Bloomberg ran a piece profiling the Worldcoin Orb Factory - a biometric iris scanner that swaps your retina data for cryptocurrency. The company behind it is called Tools for Humanity and it's backed by Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO (at the time of writing) and many other big VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz (whom I can no longer mention without citing their moral bankruptcy).

The pitch is that as technology advances, we will need a way to verify human beings vs AI. So, they set forth to scan every iris on Earth and store the information in the blockchain, which means you get a little dab of cryptocurrency in exchange called Worldcoin, which you can access with your newly registered World ID. It's like a fusion of Universal Basic Income, cryptocurrency and Persona, all verified by your eyeball. The people behind it know how dystopian it sounds but promise it's all quite altruistic.

My knee jerk for projects like this is that they are naive at best and exploitative at worst. Quotes from the Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania like this one do not waive my fears:

“That’s actually the cool thing about Silicon Valley,” Blania told the students. “You’re able to raise a quarter of a billion dollars with a crazy idea that, if it works, will change everything, and, if it doesn’t work, at least it was worth a try.”

It actually turns my stomach to think about how much VC money is spent on ideas like this instead of real world problems. The amount of ego involved is astounding to say the least.

Trying my best to put on an optimistic viewpoint, I can't disagree that a Universal Basic Income is a good idea. I can't disagree that technology is going to accelerate extremely fast, possibly in such a way that humans are hard to detect (tho mostly online). I can't even disagree that The Orb looks cool. It's also built on open source software and available for anyone to see how it works. But at the end of the day, it's a for profit company, with hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capitalist funding that eventually expects a return. They may be betting on that return to be fueled by the Worldcoin crypto value increasing but it's entirely possible that's not going to be the case. Even if it is, it's likely that the investors will be first in line to profit over the millions of people scanning their eyeballs.

As I get older, I'm trying to keep an open mind about technology and efforts of this nature. It's too easy to be cranky and pessimistic about everything. However, that forced optimism can be its own trap; skepticism can be healthy. Overall, I'm not keen on Worldcoin or The Orb for myself. Maybe one day I'll feel otherwise but I'm not convinced the privacy downside is worth the crypto gamble.