SAN FRANCISCO: Spend enough time in San Francisco, peering into the cyberpunk future, and you may find that weird things like self-driving cars and woolly mammoths start seeming normal.
On Wednesday night, people waited impatiently in a crowded room in the Marina district, gazing into a glowing white sphere known as the Orb, having your eyeballs scanned in exchange for cryptocurrency and something called a World ID. The event was hosted by World, a San Francisco startup co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI that has come up with one of the more ambitious (or creepy, depending on your view) tech projects in recent memory.
Its basic pitch is : The internet is about to be overrun with swarms of realistic AI bots that will make it impossible to tell if we’re interacting with real humans on online spaces. To solve this , World has created a program called World ID that will allow users to verify their humanity online. To enroll, users stare into an Orb, which collects a scan of their irises and provide them a unique biometric identifier via an app.
In exchange, users receive a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, which they can spend, send to other World ID holders or trade for other currencies. (As of Wednesday night, the sign-up bonus was worth about $40.) At the event, Altman pitched World as a solution to the problem he called “trust in the age of AGI.” “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stay special and central in a world where the internet was going to have lots of AI-driven content,” he said.
