Worldcoin: More Orbs for a Human-grade Artificial Intelligence, and an Ultimate Solution for Tech Solutionism – A TED Talk at Tools for Humanity

“To provide access to every human, we need more Orbs. Lots more Orbs. Probably on the order of a thousand times more Orbs than we have today,” Heley said. “Not only more Orbs but more Orbs in more places.” World will allow people to buy or rent their own sphere so they can start verification in their communities, and will also ramp up production of the Orb.

Last year, a foundation called Tools for Humanity went on tour to show off its eye-scanning Orb. The metallic globe was one part of a process where people would someday use their fingerprints to confirm their race, gender, or sexual orientation.

“We need more orbs, lots more orbs, probably on the order of a thousand more orbs than we have today,” Tools for Humanity chief device officer Rich Heley said during the keynote.

Worldcoin, then, is the ultimate attempt at tech solutionism: A human-grade AI world that Altman is building might also be technologically regulated by a tool that Altman has his hands in.

He collaborated with Alex Blania to make the idea a reality. In a world of rapidly advancing AI, they theorized, it would be important for a human to prove they were not a bot. The answer they came up with relied on individuals using iris-scanning tech to generate private tokens that would verify their identities around the world.

Tools for humanity said that all attendees can have their iris scanned today and that 500 of them will get a new Orb when it arrives in ten years.

World: A Public UBI Project to Verify Humanness in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (DeepCygnids, Denial of Privacy)

Last year, Kenya suspended World while it investigated its practices surrounding data collection (it has since dropped its investigation). Hong Kong asked World to stop operations in the country because of privacy risks, while Portugal and Spain also took action against the project.

Despite privacy concerns about building a private database of unique humans, World has verified over 7 million of them so far.

People registered to the system get a World ID that they can use to “securely and anonymously” prove their humanness online, as well as a share of its associated WLD cryptocurrency token.

World is a UBI project co-founded by Openai CEO Sam Altman and is now known as World. Along with the name change, World introduced an updated version of its eyeball-scanning Orb device which is designed to solve a problem that does not currently exist: authenticating that someone is human “in the age of AI.”