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In between running the most powerful AI company in the world, tech billionaire Sam Altman has a number of side projects. One of them is Worldcoin, the crypto-laced effort to scan the global population’s eyeballs. Why does this need to happen? Worldcoin envisions a new global economic system in which people use unique digital IDs, culled from their iris scans, to pay for stuff online and verify their identities. In a world of bots and AI content, digital IDs will help verify who is human and who isn’t, the project’s backers say. If that sounds cool, it also sounds pretty funny, since it would appear that Altman’s other company, OpenAI, is—by fueling the spread of AI-generated digital fakery—helping to cause the very problem that Worldcoin purports to solve.
Anyway, this week, Worldcoin announced a revamp to its business. Not only is the company changing its name (it’s simply called “World” now, the firm’s website states), but it’s also rolling out a brand new “Orb” that is smaller, less bulky, and supposedly faster and more efficient. “The Orb is the incluse, secure and anonymous device that enables World ID holders to verify their humanness and uniqueness,” the company’s blog reads. “In its newest iteration, the Orb is equipped with the most advanced NVIDIA Jetson module with nearly 5x the AI performance over the previous version to enable even faster, more seamless proof of human verifications.”
In other words, this version of the Orb is faster and works better. Still, that doesn’t rid the company of its chief problem, which is that people probably don’t want to surrender their biometric data (if only temporarily) to a company that has the same aesthetics and PR tenor as the Delos corporation from Westworld.
The updates to the company were announced this week at an event in San Francisco, where Rich Heley, an executive connected to the project said: “To provide access to every human, we need more Orbs. Lots more Orbs. Probably on the order of a thousand times more Orbs than we have today. Not only more Orbs but more Orbs in more places.” More Orbs!
When the project first debuted, Gizmodo reviewed the experience of signing up for Worldcoin and found the enterprise to be “boring,” “unquestionably dystopian” and “cynical” —a sentiment others seem to agree with. Worldcoin (er, World now) really hasn’t caught on with the masses quite yet, despite the fact that the company claims it has over 2 million sign-ups, which it achieved by paying people small amounts of crypto. That said, World plans to expand. The company announced this week that it will roll out its dystopic hardware to a number of new countries, including Costa Rica, Brazil, Indonesia, Panama, the UAE, Morocco, Taiwan, Australia, Hungary, and Romania.
Despite the company’s promises that it doesn’t store your biometric data and despite the nice and friendly tenor of the company’s advertising materials, and despite the fact that World currently isn’t asking for anything but your participation… it’s still just hard to shake the nagging feeling that we’re all being buttered up for something weird and bad.
