Worldcoin Orbs Scan Eyeballs Worldwide | The Singularity Monthly Newsletter
Topic of the Month: Worldcoin Orbs Scan Eyeballs Worldwide
Over the last month, from London to Hong Kong, thousands of people have gazed into a gleaming metal orb and had their eyes scanned by AI. In return, each received a blockchain ID confirming their humanity—no bots allowed—and, if they lived outside the US, a deposit of cryptocurrency into a digital wallet linked to their “iris code.”
This science fiction scenario was served up courtesy of OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman’s Worldcoin. The project’s moonshot ambitions are varied, from reliably authenticating humans online to guaranteeing equal access to the economy and even, at some point, fairly distributing a global universal basic income.
Though Worldcoin first began scanning eyes in 2021—and hit two million scans in July—the recent push moved the project beyond its pilot phase. According to Altman, there were long lines at orb operators around the world at launch, and the system was whirring along at a brisk pace of eight verified eyeball scans a second.
The idea is that biometrics—unique biological traits most humans have, like irises or fingerprints—can discern a person from a bot and prevent problematic practices like the assignment of duplicate IDs. If everyone has a single, secure digital ID—unlinked to personal information like name, address, or email—we can screen bots online—a sticky problem made worse by advances like ChatGPT—distribute financial payments, or count votes with minimal fraud, all the while preserving privacy.
“The one discriminator we had on the internet to distinguish us from machines was always intelligence, but that’s going to vanish,” Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania recently told Wired. “To our knowledge, the Orb is the only implementation that can work globally to solve this problem.”
In theory, the system will be decentralized. No bank, government, or tech company will control hardware, data, or network operations. A decentralized platform like this would return power over information to people, allowing them to more freely participate in economic activities and choose what sensitive data they share.
However, decentralization is a goal yet to be realized. To catalyze the process, Worldcoin’s investor-backed parent company Tools for Humanity, cofounded by Altman and Blania, is manufacturing orbs, building the machine learning algorithms that run on them, directing distribution and operations, and managing data.
The pilot has not been without controversy. Kenya suspended Worldcoin in early August and initiated an investigation into the project’s practices in the country. Similar investigations are underway in Argentina, France, Germany, and the UK.
Meanwhile, cryptocurrency is suffering various crises, including last year’s crypto crash, a string of scandals, and increased regulatory pressure. As journalists have paid obligatory visits to local orb operators, many have called out the dystopian vibe of giving up sensitive biometric information to a metallic orb in exchange for crypto.
Blania has acknowledged the pilot’s hiccups and attributed them to a complex project finding its feet and honing its processes. Altman, meanwhile, told the Financial Times he understands the tech has “a clear ick factor,” which makes transparency about how it works and why it’s valuable all the more crucial.
“On crypto, there have been a lot of bad actors and that’s a real shame… we have to earn people’s trust, which is why we’re explaining so much about how the technology works and the road map for decentralizing the company,” he said.
In a deep dive, Ethereum cofounder, Vitalik Buterin, noted Worldcoin’s attempt to build a proof-of-personhood system isn’t the first (though it may be the largest and most ambitious to date). Several other efforts have employed different strategies. Indeed, a strong form of digital identification may be a legitimate use case for public blockchains in the future. But there are tradeoffs on privacy, security, scalability, and decentralization between existing approaches. For example, Worldcoin’s specialized hardware strategy, Buterin wrote, is strong on privacy but weak on centralization.
The orb’s algorithms convert your iris into a unique cryptographic hash—from which it is very difficult to reverse engineer the original image—then confirm this iris code belongs to a human and isn't listed in a database of existing codes. Once confirmed, according to Worldcoin, the orb deletes the images (unless you offer them as training data). This is good, but you have to trust the hardware maker actually removes the images, hasn’t made errors that could be exploited by others—like, hackers—and hasn’t installed backdoors to be used for their own purposes. Quality assurance may be hard to guarantee at scale in a fully decentralized system with many providers.
That said, no approach checks all the boxes, and there are, perhaps, ways to solve some of the challenges of Worldcoin’s chosen strategy. Ultimately, Buterin suggests the best solution may be to combine complementary approaches over time.
It’s still uncertain whether Worldcoin’s blockchain moonshot has the staying power to solve these challenges, a fact Altman acknowledges. “Like any really ambitious project, maybe it works out and maybe it doesn’t,” he posted on X. “But trying stuff like this is how progress happens.” Whatever the future holds, Worldcoin is now official, and a sci-fi sphere of silver may soon be coming to a town near you.
ICYMI: Tech News
Google DeepMind gives robots brains like ChatGPT.
Smarty pants: It’s no secret that AI has left robotics in the dust in recent years. But this month, Google DeepMind combined the two by embedding a ChatGPT-like AI model into a robotic arm. Thanks to the language AI, the arm was able to take general verbal instructions that were not explicitly part of its training—”choose the drink that would give a tired person energy” or “the object that can be used as a hammer”—and translate them into a simple action within its field of view—pick up an energy drink or grab a rock.
Ask and receive: Getting robots to do what we want them to do is a big challenge in robotics. Most of today’s robots are coded to do one very specific thing well, and then repeat it over and over. Any new task requires someone with deep expertise “rewiring” the robot’s brain to make the switch. In this case, Google DeepMind’s robot can switch on the fly with spoken commands. In theory, this kind of robotic interface is open to anyone with language.
General purpose: The holy grail of robotics is a general purpose robot. That is, in the future, we could ask a robot to do a wide range of tasks with a spoken command, and it would understand, even if requests were unclear or required reasoning and planning, and then get to work. The Google DeepMind robot is far from that level. While it demonstrates a promising proof of concept for a robotics language interface, it only performs a static set of simple movements in response. Still, it’s a fascinating next step for the field.
Scientists reconstruct a Pink Floyd song from brain activity alone
With the aid of machine learning algorithms, researchers eavesdropped on the brains of 29 epilepsy patients with brain implants listening to Pink Floyd. They were able to reconstruct a recognizable—albeit somewhat muddled—version of the song “Another Brick in the Wall: Part I.” The technology, it’s hoped, will restore the capacity to speak—or perhaps even sing—to those who’ve lost the ability.
The speed of the clean energy transition is “astonishing” experts
The pace of renewable energy adoption has long been on an upward trajectory as the costs of component technologies have fallen precipitously. But now even experts used to watching energy data are being taken by surprise at the speed of the transition. “We look at energy data on a daily basis, and it’s astonishing what’s happening,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, told the NYT this month.
This startup just built a world-class AI supercomputer in 10 days.
With Nvidia GPUs (the chosen chip of the generative AI boom) nearly impossible to procure, competitors are emerging. Among them, Cerebras stands out for a radical AI chip the size of a dinner plate that they say scales up with ease. The company recently built a two-exaflop AI supercomputer in a mere 10 days. By sometime next year, they’re aiming for a supercomputing network 18 times more powerful.
Generative AI adoption at work is already widespread and poised to grow.
In a newly released annual report, McKinsey said 79 percent of respondents to an April survey on AI in the workplace had some exposure to generative AI either at work or outside work, while one in five said they were already using it regularly on the job. Almost half said their companies aimed to increase investment in AI due to generative AI, and a third reported the technology was on the board’s agenda.
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8moWorldcoin would be complete without the Iris hash linked to person's DNA as well? re Smarty pants: have they string ChatGPT like codes on top of Google Assistant (Siri, Alexa equivalent)