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The CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman clearly has far more up his sleeve than bringing about the AI apocalypse.
While everyone is talking about ChatGPT and its impact on humanity, Sam is already working on another project called Worldcoin, already securing $100 million dollars for the dystopian-sounding project.
The idea is simple, scan every eyeball on Earth to prove that each person is in fact human (and not a bot), and in return, they will each receive Worldcoin tokens. Interestingly, this seems to solve the exact problem that AI programmes like ChatGPT itself accelerated – that being, in the age of AI, how do we know who is human and who is a robot?
Just like in a sci-fi novel – grab a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World before they all get burned – the piece of tech used to scan everyone’s irises is called The ORB:
The nice thing, perhaps, is that when AI eventually takes over all our jobs, Worldcoin could become a form of universal basic income in the form of cryptocurrency – which might be exactly what the company is banking on.
Sam is smart – he’s created a problem to sell a solution.
This might all seem like a distant reality, but representatives for Worldcoin have already been going around – to Indonesia for example, where villages from all around the country were asked to participate in the iris-scanning project in exchange for some Worldcoin tokens/free cash.
You can already see how this is raising a few questions. An MIT Tech Review article reckons that Worldcoin used deceptive marketing techniques, exploited workers, and made wild promises of wealth with cash handouts to recruit its first half a million test users with the aim of getting one billion sign-ups by the end of the year:
“The startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it’s done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor.”
That’s a story as old as time (as money in a capitalistic world).
To make the project more dodgy, two of the biggest investors include the indicted FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and Jeffrey Epstein’s former comrade Reid Hoffman. Nice.
This is going to start a world of conspiracy theories, as if there aren’t enough already, because there’s no way that the guy who launched ChatGPT – which is predicted to replace 300 million jobs – is not the same guy who is trying to find the way for universal basic income via iris scanning.
Someone, somewhere once said that “if a product is free, you are the product”.
