Worldcoin’s premise is a disturbing one

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Last week, I joined a group of 2mn people and counting who have given up their irises to Sam Altman’s dystopian cryptocurrency project, Worldcoin.

OpenAI chief executive Altman, who has already had a busy year with ChatGPT, started the global rollout of his latest venture last week, scanning eyeballs in 35 cities across 20 countries.

At its core, Worldcoin is a private company embarking on mass biometric data gathering. It is based in San Francisco and Berlin, and backed by venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz. In some countries, in exchange for a scan of your eyeball, Worldcoin will issue you some of its cryptocurrency tokens (currently participants receive 25 but that number has fluctuated), which can be traded on crypto markets and at the time of writing were worth $2.18 each. 

Altman claims that Worldcoin is a tool for a near-future in which OpenAI’s artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, rendering most jobs redundant and meaning global society has to be restructured around a universal basic income model. 

Its iris-scanning technology — carried out using “the Orb”, a bowling ball-sized chrome device — can deduce that you are a human and not a robot, issuing you a kind of digital passport called a “World ID” through which you can, in theory, receive your share of the economic growth produced by a society in which robots do all the hard work. 

Many of the finer details, such as how Worldcoin would work with governments, and how the company makes money, remain unclear.

Altman, and Worldcoin’s 29-year-old co-founder and chief executive Alex Blania freely assert that their lofty goal is to have 8bn users. Their company aims to solve a problem that doesn’t yet exist and the likelihood of which will seem absurd to most. And that’s just the start of Worldcoin’s potential problems. I arrived for my eye scan at a shared working space in Shoreditch, London, aware of several core issues with the company’s plans. 

First, its mission is extremely contradictory. Digital currencies were created as a rejection of centralised finance and to stop governments and corporations from having total control of personal data — an aim that seems ideologically opposite to Worldcoin’s goal of uniting citizens and their governments through its crypto token. In the same vein, eye scanning will be complete anathema to most crypto libertarians.

Second, Worldcoin is not available in the US, where uncertainty persists over the treatment of crypto assets as securities and regulation is expected to become far stricter in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. This seems like an existential catastrophe for Worldcoin’s ambitions. “We didn’t think it would end up as ‘world minus the US coin’,” Altman told the Financial Times last week.

Third, there are unanswered privacy concerns in this project. Imagine a world where criminals use biometric data leaks to steal identities rather than credit card details. (Worldcoin says it converts scans to code before deleting the raw data but there is little information available about how this works.)

Yet I left my three-minute appointment with no more clarity regarding what my iris data would be used for, and convinced of a far more simple roadblock to the company’s success: most people won’t care enough to sign up.

Worldcoin lives or dies on its ability to persuade people to go and get their eyes scanned. Even for those who regularly buy and sell crypto, free tokens currently worth around $50 are unlikely to bring hundreds of millions of people through the door. Videos of people queueing up for scans just after the launch circulated online but the diehard fans, the curious and journalists won’t make for the sort of numbers the company wants.

Worldcoin is already under scrutiny for the way it incentivises participants in developing countries, where it has offered people free cash and gifts such as AirPods in exchange for a scan. That scrutiny will increase as the company expands.

No one could accuse Altman of a lack of ambition. The problem is that Worldcoin’s success hinges on OpenAI bringing about a reality that is an unpleasant thought for most. Creating both the problem and the solution is an uncomfortable premise, even if Worldcoin turns out to be a damp squib. Until that is more clear, the question remains: even if you feel comfortable giving up your biometric data to a Silicon Valley start-up whose founder is working to bring about robot super intelligence, should you?

tabby.kinder@ft.com