[HN Gopher] Worldcoin has a new Orb and is now just World
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Worldcoin has a new Orb and is now just World
Author : thunderbong
Score : 29 points
Date : 2024-10-18 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| When I first was interested in cryptocurrency, or Bitcoin, this
| is the sort of thing which made me excited. The idea of a new
| currency outside of the control of states or banks, which will
| take back the power for ordinary people.
|
| It soon stopped being about that and about "hodl" and self-
| enrichment. I applaud this project for being in the original
| spirit of Bitcoin.
|
| I've since come to realise that the important thing is not how we
| organise our currency, but how we structure our social relations.
| We could have this currency, or Bitcoin or whatever be the global
| standard, but it would make no difference to our social relations
| based on wage labour for the owners of capital.
|
| We are not going to solve that problem with technocratic
| solutions but with the working class taking power for themselves.
| Alupis wrote:
| I don't want to be the wet blanket... but this is just another
| "crypto bro" peddling yet another scam, err... "ICO". Only this
| time the elite's behind the project will have everyone's
| biometric data too.
|
| > with the working class taking power for themselves
|
| This is exactly the opposite of that. Sam has a rocky history
| with conflicts-of-interest and self-promotion. I don't see any
| reason we should trust him or his organization with this
| attempted consolidation of economic and identity powers.
|
| FTA:
|
| > 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 all operations in
| the country over privacy risks, while both Portugal and Spain
| have also taken action against the project.
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| I'm glad you came around, yes the correct solution is to eat
| Sam Altman and not to let him invent his own private currency.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > It soon stopped being about that
|
| I submit that it could never have actually been about that. It
| may have been out of the states control but it was far to
| technocratic and dependent on first movers so it was always
| going to leave behind the class of people you hoped it would
| most benefit.
|
| > the original spirit of Bitcoin
|
| Is effectively "you don't need permission." That's _it_. People
| projected quite a bit onto that.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Yep, it was very obviously going to produce landgrab
| dynamics. Like... it would be utterly astounding for someone
| _not_ to see that from day one.
| labster wrote:
| All of the banks and state regulation keep getting in the
| way. It's like there's a fence in the middle of a path --
| all we need to do is get rid of the fence and everything
| will obviously improve.
| pram wrote:
| This was explicitly the aim of projects like Urbit too,
| literally feudal lords ruling over their virtual real
| estate lol
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >It soon stopped being about that
|
| It's because everyone forgot about Chesterton's Fence. Stuff
| like the emergence of exchanges and the story of Magic The
| Gathering Online Exchange in particular are the result of
| people realizing those fences were necessary.
|
| There are very good reasons that the currencies we trust are
| managed and regulated by reputable banks and countries.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Unrelated, but it is a fascinating thought that when each of us
| dies there will have been exactly one thing that counts as The
| Stupidest Thing You Have Ever Seen. Much like we probably won't
| know what sandwich will be our last, we likely won't know if our
| current Stupidest Thing will be topped, so it is good to
| recognize and savor those moments when they happen.
| sksxihve wrote:
| So if I understand this right, this is a physical thing you stand
| in front of to prove that you are a unique human before making
| some transaction with another possibly unique human...
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Well, kind of. It's also a physical thing that you stand in
| front of to give up a bunch of biometric information to go in
| some database somewhere for...some reason that is unspecified.
| The fact that they're doing it "for free" suggests to me that
| there is some purpose to it that makes it profitable in spite
| of the costs. Given how much everyone's data is actually worth,
| I suspect that the reason it's free is because the biometric
| data has a bunch of intrinsic value such that it's worth
| building a bunch of hardware and giving away monopoly money.
| AyyEye wrote:
| > some reason that is unspecified.
|
| Their end goal is for you to need this to use the internet.
|
| > something like World ID will eventually exist, meaning that
| you will need to verify [that you are human] on the internet,
| whether you like it or not. I think that's certainly going to
| happen with the progress in AI.
|
| https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/07/10/an-
| or...
| stogot wrote:
| Wow, "whether you like it or not" directly contradicts the
| "for the good of humanity" of their proposal. That's what
| autocrats say
| Centigonal wrote:
| You stand in front of the Orb. The Orb scans your biometric
| data and stores it in Sam's Database (Sam says he doesn't own
| the database, something something blockchain good of humanity -
| but Sam doesn't "own" OpenAI either).
|
| Once the Orb gathers enough people's biometrics, the Orb will
| become the gatekeeper for transactions. The Orb will verify
| your identity and humanity. Sam's Database will be more precise
| than your social security number, more secure than your bank
| login, internationally transcendent, and secured by the rigid
| and infallible laws of cryptocurrency. The history of crypto
| has shown us that ownership of tokens is a good and safe way to
| verify people's identities and uniqueness, and that fraud is
| basically impossible with these systems.
|
| National governments will use Sam's Database to assign
| Universal Basic Income as AGI decimates the need for labor,
| shortly before they collapse and give way to the AI world
| government. Sam's database will contain the unique identifiers
| of every human, giving our benevolent AI overlord a head start
| on getting to know us all and making our lives richer and more
| wonderful than we could possibly dream, by [unspecified].
|
| Prostrate yourself before the Orb. Give it your most ineffable
| data. Invest your money in Sam's database. He is a responsible
| steward.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| I often wonder if Peter Thiel is somewhere, laughing bitterly
| into a glass of terrible overpriced gin that only a
| billionaire would drink: "this fuckin' guy... this is my
| schtick"
| anonymousab wrote:
| I assume there's some element of being very angry that
| "it's not me" but an even larger element of "but at least
| it's one of us rich elite ruling class techbros and not the
| proles".
| sebastiennight wrote:
| > National governments will use Sam's Database to assign
| Universal Basic Income
|
| Didn't the big UBI study come to the conclusion that UBI
| didn't work (meaning, folks in the control group without UBI
| were better off at the end of the study than those who
| received it)? Honest question ; I'm fuzzy on the details.
| fragmede wrote:
| That was the conclusion Pete Judo came to:
| https://youtu.be/oyoMgGiWgJQ
| AyyEye wrote:
| I'm sure there's already a plan to monetize and privatize what's
| soon to be the most valuable biometric database on earth.
|
| Plus it's cute how they developed the problem [reaction] solution
| in parallel. [1]
|
| > Something like World ID will eventually exist, meaning that you
| will need to verify [that you are human] on the internet, whether
| you like it or not. I think that's certainly going to happen with
| the progress in AI.
|
| Par for the course for the Davos types.
|
| [1] https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/07/10/an-
| or...
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > Something like World ID will eventually exist, meaning that
| you will need to verify [that you are human] on the internet,
| whether you like it or not. I think that's certainly going to
| happen with the progress in AI.
|
| No thanks. I would prefer to just opt out.
| runako wrote:
| If this was necessary to solve a problem, why wouldn't the
| existing Internet access points simply solve the problems?
|
| For example, why would Apple not add liveness detection to
| its devices, which users already trust with their biometric
| data?
|
| One could imagine a Web standard that specifies minimum
| capabilities for user agents, which could then be implemented
| in a variety of ways. Apple might use an upgraded FaceID, for
| example.
|
| That would have the added benefit of being able to verify
| liveness anywhere, anytime, unlike the Orbs.
|
| World feels like a ZIRP phenomenon.
| ejddhbrbrrnrn wrote:
| This is what I thought. Finger print and face detection
| have been added with little fanfare. FAANG wont let this
| become a defacfo standard without a fight.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > For example, why would Apple not add liveness detection
| to its devices, which users already trust with their
| biometric data?
|
| That's what I always assumed too, that existing biometrics
| on mobile would be adequate. This World Coin Orbo bullshit
| doe not bring anything to the table except get sama one
| step closer to his wet dream fantasy of WorLD DomInaAtiOn.
| janice1999 wrote:
| You won't have a choice depending on what it will gatekeep,
| just like how at the moment web users can't opt out of being
| fingerprinted [1] and data intercepted by Cloudflare when
| they want to visit their favourite site or have to live with
| never having root access to their phones if they want to use
| their bank's mobile app.
|
| [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/turnstile-ephemeral-ids-for-
| frau...
| ejddhbrbrrnrn wrote:
| It is more like how you can't opt out of an okta app, cisco
| vpn on your phone etc. if you want a job.
|
| Speaking of which I suspect these sort of companies not
| World will win this race. It wont be a new product for
| them. It is just a new feature.
| anonymousab wrote:
| Anonymity and lack of accountability/a target to attack on
| the internet is just a huge pain in the ass for most
| governments and corporate interests.
|
| It is also useful, to some extent, for bot farms, propaganda,
| opinion influencing and spycraft. But if you're a government
| controlling the "internet id" for your or other nations, then
| you can easily make affordances for whipping up a "valid"
| fake digital personage.
|
| That it still exists is a technical and political challenge
| that will eventually be resolved. There's too much money and
| soft and hard power to be gained by getting rid of it.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > > verify [that you are human] on the internet
|
| IMO it's crucial that we keep in mind the policy/engineering
| differences between:
|
| 1. Prove you're a human and share your global permanent ID.
|
| 2. Prove you're probably human.
|
| 3. Prove that if you're a bot you're at least the high-quality
| kind that isn't part of an army and whose operators are likely
| to follow the rules.
|
| In many cases #1 is overkill, difficult to engineer, has reams
| of nasty privacy implications, and requires a massive amount of
| bureaucracy for edge-cases.
|
| Most websites are happy with #2 or even #3.
|
| [Edit: Some prior musings in comments here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714245 , where someone
| also mentions Worldcoin.]
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| The finance industry has strict KYC laws to prevent fraud and
| funding of other criminal pursuits. Now we have several
| converging trends:
|
| - we need to know if anyone ever says anything doubleplus
| ungood so we can punish them with a lifetime exile from
| society. what qualifies depends on the day and if mercury is
| in retrograde.
|
| - data is useful for making money
|
| - human verification on an AI-enshittified net becomes
| practically "required" to get any "legitimate" content, by
| which i mean the dreck we had pre-2022 as opposed to
| post-2022.
|
| - everything as a subscription service
|
| - also the ghost of web 3.0
|
| More parties are incentivized to hoover more data. So
| although #1 is overkill and everything else you listed, it's
| the path more companies will be taking in a neverending arms
| race.
| pvaldes wrote:
| The market for fake eyes made on resin and plastic seems to
| have a brilliant future. Soon most of all 'certified 100%
| humans' talking on internet will be animatronic heads without a
| brain. Same as today
| AyyEye wrote:
| The orb is a multi-spectral imager with extreme zoom, liquid
| lens, and very tamper hardened. They'll be everywhere.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I doubt it. For one thing, the ergonomics of an "orb" are
| horrible. This is a solution looking for a problem and
| seemingly designed by people who took the wrong lessons
| from Apple's success.
|
| Incidentally they have a typo in their announcement
| page[1].
|
| > The Orb is the incluse[sic], secure and anonymous device
| that enables World ID holders to verify their humanness and
| uniqueness.
|
| I assume "incluse" is meant to be "inclusive". But what's
| "inclusive" about letting a startup with foggy monetization
| plans collect everyone's biometrics? Sounds like bullshit.
|
| [1] https://world.org/blog/announcements/world-unveils-new-
| orb-n...
|
| Edit: I'm reminded of this old clip:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
|
| From all external appearances, "World" is being run by
| sales and marketing people from its inception.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It is genuinely kinda fascinating, because, lets face it, based
| on what we are seeing now, short of omega swan event ( black
| swan events seem too common lately ), it will actually be a
| problem that will need to be solved. I am just mildly annoyed
| that solution to prove I am human is to effectively give last
| parts of me that are.
| AyyEye wrote:
| > I am just mildly annoyed that solution to prove I am human
| is to effectively give last parts of me that are. What a
| poetic way to put it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Something like World ID will eventually exist
|
| It's called a national ID with an eID feature and I've been
| using it to verify my age when I order booze online for like a
| decade. It cost 5 bucks extra when I renewed my id the last
| time. What do I need an eyeball scanning orb and a crypto coin
| for something that every developed or for that matter half
| developed government invented in like 2010?
| Terr_ wrote:
| I agree that the crypto/blockchain angle is stupid, since it
| only makes sense in a completely hypothetical future where
| somehow governments ceased to exist or don't have identity
| management as one of their core functions. (For some people,
| this is less of a system-design oversight and more of an
| agenda.)
|
| That said, there's always potential to improve privacy with
| some clever algorithms: A lot of naive approaches would make
| it too easy for a government or vendor to have lots of
| information about your activities that they don't really need
| or deserve to have.
| Philadelphia wrote:
| If we're dealing with an all-powerful Skynet intelligence, or
| even a WOPR or Wintermute, won't it just figure out how to
| bypass the verification system?
| AyyEye wrote:
| How smart your AI is depends on whether you're selling the
| poison or the antidote.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| AKA: who you're marketing something to.
| dang wrote:
| > _Sam the snake_
|
| Please edit personal attacks out of your HN comments, as the
| site guidelines ask:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You may not
| owe people whom you call snakes better, but you owe this
| community better if you're participating in it.
|
| This applies regardless of who the person in question is,
| because it's not about them, it's about us, i.e. the group you
| belong to.
| AyyEye wrote:
| Edited, sorry.
| modeless wrote:
| I get that this solution is distasteful. But verifying humanity
| on the Internet is a real problem that is getting harder and more
| important very quickly. CAPTCHAs aren't going to work much
| longer. What is a solution that people can live with?
| lolinder wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate: why is it important? Why do we need
| to know if an agent on the internet is human or robot?
|
| Generally what we actually need to know is if a given agent is
| engaging in manipulative behavior, illegal activities, or
| otherwise causing harm to us or our customers. Those behaviors
| are often correlated with robot agents, which has allowed us to
| use "is this a robot" as an imperfect proxy for "is this agent
| up to no good". But for most use cases the humanity isn't
| actually what we're interested in, it's whether the agent is
| abusive.
|
| In a world where we can't verify humanity as easily, maybe we
| just need to find different proxies for abuse detection?
| modeless wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint. There will be applications
| that need human verification, but maybe in most cases it
| doesn't matter. It does seem to me like the endgame of this
| would be that everyone interacts mostly with AIs online
| rather than other humans, as AIs will be (at least
| superficially) more helpful, patient, pleasant, whatever you
| want. Check out this social network of AI sycophants and
| imagine that they start populating all the regular social
| networks too:
| https://x.com/michaelsayman/status/1835841675584811239
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << What is a solution that people can live with?
|
| Dropping a good portion of digital life seems like a good
| start.
| cedws wrote:
| Agreed, the internet is already in desperate need of a way to
| authenticate real humans, and we'll need it even more in 5-10
| years. But it can't simply be verification via government-
| issued ID. The solution needs to be private, and ideally as
| decentralised as possible.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| If Ticketmaster wants to know I'm not a bot, I guess I would be
| OK signing a challenge with my government issued identity card
| [0] - for message boards that need to avoid spam and griefers,
| IMO an invite only system with revokable access to everyone a
| bad actor handed an invite code could be sufficient
|
| Also scanning my eyeballs to have a private corporation give
| the thumbs up or thumbs down on whether I can access a
| particular service isnt merely distasteful but dystopian in a
| "we already lost" kind of way
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
| m1guelpf wrote:
| no need to reverse-engineer anything, both hardware[1] and
| software[2] are up on GitHub
|
| [1]: https://github.com/worldcoin/orb-hardware [2]:
| https://github.com/worldcoin/orb-software
| wbobeirne wrote:
| I think this is a totally valid question. My answer would
| probably be to have people actually pay for more things. I
| think a huge proponent of something like World is advertisers,
| who want to make sure that real human eyeballs are seeing your
| ads. But if you pay me money, I don't care if you're a rogue AI
| botnet running amok, I'm happy to serve your request.
| modeless wrote:
| So Twitter Blue/X Premium is the model of the future?
| PolieBotics wrote:
| A real solution is to create privacy-preserving proofs
| regarding the state of a timestamped cryptographic feedback
| loop in projector-camera systems.
|
| It's trivial to add incoming image hashes and timestamps to a
| Merkle tree and to derive the output hashes of projector
| emissions as they come, while providing an output hash to one's
| interlocutor (or BFT network) periodically. This proves the
| beginning time, end time, and sequentiality of all emissions.
|
| Correspondence between emissions and recordings is proven by
| training autoencoders on concatenated projection images and
| returned camera images. These autoencoders are transformed
| using privacy preservation techniques.
|
| Thus, human relationships and trust can be modeled and secured.
| grishka wrote:
| I've not researched how this works, but this definitely feels
| like one of those things where if you dig deep enough into it, it
| boils down to "we verify your 'humanness' by checking that
| there's your biometric data signed by our private key, for which
| the public key is hardcoded everywhere, so trust us please".
| remcob wrote:
| It actually uses a lot of modern cryptography (zero knowledge
| proofs, multiparty computation, decentralized consensus, etc)
| to avoid exactly that.
| stogot wrote:
| To avoid harvesting people's biometrics for profit?
| AyyEye wrote:
| > It's also launching a new service called "Orb on Demand" (yes,
| it's really called that) that will let people order Orbs "much
| like a pizza you would have delivered to your apartment
|
| Great. I can't wait for captchas that requires me to pay someone
| to come to my home and scan my eyeballs. What a hellscape.
| Everyone involved should be embarrassed and shunned out of the
| society.
|
| "Drink a Verification can to continue" crossed with the torment
| nexus. Fan-fucking-tastic.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I guess he's going for the "FBI fingerprinting" market?
| fredoralive wrote:
| So a crypto grift-scam-bandwagonchasher pivoting to an AI grift-
| scam-bandwagonchasher?
| Centigonal wrote:
| Someone is gonna reverse engineer their orb and add a couple
| thousand fake people with fake biometrics to the database - or
| just pay people to borrow their WorldID.
| drdeca wrote:
| I feel like the former could probably be avoided if they use an
| ORWL-PC-like thing to ensure that an on-device generated
| private key can't be extracted, and use some kind of like,
| video recording from multiple cameras to demonstrate that the
| construction of the device didn't differ from the standard, and
| showing the public key it produced, and had such footage signed
| by trusted parties, as part of the like, certificate for the
| public key that the device uses?
|
| Of course,
|
| 1) I doubt they did this
|
| 2) This still kicks the can down to "why do you trust the
| authorities who signed the alleged footage showing the
| construction of the device". (You can kick the can further by
| having the cameras also have such infeasible-to-extract private
| keys, but encounter the same problem)
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| I'm sure this is fine, and there is no reason to be concerned
| that the same very rich person is behind this device as the AI
| technology whose worst outcomes it exists to combat.
|
| Also there's a blockchain so that's great! I know you're not a
| crypto evangelist on Twitter anymore, or an NFT evangelist, and
| now you're an AI consultant and solutions provider. But here it
| is -- that great application for the blockchain you were all so
| sure was coming all along.
|
| All tied up with one neat looped bow that can make you feel like
| it isn't somehow some empty, culture-destroying, billionaire-
| welfare griftapolooza.
|
| And it's even a bit YCombinator because Sam Altman, right? He was
| always going to make it. He's got the killer instinct.
| rasz wrote:
| Wasnt there a scifi movie about mysterious Pod/Sphere showing up
| promising to teleport people to another world, but then it turns
| out it was all a conspiracy by a crazy scientist and all the
| scanned people were just disintegrated to help out Earth
| ecosystem recover from overpopulation? Hmmm there it is
| https://www.reddit.com/r/NameThatMovie/comments/190d0fb/im_l...
| Deus (2022)
|
| TLDR: Orb eyeball scanning might be first step of some crazy
| Population control conspiracy :)
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Did Sam ever satisfactorily answer why they seeded the database
| not in say, Silicon Valley, or the US, but in some of the most
| impoverished regions in Africa, and offering "insane" amounts -
| like in some cases two months salary or more?
| 23B1 wrote:
| Bond villains only answer questions when you're safely strapped
| in to their brain-drilling chair.
| stogot wrote:
| > "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."
|
| What a blob of a thing to say. And 'access' isn't even a thing
| people want. There's few companies I hope for bankruptcy and this
| is one of them
| notfried wrote:
| Sam needs to hire a consultant when he wants to name products.
| First it was ChatGPT, then came the 4o's and o-1's, and now this.
| "World" is not easy to pronounce for some non-English speakers
| (the "rld" part). For a product literally meant to be used by
| everyone, that's quite the faux pas.
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(page generated 2024-10-18 23:02 UTC)