Thursday, 28 March 2024
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Sam Altman wants to give you crypto to scan your eyeballs. Can Worldcoin get billions of people to stare into an orb and prove they’re not A.I. bots?

Sam Altman wants to give you crypto to scan your eyeballs. Can Worldcoin get billions of people to stare into an orb and prove they're not A.I. bots?

The Worldcoin orb resembles a bowling ball conceived by Steve Jobs or an oversized Magic 8 ball possessed by HAL 9000. Its glossy exterior envelops the sphere, save for a gaping black circle in the front that houses three sensors positioned in a triangle.

Making the object round was an engineering nightmare, but the symbolism was too vital to ignore. The orb isn’t a perfect sphere but two halves that come together at an angle that matches the orbit of the Earth—designed by Thomas Meyerhoffer, the first hire of Apple legend Jony Ive.

Architectural marvel that it is, the orb serves a simple purpose: It scans your iris and converts the biometric image into an impenetrable string of numbers, which Worldcoin refers to as an “IrisCode.” When combined with an algorithm, the code verifies you’re a unique human.

Each week, about 40,000 people subject themselves to the scan. On a chilly Sunday in March, I became one of them, with an orb-carrying Worldcoin employee stopping by my cramped Brooklyn apartment.

After two years of reading about the company, I welcomed the opportunity to meet the orb face-to-face. Finally, once the technician wrestled it from a specially designed backpack and connected it to an internet hotspot, I was able to stare into its depths. The orb responded with beeps and bops, lighting up white and red as it scanned my iris and beamed the encoded results back to the mothership. After about 45 seconds, the World App on my phone illuminated, revealing that I had been successfully verified. I was myself, after all.

The company, founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, converts the biometric data code generated from iris scans into a “proof of personhood.

Karsten Moran for Fortune

Silicon Valley these days is short on fanciful ideas. There’s the “Uber-for-X” reprise, where the venture capital herd mentality has turned every app into a facsimile of some other company, but even that has ceded to the proliferation of business-focused products focused on infrastructure or payroll software.

Worldcoin, in contrast, might be original to a fault, starting with the orb—perhaps the most iconic piece of hardware since the iPad. Then comes the pitch: There are 8 billion people on Earth. How do we prove each person is real? Worldcoin’s solution is cataloging every individual over 18 years old through a privacy-preserving protocol, rewarding each person with cryptocurrency, which in turn will become the new global monetary…

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