A bizarre cryptocurrency project from the AI hotshot behind ChatGPT has arrived in London.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s Wordcoin Foundation wants to scan a billion people’s eyeballs using a five-pound spherical machine in exchange for its crypto token.
According to the company’s website, the contraption (known as the Orb) is going to be available in 35 cities including London. You can currently book appointments to get your eye scanned at two locations in Shoreditch.
For some, staring into an iris-scanning device to earn digital money sounds like a dystopian sci-fi novel come to life. There’s even a section in the Worldcoin FAQ that asks “will the orb hurt my eyes?”. Apparently, it won’t as the machine complies with international standards on eye safety.
A more pressing issue is privacy. Worldcoin insists that capturing the scans is necessary in order to discern between humans and robots amid a boom in artificial intelligence technology.
To ease privacy concerns, investor Blockchain Capital previously explained what happens “under the hood” of the orb.
The way it works is “the machine takes a picture of an iris and the device subsequently generates a unique encoding of the randomness of the iris (an “iris code”).
“Per default the original biometric is immediately destroyed and the iris code is the only thing that leaves the orb.”
Worldcoin said it has already signed up two million people over the last six months during its trial phase, at a rate of 40,000 users per week. It is now planning to roll out 1,500 orbs around the world during the summer. An accompanying app, which lets customers reserve the Worldcoin token and purchase other cryptocurrencies, is available on iPhone and Android.
In a joint statement released on Monday, Altman and co-founder Alex Blania said: “If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded [universal basic income].”
