I recently spoke to a number of biometric authentication providers and experts to try and suss out the pros and cons of various 'proof-of-human', AKA 'liveness detection', technologies, AKA prove you're flesh and bones and not an agentic AI. One thing I didn't focus on too much in my piece exploring the tech, but which certainly stuck out to me during my conversations, is just how inevitable many seem to think this technology is.
This came through most strongly from my discussion with Tiago Sada, chief product officer at Tools for Humanity. This company makes 'Orb' iris scanners for World, a Sam Altman co-founded company that's looking to create a global network of verified humans. The idea with proof-of-human/liveness detection is to, well, detect and prove that you're human, the goal being to combat bots on online services—even services such as gaming.
