If you want to know the future of technology, then you need only look at what’s happening in pornography.
You know what standardised Super 8 as a format in the 1960s? Porn. You know what killed Beta as a video format? The greater availability of porn on VHS. 1-800 numbers, CD-ROM, pay TV, video on demand: they all started with some engineer with a dream, which involved seeing someone else with no clothes on.
Not necessarily this specific someone else.
And when the internet appeared a lot of the things you take for granted – secure online payments, encryption, video formats – were all pioneered by the industrious smut-bees of the porn biz.
Even the weird-ass “pregnancy belt” used by particularly empathetic fathers-to-be to experience the feelings of carrying a child is only possible because of the leaps in haptic engineering that the porn industry spearheaded for masturbatory tech – what is rather brilliantly called “teledildonics”. Streaming video, appropriately, started with porn.
Anyway: this brings us to Deepfakes, the technology which is about to end the world.
Well, at least it’s still creepy.
Deepfakes began, once again, from the simple dream of wanting to see people with their clothes off. Specifically, famous people.
The term was coined in 2017 – blending the coding term “deep learning” with “fake” – but the exercise has existed ever since horny people realised they could use graphics programs to cut and paste a famous person’s face onto a digital centrefold.
And, like all technology, it rapidly left the porn suburbs and moved to the cultural big city where it’s used to do things like create a creepy Princess Leia for Rogue One or have 70 year old Samuel L Jackson perform as his 45 year old self in for Captain Marvel.
But, of course, now that tech is out there and anyone can use it to make anyone do or say anything in a way that’s pretty convincing.
So how long until it’s used for a world leader to declare war, or have an opponent announce they’re a pedophile? It’s vaguely amazing it hasn’t happened yet.
At the time of writing, at least.
But it’s not even what they can create that’s of concern: it now gives a perfect rationale for denying the reality of anything caught on film.
That’s reasonable if it’s, say, Emma Watson rejecting a sex tape – but less so if it’s Putin denying war crimes, or Trump rejecting video of alleged urine-related events in Russian hotel rooms. When anything is real, nothing is.
And god, how embarrassing will it be if humans end up rendered extinct from a war started by a bad video of Chinese leader Xi Jinping grinding down on Vice President Mike Pence?
When we get to the afterlife, we’re going to look like such idiots.