I’m here to see the Orb. The receptionist knows exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not the first person here for an audience. Inside the coworking space in Shoreditch, East London, a small crowd has gathered. Mostly male, mostly young, many bearded—very crypto. The Orb is there too, chrome, gleaming, mounted at eye-level on a pole, waiting to scan us, one by one. In fact, there are two Orbs—the other one is being carted around less ceremoniously by hand.
The devices are on a world tour, the sharp end of a new cryptocurrency-based project, Worldcoin, created by Tools for Humanity, a company cofounded by Alex Blania and Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT. Everyone who signs up to the project has their irises and other facial features scanned by one of the hundreds of Orbs in circulation, in return for a chunk of a new cryptocurrency. The aim, its founders say, is to create a global identification system that will help reliably differentiate between humans and AI, in preparation for when intelligence is no longer a reliable indicator of personhood.
By capturing someone’s unique biometrics and encoding those details into a numeric string, the logic goes, that person will be able to demonstrate they are both a human (not a bot) and unique from other humans, for the purposes of voting, say. In turn, social media firms and other online platforms will be able to verify the authenticity of their users and thereby stamp out nefarious bot activity, from spam and fraud to the spread of disinformation.
“The one discriminator we had on the internet to distinguish us from machines was always intelligence, but that’s going to vanish,” Blania told WIRED in June. “To our knowledge, the Orb is the only implementation that can work globally to solve this problem.”
The name of the project, Worldcoin, is a nod to its global ambitions (the Orb has already recorded eyes in more than 30 countries, across five continents), but also the cryptocurrency given out to anyone that agrees to be scanned. The idea was to use a crypto handout, explains Blania, to solve the perennial cold start problem: What better way to encourage people to join than to pay them? So far, more than 2 million people have signed up.
But the dystopian flavor of the proposition—an iris scan for some crypto—has been lost on nobody. In October 2021, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden admonished the idea in a Twitter thread: “Don’t catalog eyeballs,” he wrote. “Don’t use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don’t use biometrics for anything. The human body is not a punch ticket.” Blania says that, unless an individual specifies otherwise, raw images captured by the Orb are deleted and only the numeric representation is kept on file.
Despite criticism of the project, my visit to the Orb shows that plenty of people are willing to squash any apprehensions, whether because they are a fan of Altman, tech’s latest messiah, or for a shot at crypto riches. But as more information about Worldcoin is made public, crypto analysts are raising objections: Whether by design or otherwise, they say, regular people are unlikely to profit.