Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball

Summary

Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball Photo: Flyd / Unsplash Last week, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman announced in San Francisco that the World project he co-founded, formerly known as Worldcoin, is opening six stores across the United States, allowing users of the project's app to scan their eyeballs. Simply put, the premise is this: scan your eyeball, get a biometric tag, verify yourself, buy our apps (and cryptocurrency). The scary part is the for-profit company developing the project has now gathered millions in venture capital investment, powerful partners, and is ready to expand and impose its Minority Report style technology everywhere. Welcome to Dystopialand. The World(coin) project is an initiative from the startup Tools for Humanity, co-founded by its CEO Alex Blania. Despite its friendly name, the for-profit corporation has been on the radar of many critics through the years already. From experts to journalists to privacy commissioners around the world, not everyone shares Blania's enthusiasm for his biometric-based technology. What is the World App? The World project, recently rebranded from the Worldcoin project (possibly to convey better its expansionist ambitions) presented its plan for the World App to Americans this week. The project is now expanding well beyond the cryptocurrency it started from. The World App is an everything app, providing users with a World ID, that can be verified through the collection of biometric data in the form of an iris scan. The scan is then filtered and hashed to create a unique identifier that is stored as a so-called "proof of personhood" on the World Network, a blockchain-based protocol. The World App itself contains a collection of "Mini Apps", where users can manage their cryptocurrencies, chat together, play games, receive their pay check even, and ultimately live their whole life within the closed "verified" ecosystem of the app. For a company constantly praising decentralization, it sure looks like they want to make sure th...