I recently read this interesting, and distressing, story of a man who was drugged and robbed. A form of crime which has been going on for centuries. But the 21st Century twist is that the thieves forced him to transfer large sums of money via his phone's banking apps.
While under the influence, the victim used his usernames, passwords, PINs, and biometrics to send money to the criminal's accounts.
Is there a "technological" way to stop this? His banks initially refused to refund the stolen money. Only once the press stepped in did they relent. One bank, Revolut, said:
This was an unusual case where the payments were authorised by the customer but, as is now clear, without his consent.
I once read a good definition of aptitude. Aptitude is how long it takes you to learn something. The idea is that everybody can learn anything, but if it takes you 200 years, you essentially have no aptitude for it. Useful aptitudes are in the <10 years range.
Your first short story takes 10 days to write. The next one 5 days, the next one 2.5 days, the next one 1.25 days. Then 0.625 days, at which point you’re probably hitting raw typing speed limits. In practice, improvement curves have more of a staircase quality to them. Rather than fix the obvious next bottleneck of typing speed (who cares if it took you 3 hours instead of 6 to write a story; the marginal value of more speed is low at that point), you might level up and decide to (say) write stories with better developed characters. Or illustrations. So you’re back at 10 days, but on a new level.
This kind of improvement replaces quantitative improvement (optimization) with qualitative leveling up, or dimensionality increase. Each time you hit diminishing returns, you open up a new front. You’re never on the slow endzone of a learning curve. You self-disrupt before you get stuck.
The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function not of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste.