Those Tom Cruise deepfakes are even weirder than you think. A US town tried Universal Basic Income. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
?? This week’s Sunday briefing was inspired by Facebook’s skirmish with the Australian government. Go here to read How to Build a New Internet (and Save the News Industry)??
This week, AI-manipulated faces were everywhere. How much longer will we be able to tell real from fake?
Also, Stockton in California trialled UBI; now the results are in. And Microsoft wants to revolutionise remote collaboration with its new holographic platform, Mesh.
Let’s go!
?? AIs Wide Shut
It’s been another big week for generative adversarial networks (GANs). More specifically, for deepfakes.
You’ve already seen it, but here’s a reminder. And if you think you already have this story covered, scroll down: there have been developments.
A series of insanely good Tom Cruise deepfakes did the rounds this week. Cue much talk on the impending threat posed by this kind of AI technology.
It was revealed today, though, that these aren’t just any old deepfakes. They’re the work of a team of experts assembled by the creators of South Park, and going under the name Deep Voodoo Studio. The actor involved is Miles Fisher, a leading Cruise impersonator. When the news broke, the videos mysteriously disappeared from their original home on TikTok. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, Twitter was also on fire with MyHeritage’s GAN-fuelled Deep Nostalgia tool, which animates photographs of faces. Lots of people are using the tool to animate pictures of ancestors, and the results are eery.
One final sign of AI times? Latest figures show China has overtaken the US in AI research journal citations; an indicator that it now leads the world in novel AI findings.
? NWSH Take: VICE magazine revealed the true origins of the Tom Cruise deepfakes. Their line: it took a team of experts and a big budget to make deepfakes this good, so all the deepfakes are going to ruin democracy talk of the last few days has been overblown. // There’s some truth in that, but I’m not so relaxed. Sure, the average troublemaker still can’t make a deepfake like this. But it’s only a matter of time. Besides, the fact that anyone can produce something this convincing is already enough to distort our shared conversation. It won’t just mean people believing in fake clips, it will mean people dismissing real clips as fake. The water is getting muddy, and it will be enough to make many throw up their hands and say, ‘meh, real, fake, who knows, who cares?’ // As for MyHeritage: it’s a genius marketing campaign. Why? It leverages an exciting new technology to serve a human need that is deep and relevant to the brand: connection to departed loved ones.
?? UBI’s time has come
For the last two years a small town near Silicon Valley called Stockton has been running an experiment in Universal Basic Income.
At the mayor’s behest, 125 families with incomes below the $46,000 median where selected, and sent $500 a month no strings attached. Their journey through the last 24 months was compared against a control group.
Now, the results are in. Participants didn’t waste the money: they used the money to pay off credit card debt and buy household essentials. Free money didn’t discourage them from working: the share of participants with full time jobs rose 12 percentage points in the UBI group, verses five percentage points in the control group.
? NWSH Take: The Stockton experiment adds to the growing body of evidence that UBIs are effective, and that the best way to tackle poverty is to give poor people money. // Meanwhile, the pandemic has seen governments transfer vast quantities of cash to citzens: see $1,400 stimulus cheques in the US, or the UK furlough scheme. All the conditions are in place for UBI to become a mainstream political idea. // My view? In industrialised economies some form of UBI is right, and maybe even inevitable. Automation means productive economies that need little human labour. Let’s set people free to be useful outside the boundaries of the traditional economy: to care for loved ones, be with their children, and follow their creative instincts.
?? Welcome to the holoworld
At its annual Ignite event Microsoft debuted Mesh, a holographic platform intended to revolutionise remote collaboration.
Mesh is built on Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, and it enables people using VR headsets or AR glasses (such as HoloLens) to collaborate in a shared holographic space.
Check it out:
CEO Satya Nadella says he wants Mesh to do to remote work what Xbox Live did to gaming. And this platform could transform events, too; Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberté spoke at the launch event via.
Intrigued? You can see the entire one-hour launch keynote here.
??? Also this week
?? Researchers at Hanover Medical School say they may have found a new anti-aging drug. When spermadine was administered to mice they suffered fewer diseases and physical signs of ageing.
?? Music streaming site SoundCloud is switching to a fan-powered royalty system. It will be the first streaming service to send each subscriber’s fees only to the artists they stream.
?? Japan’s recovering hikikomori have been hit hard by the pandemic. Typically young men, hikikomori withdraw from society and shut themselves in their bedrooms.
?? Google is explaining more about its plan to ban third party cookies from Chrome. The move will transform online advertising. A huge story this week; but you heard it first way back in New Week #22.
?? Netflix have created a TikTok clone. The new Fast Laughs feature provides a feed of short, funny clips from its shows.
????? Tech companies in Silicon Valley are offering a new perk: work from home forever. To think it used to be all about bean bags and free muffins.
?? FedEx say they will be carbon neutral by 2040. The delivery firm will spend $2 billion to transfer to an all-electric fleet.
????? Blue Origin has delayed the launch of its New Glenn rocket until 2022. It’s yet another delay for the flagship project at Jeff Bezos’s space startup.
?? A new official report says the US is not prepared to deal with the threat posed to national security by AI. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence was led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
?? Canadian singer Grimes made $6 million by selling digital art backed by non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Read New Week #24 for a guide to the NFT phenomenon.
?? Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
?? Global population: 7,849,726,386
?? Earths currently needed: 1.7792559372
?? Global population vaccinated: 0.7%
??? 2021 progress bar: 17% complete
?? On this day: On 3rd March 1938 oil is discovered for the first time in Saudi Arabia.
You had me at hello
Thanks for reading this week.
The rise of deepfakes is only just beginning. And pretty soon they’ll make our 2021 discussions about disinformation look positively quaint. We’re about to enter a whole new hall of mirrors.
In the world that’s coming it’s more important than ever that we work together to make sense of what’s happening, and what it all means for our shared future. That’s what New World Same Humans is all about.
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I'll be back on Monday with another New World Same Humans. Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.