Visitors to a future-themed retail store called Josephs, just off the main drag, found a mysterious-looking metallic orb the size of a cantaloupe. The Orb, with its shiny chrome finish, sat atop a black pole, which poked out of a large, rectangular wooden base, and this whole arrangement had been placed near one of the windows at the edge of Josephs' main show floor. Not far from this odd object was Alex Blania, the Orb's co-creator. He sat in a chair at the head of the room, where an interviewer peppered him with questions in front of dozens of German computer science and engineering students, who were celebrating Blania as the local boy made good.
Europe has a handful of major tech success stories, but it's long trailed the US in terms of the quantity and quality of its ventures and the breadth of its entrepreneurial ambition. This is precisely why Blania had been put on display near his shiny sphere. He's the chief executive officer of Tools for Humanity Corp., which uses the Orb as part of an identity verification and cryptocurrency system called Worldcoin. His company, based in San Francisco and Erlangen, Germany, is the ne plus ultra object of Silicon Valley yearning. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who started Tools for Humanity and recruited Blania, is a major financial backer, along with Tiger Global Management, Fifty Years, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and dozens of other investors who've contributed more than $250 million to, as the company's website says, "ensure a more just economic system."
To achieve that not-so-modest goal, Tools for Humanity wants to create a global identity system for humans. The thinking is that artificial intelligence is improving so quickly that we soon will—or may already—need a way to separate humans from machines. In other words, to prevent supersmart AIs from flooding the internet with deepfakes, scams and the propaganda of their choosing, we must have a way to answer the modern existential question: bot or not? And this is where the Orb comes in. It takes images of people's irises under the supervision of a human Orb associate and grants them a unique World ID, which certifies that a real person belongs to a string of characters the machine generates. You might then use your World ID to log in to Shopify or Reddit or a Discord server, and everyone can feel safer knowing they're dealing with an actual, fleshy human and not an AI.
A Orb user completing an iris scan. Photograph: Eriver Hijano for Bloomberg Businessweek
This, however, is just Step 1 in a very futuristic vision. People who obtain a World ID can also receive an allotment of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency. Tools for Humanity, which manages Worldcoin, the Orb, World ID and all the rest, argues that crypto will be crucial to solving the income and resource distribution issues that might arise from AI. The company would thus like to create a financial network that could theoretically do things like dole out regular payments to people in need. In this scenario, the Worldcoin network would function as a non-government-run financial backstop for people across the planet.
Blania and Altman, who formally outlined their Worldcoin master plan a year ago, have since received feedback that might be generously described as mixed. On one hand, they've already persuaded more than 6 million people to go before an Orb and sign up for a World ID, and the sign-up rate has been surging this year. The total value of the digital currency (WLD) is more than $550 million. At a factory in Germany, Orbs are heading toward mass production and will soon be dispersed around the globe in a bid to push these numbers even higher.
On the other hand, the whole scheme has struck many people as ridiculous and dystopian, a privacy nightmare straight from the pages of Orwell. Numerous countries have halted the iris-image-snapping operation out of fear that the people standing in front of the Orbs don't really know what they're signing up for and that the collection of biometric data is "unnecessary and excessive," as a Hong Kong regulator put it in May.
Blania, 30, is well aware of the criticism and admits the Worldcoin effort didn't get off to the best start. Bloomberg News first reported what the company was up to in 2021, months before the founders were ready to shape any message about their intentions. "We basically got hit in the face really early," Blania told the students at Josephs.
Over the past year, though, Blania and his team have tried to address the knocks on Worldcoin one by one. They've improved the security technology in the Orb and how the company handles customer data. They've met with regulators again and again and managed to sway countries such as South Korea and Kenya to lift their Orb bans. Yes, the Worldcoin project can sound nuts. Blania himself gives it maybe a 5% chance of succeeding. Still, he insists in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek that governments and the public simply haven't caught up to the technological change that's coming for them, nor are they making the tools they'll need to deal with the ramifications of AI when it really arrives. 'Tis better to have Orbed and lost than never to have Orbed at all.
"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."
Keep reading: Inside Worldcoin's Orb Factory, Audacious and Absurd Defender of Humanity
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