My Eyeball Met With Sam Altman’s Crypto AI Scanner

29.07.2023 - 01:35 / tech.hindustantimes.com / Ai

Sam Altman's imprimatur has given a new lease of life to cryptocurrency Worldcoin, whose orb-shaped iris scanners — key to verifying individuals who can then claim free tokens — are now being pitched as humanity's future ID system in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. The hype has certainly been very human: After launching this week, the digital money more than doubled in value before falling as much as 90%.

So far, so crypto. Clearly, there'll always be some kind of market for speculative tokens lacking intrinsic value. But Worldcoin does have something worth taking a closer look at: Those orbs, and the apparent willingness of 2 million people and counting to scan their irises in return for… well, what exactly? In a world where our data is regularly hoovered up by web browsers, social-media networks and smartphone apps, why would people willingly hand sensitive biometrics to Worldcoin and its opaque foundation, based in the regulation-lite Cayman Islands, especially after reports of hacks and fraud?

I decided to take a look for myself and booked an appointment with a newly-arrived Worldcoin orb in Paris's Latin Quarter, where 1960s students once rebelled against the established order. Today, they're more likely to relish the chance to work on an AI project like this one. When I step into the hipster-ish cafe where the tell-tale chrome orb is busy scanning one of its first customers on Thursday, I'm greeted by a Worldcoin operator called Paul, a graduate audio engineer, who's doing this as a summer job after finishing his studies.

As Paul runs through the familiar pitch of Worldcoin's end goal of proving “personhood” by scanning 8 billion people's eyes, in turn generating unique identifiers and using that database to verify access to anything from financial services to universal basic income, I note the company logo on his T-shirt — a picture of the world combined with the Greek letter “epsilon” and a circle. It all feels like a bad episode of Star Trek: A utopian vision intended to escape a future of AI machines, but with its own gloomy unintended consequences. Why should we trust this company to manage such a global digital turnstile? How easy will it be for others to “enrich” this ID with more of my personal data? And aren't Worldcoin's early backers — including the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried and Three Arrows Capital — best placed to cash out first whatever happens?

Unlike Worldcoin's first “field tests” in countries such as Indonesia, which prompted accounts of exploitation and invasion of privacy, I have a hard time believing many French people would willingly peer into a chrome-shaped orb for a few tokens, at least not without asking some tough questions about reports of a black market