Among the management of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence company, technology billionaire Sam Altman owns a number of side projects. One of them is Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency effort to scan the iris of the world’s population. Why should this happen? Worldcoin envisions a new global economic system where people use unique digital identifiers extracted from iris scans to pay for things online and verify their identities. In a world full of robots and artificial intelligence content, digital identifiers will help verify human identity and who is not, say project supporters. If this sounds great, it also sounds very funny, as it appears that Altman’s other company, OpenAI, is helping – by feeding the spread of AI-generated digital fakes – to cause the same problem that Worldcoin aims to solve.
Anyway, Worldcoin announced this week a renewal of its business. Not limited to changing the company’s name (simply called “The World” now, as the company’s website notes), it also introduces a new, smaller, lighter “celestial body” that is supposed to be faster and more efficient. The company’s blog says: “Orb is the comprehensive, secure, and anonymous device that enables global identity card holders to verify their humanity and uniqueness.” “In its latest iteration, Orb has been equipped with the most advanced NVIDIA Jetson unit with nearly 5 times the performance of artificial intelligence compared to the previous version to enable faster and smoother human verification.”
In other words, this version of Orb is faster and works better. However, this does not solve the company’s main problem, that people may not want to hand over their biometric data (even temporarily) to a company with the same aesthetic and PR content as Delos from Westworld.
The company’s updates were announced this week at an event held in San Francisco, where executive associated with the project, Rich Hilly, said: “To provide access to every human, we need more celestial bodies. More celestial bodies. Perhaps about a thousand times more celestial bodies than we have today. Not just more celestial bodies but more celestial bodies in more places.” More celestial bodies!
When the project first appeared, Gizmodo reviewed the experience of subscribing to Worldcoin and found the project “boring” and “undoubtedly pathetic” and “satirical” – a sentiment that others seem to agree with. Worldcoin (now World) has not really succeeded in attracting audiences so far, despite the fact that the company claims to have over 2 million subscribers, which it achieved by paying small amounts of cryptocurrencies to people. However, the world is planning to expand. The company announced this week that it will introduce its innovative devices in a number of new countries, including Costa Rica, Brazil, Indonesia, Panama, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Taiwan, Australia, Hungary, and Romania.
Despite the company’s promises not to store your biometric data and despite the nice and friendly content of the company’s advertising materials, and despite the fact that the world currently only asks for your participation… it is still difficult to shake the disturbing feeling that we all feel buttered because of something strange and bad.
