Peter Rhodes on range anxiety, deep fake and the PM's encounter with a pint
My eye was caught this week by an image of a shiny new MGB, the slung-low sweet chariot we dreamed about all those years ago. Here it is, recreated as an electric vehicle. Just turn it on and glide almost noiselessly into your new all-electric fantasy. Your only limits (apart from the £90,000 price tag) are your own imagination. Well, sort of.
Reading the small print, I see the MGB EV has a range of just 160 miles which, for those of us in the Midlands, pretty much rules out a quick hop to the seaside without panicking over where you'll find your next charge.
I'm an optimist. I'm sure that one day technology will deliver the 1,000-mile EV battery and the 10-minute recharger. But for the time being the EV dream comes with a tiny range and a huge paranoia. Shrinks call it “range anxiety.” A friend had a nasty case of this syndrome recently when, on a drive home from Scotland in his EV, he spent four hours either charging or queuing to charge.
Another gift from the ever-growing cornucopia of digital devices is deepfake, a range of audio and video bamboozlery that means you can't really believe anything you see or hear.
The faking doesn't need to be particularly hard-hitting; a mere hint of innuendo does nicely. Take the online image that appeared a few days ago on X (formerly Twitter) showing Rishi Sunak in a pub, inexpertly pulling a frothy pint of beer while a woman looks on with a disdainful expression.
In the original photo, the pint is brim-full and the woman's expression is neutral. Just a couple of little tweaks plant the message that the PM is unfamiliar with beer and therefore not a man of the people. As if...
In another example of photo-tweakery, an anti-Trump demonstrator appeared in Washington brandishing a doctored photo of Trump dressed as a prisoner and shorn of his bouffant hairdo. This goes deeper than suggesting Trump is a crook. It also plays to the curious, but long-established, fact that, given a choice between hairless and hirsute candidates, Americans don't vote for baldies.
