Paul Canetti on the implications of augmented reality era, ushered in by the release of the iPhone X:

Besides all the awesome implications… it’s also easy to imagine doing all this for malicious purposes. You could make a politician or a celebrity do and say things that they never did, in a way that to a layperson is indistinguishable from a real video of them. You could make it seem like they were in a place that they never were with someone that they’ve never met.

When people talk about the high price of iPhone X, it must be understood that the price tag of $999 for this technology is literally thousands of times cheaper than it was only a few years ago, and that price will continue to go down over time until every smartphone on earth has this technology, with the cost driven to essentially zero. There will be a proliferation of falsified content, created by everyone all the time. And all along the technology itself will be improved, making it harder and harder to parse out what’s real and what’s not.

This is scary, yeah okay. But we also live in an era in which a presidential candidate could be heard on tape bragging about grabbing “pussy” and subsequently very few of his supporters seem to have changed their minds about voting for him. So when we see a ginned up sex act between a politician and a dead girl or live boy, I’m not sure that will move the needle any either.

I don’t say that to absolve tech and the culture of innovation, which is all too often incredibly callous, but to remind about how desensitized we’ve already become to new information before having been confronted with the tragicomedy of AR memes.