Algorithms tuned by an average engineer can outperform those built by the world’s leading experts - Kai-Fu Lee

To the AI, such things were a matter of math, not love.

So, is 100-percent detection of deepfakes hopeless? In the very long term, 100-percent detection may be possible with a totally different approach — to authenticate every photo and video ever taken by every camera or phone using blockchain technology (which guarantees that an original has never been altered), at the time of capture. Then any photo loaded to a website must show its blockchain authentication. This process will eliminate deepfakes. However, this “upgrade” will not arrive by 2041, as it requires all devices to use it (like all AV receivers use Dolby Digital today), and blockchain needs to become fast enough to process this at scale.

Cash has disappeared so quickly from Chinese cities that it even “disrupted” crime. In March 2017, a pair of Chinese cousins made headlines with a hapless string of robberies. The pair had traveled to Hangzhou, a wealthy city and home to Alibaba, with the goal of making a couple of lucrative scores and then skipping town. Armed with two knives, the cousins robbed three consecutive convenience stores only to find that the owners had almost no cash to hand over — virtually all their customers were now paying directly with their phones. Their crime spree netted them around $125 each — not even enough to cover their travel to and from Hangzhou — when police picked them up. Local media reported rumors that upon arrest one of the brothers cried out, “How is there no cash left in Hangzhou?