I spoke last week at a conference in Cardiff on the future of work. It was organised by the law firm Dawson Gray. You can't talk about the the future of work without thinking about the future city, since the shape and structure of work is bound up more or less completely with the shape and structure of cities. Edward Glaeser's book The Triumph of the City (2012) gets a lot of love in these conversations. It's hard to find people who have a bad word to say about it. Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies.

In an era of deepfakes for fun and deepfakes for deception, we now have deepfakes for privacy. And just like all the other deepfakes, this one raises challenging moral and ethical questions. The deepfake technology I'm taking about is from a Berlin-based startup called Brighter AI, which provides privacy solutions for an increasingly surveilled world: license plate blurring and face blurring so companies with cameras can comply with European privacy laws, especially GDPR. Now, the company is launching a new product, ProtectPhoto, which anonymizes faces in pictures in an entirely different way. "We extract the original faces and replace them with new faces that are non-trackable to the original one," Brighter AI CEO Marian Glaeser told me in a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast.