Alright, so it’s Wednesday night, the clock’s ticking past what any sane man would call a reasonable hour, and I’m nursing what’s left of this fifth of bourbon. The bottle’s looking as empty as the promises of these tech messiahs. My ashtray’s overflowing, a tiny, stinking monument to another day spent sifting through the digital dung heap they call progress. And today’s particular gem? Some shiny new beach ball that wants to eyeball you for crypto. Yeah, you heard that right.
The latest dispatch from the land of Too Much Money and Not Enough Sense comes courtesy of one Sam Altman, the boy wonder behind OpenAI, the outfit that’s currently teaching your toaster to write poetry and your boss to become even more obsolete. Seems Sammy boy’s got another brainstorm, a real world-shaker this time. He’s cooked up a little something called “The Orb.” Sounds like a villain from a bad sci-fi flick, don’t it?
This Orb, a gleaming white sphere, is apparently the bouncer at the gates of our brave new AI-infested internet. You stare into its unblinking camera-eye, it maps the “unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris” – sounds like something you’d whisper to a dame in a cheap motel if you were trying to be fancy – and bam, you’re a “verified human.” Your reward for this ocular striptease? A string of numbers longer than my bar tab, an “iris code,” sent to your phone. And, get this, a little taste of something called Worldcoin, about 42 bucks worth. Just enough to make you feel like you got something for selling a piece of your soul, or at least your eyeball.
Altman, bless his cotton socks, says we need this because soon, AGI – that’s Artificial General Intelligence, for you lushes still trying to figure out how to work the remote – will be so damn smart, so human-like, we won’t be able to tell if we’re arguing with a genuine jackass online or a highly sophisticated jackass program. His solution? Scan every goddamn eyeball on the planet. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central,” he says. Touching. Real touching. Makes me want to pour another.
So this outfit, “Tools for Humanity” – a name so dripping with Orwellian irony it makes my teeth ache – is behind it. Their grand plan is to get 50 million peepers scanned by the end of next year, and eventually, every single last one of us. Every man, woman, and child, lining up to get their irises cataloged like rare butterflies. And the free crypto? That’s the cheese in the mousetrap, folks. The lure to get you into what they hope will be the “world’s largest financial network.” Ambitious, ain’t it? Altman himself says, “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world.” Yeah, and if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.
The problem they’re “solving,” of course, is one these geniuses are actively creating. They’re unleashing these AI “agents” – digital coworkers, tutors, even doctors – that are supposed to “turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.” Sounds great, until you realize these agents are also gonna be flooding the internet, making it impossible to know what’s real. Social media’s already a cesspool of AI-generated crap. Wikipedia’s crying uncle about bots scraping their site. Hell, AI comments are apparently better at changing people’s minds on Reddit than actual humans. Imagine that. A machine more convincing than your loudmouth brother-in-law. Maybe there’s an upside after all.
Alex Blania, the CEO of Tools for Humanity, says, “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months. So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.” The urgency! The drama! It’s like a goddamn soap opera, but with more algorithms and less sex. Probably.
They’ve been testing these Orbs overseas, and now they’re bringing the circus to the good ol’ U.S. of A. Gas stations, bodegas, flagship stores. Imagine, filling up your tank, grabbing a Slim Jim, and getting your iris scanned for digital pocket change. The American dream, folks.
But here’s the kicker: not everyone’s champing at the bit. They’ve only “verified” 12 million humans since mid-2023, which Blania admits is “well behind schedule.” Shocking. You mean people aren’t lining up in droves to have their eyeballs scanned by a mysterious sphere for a handful of crypto that’s probably worth less by the time they cash it? Color me surprised. Even Altman’s not sure it’ll catch on. It could be “fairly mainstream,” or just for “a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” You know, the kind of people who collect commemorative plates or think wrestling is real.
Still, they’re betting the farm that soon, you’ll need this “World ID” to do anything online, from finding a date (good luck with that, pal) to accessing government services. A digital passport, or you’re locked out of the future. It could be a “privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet,” they say. Or, it could be a “big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance,” as some smart cookie named Divya Siddarth points out. Place your bets, ladies and gents.
Blania, this German kid who liked building things that “could potentially blow up” (my kind of guy, if he wasn’t so damn earnest), got roped in by Altman’s vision. Altman apparently told him three things: AI’s gonna get smarter than us, crypto’s the future, and scale is everything. So, Worldcoin was born. Give away free crypto to get people in, just like PayPal gave away ten bucks. The more people join, the more the coin is supposedly worth. They’ve raised $244 million from big-shot investors. Most of the coins are for us schmucks to claim, but a cool 25% is for the backers and staff. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” Blania says. Honesty. I can respect that, even if the idea itself makes me want to gargle drain cleaner.
And the initial sales pitch? Universal Basic Income. Yeah, Altman was big on that. Since AI’s gonna take all our jobs, we’ll need a way to spread the wealth. Worldcoin was gonna be the pipeline. They even talked about redistributing profits from AI labs. Noble. Now, Blania says he’s “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI. Funny how these grand visions shrink when the rubber meets the road, or when the investors start asking hard questions. Altman himself is now musing about “universal basic compute” – giving everyone access to AI instead of cash. Sounds like giving a starving man a cookbook.
So, the reporter for this piece goes and gets himself “verified.” Downloads the app, flashes a QR code, stares into the Orb. Phone buzzes. Boom. Human. Confirmed. Easy peasy.
Behind the scenes, it’s a technological ballet. Neural networks, infrared cameras, thermometers, telephoto lenses, all working to make sure you’re a living, breathing meatbag with a unique iris. Then it turns your pretty eye-picture into a code, checks if it’s seen it before using some fancy encrypted voodoo, and then – here’s the rub – it “effectively anonymizes” your data by creating derivative codes. It deletes the original from your phone if you ask, but those derivatives? Those stay in the system. Forever.
They argue these derivatives are no longer your personal data. But if you go back to an Orb after “deleting” your data, it’ll still know it’s you. It’s a clever bit of wordplay, a real “sleight of hand,” as the article puts it. If you could really delete it, the whole “one ID per human” thing falls apart. People could scam the system, claim their crypto twice. Can’t have that, can we? The Germans, bless their rule-loving hearts, weren’t buying it. Told them to let Europeans fully delete their data. Tools for Humanity is appealing, naturally. “Users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” they sniff. It’s like saying the ashes in my ashtray aren’t related to the cigarettes I smoked.
Then we get these lovely little vignettes from South Korea. Elderly folks lining up, getting their eyes scanned for about $54 worth of Worldcoin. An attendant explaining, “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore… humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.” Profound. One old lady stares into the machine, gets her crypto, and is congratulated: “You are now a verified human.” I wonder if she felt any different. Probably just felt 54 bucks richer, for a minute.
They’re aiming for a million Koreans in the next year. High smartphone use, crypto adoption, modest wages – perfect petri dish. But it’s slow going. Tourists wander by, bemused. Most who sign up are crypto nuts. One Chinese student, Wu Ruijun, admits, “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy. I just came for the money.” Attaboy, Wu. At least you’re honest. That’s more than I can say for some of these tech evangelists.
Altman, when pressed about the darker side of his AI creations making this whole Orb thing necessary, gets a bit testy. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. Spoken like a true alchemist who’s just accidentally turned lead into a slightly more radioactive form of lead but insists it’ll glow in the dark real nice. He waves away concerns about the power he and his buddies will have if this thing takes off. It’ll all be “decentralized,” he assures us. Power to the people, via the “World Protocol.” Right. OpenAI was a non-profit for the benefit of all humanity, too, until it wasn’t. These guys change structures faster than I change my socks (which, admittedly, isn’t that often).
And here’s another little twist for you, just to keep things interesting. This World ID system? They’re building it so you can delegate your “humanity” to an AI agent. Let your bot act online on your behalf, with your verified human stamp of approval. So, the system designed to tell humans from AI will now help AIs pretend to be… authorized humans. My head hurts. I need another drink. It’s like hiring a guard dog that also unlocks the back door for the burglars if they ask nicely.
The article ends with a beautiful quote from a 75-year-old South Korean woman, Cho Jeong-yeon, who watched her friend get Orbed but refused to do it herself. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”
Damn. Out of the mouths of babes, or in this case, wise old ladies in Seoul. She hit the nail on the head harder than I hit the bottle on a Tuesday. Are we becoming machines? Or are we just becoming data points in someone else’s grand, lucrative experiment?
This whole Orb business, it stinks. It stinks of desperation, of hype, of a solution chasing a problem that these same guys are gleefully creating. They build the maze, then sell you the map. And the map might just lead you deeper into the labyrinth. They want your eyeballs, your “humanity,” in exchange for a few digital trinkets and a promise of a future where you can prove you’re not a figment of some algorithm’s imagination.
Me? I’ll keep my irises to myself, thank you very much. They’ve seen enough bad checks, empty bottles, and false promises to last a lifetime. If the internet becomes a place where I need a damn eyeball scan to log in, well, maybe it’s time to find a good dive bar with no Wi-Fi and a bartender who still takes cash. At least there, when someone looks you in the eye, it’s usually because they’re about to tell you a story, buy you a drink, or punch you in the face. Real human interaction. Messy, unpredictable, and worth more than all the Worldcoin in Sam Altman’s digital wallet.
So, yeah. The Orb will see you now. And it’ll remember you. Forever. Sleep tight.
Time to kill this bottle and see if I can find another. The night is young, and the world is getting weirder by the minute.
Chinaski, out. Going to stare into the bottom of a glass instead. It’s more honest.
Source: The Orb Will See You Now