise (San Francisco, CA)

Smart Cities, Transportation & Delivery:
Intelligent Infrastructure Solution – Velodyne Lidar (San Jose, CA)

Social & Culture Impact:
Degree Inclusive – Wunderman Thompson Argentina (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Speculative Design:
The First-Ever Waste Based Filament – UBQ Materials (Tel Aviv, Israel)

Student Innovation:
Tapis Magique: A Choreomusical Interactive Carpet – MIT Media Labs (Cambridge, MA)

Visual Media Experience:
Un(re)solved – Frontline PBS and Ado Ato Pictures (Brighton, MA)

VR, AR & MR:
Osso VR Surgical Training Platform – Osso VR (San Francisco, CA)

People’s Choice:
Lift Zones from Comcast – Comcast (Philadelphia, PA)

Innovation Awards Special Recognition:
GiveDirect-Novissi COVID-19 Aid – GiveDirectly, Government of Togo’s Ministry of Digital Economy & Digital Transformation, the Center for Effective Global Action, and Innovations for Poverty Action (Togo, Africa)

David Carr Prize:
Maria Ressa

Hall of Fame:
Nonny de la Peña

At South by Southwest, Capital Factory and Guinn Partners activated the Center for Autonomous Robotics with a two-day showcase of robots and drones.

The event took place Sunday and Monday and included a display of Unmanned Aircraft Systems technology from startups, corporations, universities, and government entities.

“Innovation is all about iteration. You have to try, fail, and try again as quickly as possible,” Capital Factory CEO Joshua Baer said in a news release “If you want to innovate with drones and robots, you need to be in a location where you can easily test your designs over and over.”

Capital Factory established a testing area for land, air and sea robotics of all types at its Center for Autonomous Robotics.

“The most challenging core technical problems in automation persist across industry” Colin Guinn, founder of Guinn Partners, said in a news release. “If America is going to be a global player in drones and robotics — and we should — then companies in that space need a place to collaborate and address those problems together. The CAR meets that need and so much more.”

The event included participation from the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and more.

Capital Factory provided shuttle transportation from its downtown office to the testing site.

In addition to the event, Capital Factory House held a series of talks and panels and other programs over four days focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, data, health, and more.

Capital Factory is an accelerator, incubator for startups and a coworking space. It also invests in startups and holds pitch competitions as well as collaborates with the military and private sector on innovative projects.

Based in Austin, Guinn Partners serves clients focused on drones and mobility.

Onuu, a fintech company, announced this week that it has raised $6 million in seed-stage funding.

Global Partners led the round with participation from Ulu Ventures, SV LATAM Capital, Jumpstarter Ventures, Verso Capital and Capital Factory Ventures.

Onuu, pronounced “on you” is focused on low-income consumers. The company will provide life insurance, savings and credit card products along with financial literacy lessons and a personalized digital guide.

The Austin-based company runs a monthly subscription-based model.

Felix W. Ortiz III, a serial entrepreneur, and Ryan Wuerch, who formerly founded DOSH, founded Onuu.

“Far too many Americans are rejected when they apply for financial products because of adverse selection,” Ortiz said in a news release. “The goal of Onuu is to bring them into the financial system fairly and give them a chance to prosper by offering financial security as a product.”

“My late grandparents, Felix and Candi, influenced my life so immensely and ultimately, were the catalysts for Onuu,” Ortiz said. “To turn the financial challenges, they faced into an opportunity to serve millions of people who are in a similar position is not only an honor, it’s a responsibility.”

The majority of Onuu’s VC funders are Latinx-led. It is a majority Hispanic-owned company, with a 20-person staff, 60 percent of whom are minorities or women.

“We believe fintech has entered a new phase of contextual financial services, where companies like Onuu will use AI-driven approaches to provide relevant financial services within the context of their users’ financial lives,” Roman Leal, Managing Partner of Leap Global Partners said in a news release. “Onuu’s vision of providing financial security for the roughly 166 million Americans traditionally left out by financial institutions is well aligned with our mission of challenging the status quo in fintech.”

Flash, a parking solutions provider, announced this week that it has raised $250 million in strategic investment led by Vista Equity Partners.

The Austin-based company, founded in 2011, has created a smart parking system that lets real estate owners, parking operators and cities solve problems of congestion and lack of visibility into parking supply and demand.

To date, the company has raised $314.3 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase.

Other investors in the deal include L. Catterton, other prior investors and management.

The company plans to use the funds raised to expand its Flash mobility operating system and payments platform, extend digital services, and hire more than 200 employees this year.

Flash also plans to focus on mobility solutions including electric vehicle charging stations, autonomous vehicle staging, and mobility-as-a-service.

“When FLASH was founded, the parking industry was poised for transformation and digital mobility platforms were nascent,” Dan Sharplin, Chairman and CEO of FLASH, said in a statement. “We are rapidly future-proofing urban mobility infrastructure by providing an agile, cloud-based, mobile-first platform for the myriad opportunities facing cities, citizens, asset owners, utilities, and parking operators. We are thrilled to welcome Vista as an investor and partner whose expertise and experience will ensure we continue innovating to advance the connected mobility experience.”

Flash has more than 10,000 customer locations nationwide and in Canada. It processes more than 11 million parkers per month and more than $1 billion in annual transactions.

“FLASH has an incredible opportunity to continue its disruption of a massive industry,” Marc Teillon, Co-Head of Vista’s Foundation Fund and Senior Managing Director, said in a news release. “We are excited to partner with Dan and the entire FLASH team as they innovate to advance the connected mobility experience.”

Facebook still has a huge problem with spreading misinformation throughout the world, said Frances Haugen, former product manager turned Facebook Whistleblower.

“The problem at Facebook is not about bad people or bad ideas it’s about giving the most reach to the people with the most extreme ideas,” Haugen said.

Haugen spoke at South by Southwest on Tuesday morning. Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke virtually via camera, in an afternoon session but didn’t mention any of the issues Haugen raised. Instead, he focused on the rebranding of the company to Meta and its focus on creating tools for the emerging Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality 3-D world known as the Metaverse.

In her talk, Haugen said she joined Facebook in 2019 after a Facebook recruiter reached out to her. She worked on a team focused on civic misinformation. It was an extremely personal issue, she said. She had lost connection with a close friend who went down a rabbit hole of misinformation.

Before joining Facebook, Haugen worked as a product manager at Google, Pinterest, and Yelp. Her job largely focused on algorithmic products and recommendation systems like the one that powers the Facebook news feed.

In her job, Haugen began to see Facebook prioritize profits over safety. She realized that the company also misrepresented how it was dealing with the problems of hate speech, violence, teenage mental health, human trafficking, and misinformation on its platform to the public, investors, and the government.

So, in 2021, Haugen became a whistleblower and gave tens of thousands of Facebook’s internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“It’s really easy to be dismissive of the severity of misinformation,” Haugen said.

Without having the ability to have shared facts, people don’t have the ability to discern fact from fiction.

“In the case of the truth, there is only one truth,” Haugen said.

Zuckerberg thought AI could solve the problem of misinformation online but it only made the problem worse, Haugen said. All artificial intelligence or machine learning systems are biased, Haugen said. She called them hill climbers. They consume information and optimize for the content that gets the most reactions, she said.

“The scary thing is that fake news is way more compelling than real news,” Haugen said.

That’s why third-party fact-checking and AI by machines do not work, Haugen said. The systems as they are written are not designed for scale, she said.  

Google and Apple are transparent on how they operate but Facebook is not, Haugen said.

“There is much less incentive for Apple to lie to us,” she said.

But Facebook is different, Haugen said. Facebook is a closed system, she said. Each one of us has a different experience on the platform, she said.

Facebook had been warned by an activist five years prior to 2020 that Facebook had a problem with human trafficking that was happening on the platform, Haugen said. When she brought it up with Facebook executives, they told her over and over again that it wasn’t real and that it was not a big deal.

“Because no one could see inside of Facebook they got away with it,” Haugen said. “When my disclosures came out – we had proof. The public had proof.”

Facebook gives the most reach to the most extreme ideas, Haugen said.

“It does that because it makes them money,” she said.

Facebook has not been about family and friends for a long time, Haugen said. It started to change around 2008, she said. .Facebook is a private company and they have a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, she said.

“Every quarter they need you to look at more and more content,” Haugen said.

That solution to get people on Facebook to spend more time and engage more was groups, Haugen said. These things are designed to be addictive and they are designed to create a rabbit hole for you to fall down into, she said.

“Groups are the gasoline that is ignited by the algorithm,” Haugen said.

Facebook also had a huge influence on the election, Haugen said. By the time we got to the ballot box in December, Facebook got to vote first, she said.

The QAnon, Neo-Nazi and other hate and misinformation groups flourished on Facebook, Haugen said.

Facebook has an algorithm that rewards polarized content, she said. And government oversight and regulation are needed to make sure the public’s safety is prioritized, Haugen said.

“The main thing I always advocate for is transparency,” Haugen said. “We have to have legislative-supported transparency.”

“Facebook knows how to keep us safe without censoring us,” Haugen said. “But the reason why it doesn’t. It makes more money running the system the way it does today.”

Digital identity in the metaverse, robots that are smarter than humans, synthetic biology to create chicken from stem cells, and climate change are some of the major trends Futurist Amy Web discussed at South by Southwest on Sunday morning

This year, Webb’s 15^th annual trend report is 668 pages long and covers 574 longitudinal tech and science trends, and is divided up into 14 reports. But the trends alone are not enough, Webb said.

“You need to use trends to help you re-perceive the future,” Webb said. “To help you influence the future.”

The biggest problem facing the world right now is not creating Web3, the Metaverse, or AI Robots taking over the planet, Webb said. The biggest threat has to do with a climate emergency, she said.

“Already, earth has warmed by about 1 degree Celsius or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, before industry started to boom,” according to the Environmental Defense Fund. “While we experience the effects, we’re on our way toward 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by as early as 2030.”

Rising temperatures are leading to extreme weather events worldwide. And if the world hits the 2-degree Celsius benchmark, those weather events will become even worse, Webb said.

“We’re not making enough changes,” Webb said. “We’re not doing enough about it. We’re not taking any action.”

It’s not enough to know the data, Webb said. People need to take actions right now to change behavior so that the future outcomes will be better, she said.

In addition to climate change, the major trends Webb talked about focused on Artificial Intelligence, Web 3, the Metaverse, and Blockchain and Synthetic Biology.

AI advancements are moving fast, Webb said. In 2012,  a neural network taught itself how to recognize a cat. Today, those networks can generate cat clones that look identical to the real thing in a matter of seconds.

Image recognition and generation are seamless today, she said.

AI is reaching other benchmarks like figuring out how to beat humans at complex computer games, Webb said. Google’s DeepMind created an AI Agent 57 that beats humans at classic Atari games. More recently, an AI Agent named GT Sophy beat some of the world’s best drivers of PlayStation racing simulation game, Gran Turismo Sport.

“We’re getting closer to the day when AI networks do make their own decisions without a human in the loop,” Webb said. “And if that has you freaked out, you are not the only one.”

“AI is starting to change how we communicate,” Webb said. “They can determine what we mean, not just what we say.”

Webb showed an example of an AI-generated synopsis of her report. She gave the AI agent a prompt with instructions, and it wrote the summary on its own from her data.

“We are generating data that can be mined and refined by AI systems,” Webb said.

And it’s not just about facial recognition anymore. AI can recognize people by their breathing patterns or heartbeat.

“If you don’t want to be recognized, it’s not like you can stop breathing or have your heartbeat stop,” she said. “AI systems don’t need your face to see you and know who you are.”

The scary thing is people trust AI-generated faces, more than they trust real faces, Webb said. AI can pull all the characteristics of trustworthiness, friendliness and create faces that don’t exist, she said.

Next, Webb talked about the next generation of the Internet called Web 3. It is real and it is very important, she said.  But digital collectibles, called Non-Fungible Tokens, are not the long-term play, she said.

“The next version of the Internet will become more embodied,” she said.

The metaverse is part of Web 3, the next version of the Internet, Webb said. The problem is there are no common protocols for the metaverse right now, she said.

“If you think managing passwords is a challenge today, imagine having to manage different synthetic versions of yourself sprinkled all over the metaverse,” Webb said.

Eventually, everyone will all have a digital ID, she said.

In the Metaverse, a digital ID is like a driver’s license, but it controls your data and you’re in charge of it and you’ll be able to parcel out different versions of your data as you see fit, Webb said.

Already, a Canadian-based company called Secure Key is creating digital IDs to protect data and information and give consumers pseudo-anonymity in the Metaverse, she said.

The buzz around NFTs will begin to fade, Webb said. Digital collectibles are valuable because of scarcity, but now the market is saturated with them, she said. But for now, the hype is real. Someone recently paid $650,000 for an NFT of a yacht in Sandbox.

“The analogy to fine art doesn’t mesh,” Webb said.

Webb also cautioned people to beware when they enter the Metaverse because they are much more vulnerable to influences. That is why regulation is needed, she said. Web3 is about transparency, interoperability, and trust, she said. But there need to be regulators to make sure that the virtual world develops in a healthy manner, Webb said.

Lastly, Webb talked about advances in synthetic biology like making chicken from stem cells. Lab-grown chicken is already being sold and consumed in Singapore.

The same big tech companies, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are working on synthetic biology applications, Webb said.

There are many products being made from DNA. Microchips are being made with DNA that can be used to reprogram the body and for life extension.

 China owns most of the DNA in the world. The second and third biggest owners are Ancestry.com and 23andMe, Webb said.

The key takeaways from Webb’s talk are “we’re in a period of acceleration,” Webb said.

“Bias still persists, and we need to fix that,” she said. “Decentralization will benefit some, but not all. We don’t have guardrails or national plans.”

And lastly, “we will need to define what is “real,” Webb said.