Eyes wide shut: When tech bros want to scan your eyeballs
DON'T blink now, because Sam Altman's World Network project, or World for short, is ramping up its bid for eyeballs. Launched globally as Worldcoin in 2023 and introduced in the US last month, this identity-verification project wants to help you prove you're a human being and not an artificial intelligence (AI) bot by scanning your iris and generating a World ID. This 'digital passport', which is stored on the blockchain, might even be used in the future to prevent fraud in the distribution of universal basic income – the payout that humans might need once they've been replaced by AI.
When you consider the irony of Altman's other venture, OpenAI, this development is only marginally less infuriating than when Amazon opened its own brick-and-mortar bookstores in 2015. But already, more than 12 million people's identities have been verified with World's iris-scanning orb devices. The project, managed by an outfit called Tools for Humanity, has already raised some US$240 million in venture capital funding from marquee-level names such as Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital. So here we all are.
World has understandably encountered regulatory suspicion and sundry complications – authorities in Spain and Portugal have cracked down on the platform's activities over data protection concerns, while Hong Kong has ordered it to stop collecting iris and face images. Singapore, too, has grappled with other by-products of World's existence – the police have cautioned the public against giving away or selling their Worldcoin accounts.
For its part, World has said that no personal data is stored from a person's orb verification, and that the photos taken by the orb are encrypted, sent to the individual's device and 'immediately deleted' from the orb. In any case, World ploughs on. Its website lists more than 800 orb locations worldwide, and it plans to have 7,500 orb devices across America by year-end. While the World app and iris scans are currently free for end-users, the platform has introduced World ID fees for applications.
Is there a need for such an endeavour despite World's ungainly start? Maybe. But the question of a use case, however, is a distinct one from whether World – or any enterprise – is the right steward for such a responsibility. Where tech is concerned, we have long conflated these two separate questions, and it's time that we stop doing that.
I'm not making an argument either way about Altman or the body behind the World platform. But it does bear noting that individual titans increasingly wield power that used to be entrusted to governments. If there is cause to distrust governments, fallible as they are, there is room to scrutinise the billionaires who are displacing bureaucrats.
That we even have to psychoanalyse these individuals whom nobody voted into power speaks volumes about how some governments have increasingly ceded ground to the private sector. A global ID-verification project is the very sort of undertaking that states should be helming.
Alas, the odds of multilateral miracles happening in such a fractious time are poor, given how most countries don't even know what trade with the US will look like in the next 60 days.
If this is the Pandora's box that we insist on unlocking, it's not the bots or billionaires that we should blame, but the people who handed them the keys.
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