In the distant future I think there’s a real possibility that keys will cease to exist. Instead we will open doors with our faces. Similarly, we won’t have cash or credit cards or even Apple Pay. What we will have is Apple Face Pay or some similar (Facebook Face?). We will pay for things by having machines scan our faces, which are probably a bit more secure than a signature, passwords we can’t remember or, in the case of physical locks, sets of keys (we currently carry an average of 9 metal keys, but have no idea what 3 do!),

In China, companies such as Face ++ (currently valued at around $1 billion), Alibaba and Baidu have developed such facial recognition technology already. Of course China is not the UK or US. In China surveillance is omnipresent and its people don’t seem to care about this too much. Minority Report and Face Off here we come….