My Eyeball Met With Sam Altman’s Crypto AI Scanner

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Sam Altman's imprimatur has given a new lease of life to cryptocurrency Worldcoin, whose orb-shaped iris scanners — key to verifying individuals who can then claim free tokens — are now being pitched as humanity's future ID system in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. The hype has certainly been very human: After launching this week, the digital money more than doubled in value before falling as much as 90%.

So far, so crypto. Clearly, there'll always be some kind of market for speculative tokens lacking intrinsic value. But Worldcoin does have something worth taking a closer look at: Those orbs, and the apparent willingness of 2 million people and counting to scan their irises in return for… well, what exactly? In a world where our data is regularly hoovered up by web browsers, social-media networks and smartphone apps, why would people willingly hand sensitive biometrics to Worldcoin and its opaque foundation, based in the regulation-lite Cayman Islands, especially after reports of hacks and fraud?

I decided to take a look for myself and booked an appointment with a newly-arrived Worldcoin orb in Paris's Latin Quarter, where 1960s students once rebelled against the established order. Today, they're more likely to relish the chance to work on an AI project like this one. When I step into the hipster-ish cafe where the tell-tale chrome orb is busy scanning one of its first customers on Thursday, I'm greeted by a Worldcoin operator called Paul, a graduate audio engineer, who's doing this as a summer job after finishing his studies.

As Paul runs through the familiar pitch of Worldcoin's end goal of proving “personhood” by scanning 8 billion people's eyes, in turn generating unique identifiers and using that