Speaker unverified: uncertainty

Transcript context

…going to get orb verified any soon. But speaking of orbs, Kevin, am I right that among the announcements this week is that world has a new orb. Yes, new orb just dropped. Uh they announced last night that they are uh starting to produce this thing called the Orb Mini. Um which is we should say it not an orb. What it is a I'm out. It is like a It's like a little sort of smartphones sized uh device that has like two glowing eyes on it basically and you can or will be able to like use that to verify your humanity instead of the actual orb. So the idea is distribute a bunch of these things. um people can like convince their friends to sign up and get their uh their world IDs and that's part of how they're gonna scale this thing. For me, all this company has going for it is that it makes an orb that scans your eyeballs. So, if we're already moving to a flat rectangle, I'm I'm like 80% less interested, but we'll see how it goes, I guess. Now, okay. So, you had a chance, Kevin, to scan your eyeballs. What What did you decide to do in the end? Yes, I became orbilled. Uh, I I I stared into the orb. Basically, it feels like you're setting up Face ID on your iPhone. It's like, "Look here. Move back a little bit. Take off your glasses." Like, make sure we can get a good Give us a smile. Wink. Right. Right. Uh, say, "I pledge allegiance to Worldcoin three times. A little louder, please." Um, and and then it sort of glows and makes a sound and I now have my world ID and uh I apparently like $40 worth of World Coin, although I have no idea how to access it. Was there any physical pain from the orb scan? How'd you feel when you woke up this morning? Any joint pain? Well, I did find that my dreams were invaded by orbs. I I did dream of orbs. So, um, it's made it into my deep psyche in some way. Yeah, that's a well-known side effect. Now, you say you were given some amount of World Coin as part of this experience. Will you be donating that to charity? If I can figure out how, yes. Um, and uh, we should talk about this because the world coin cryptocurrency has not been doing well. Um, and like over the past year, it's down more than 70%. Um, this was initially a big reason that people wanted to go get their orb scans is because they would get this like airdrop of of crypto tokens that could be worth something. And I think this is the part that makes me the most skeptical of this whole project. Like I think I am in general pretty open-minded about this idea because I do think that bots and uh impersonation is going to be a real problem. But I feel like we went through this a couple years ago when like all these crypto things were launching that would promise to like use crypto as the incentive to like get these big, you know, projects off the ground. And you know, I wrote about one of them. It was called Helium. And I thought that was like a decent idea at the time, but it turned out that like attaching crypto to it just like ruined the whole thing because it created all these like awful incentives and brought in all these like, you know, scammers and and people who were not scrupulous actors into the ecosystem. And I worry uined the whole thing because it created all these like awful incentives and brought in all these like, you know, scammers and and people who were not scrupulous actors into the ecosystem. And I worry that that is the piece of this that is going to uh if it fails like cause the failure. Well, I I'll tell you what I would do if I were them. Uh, which is to become the president of the United States because then you can have your own coin. Foreign governments can buy vast amounts of it to curry favor with you. You don't have to disclose that. And then the price goes way up. So, something for them to look into, I would say. It's true. It's true. And we should also mention that there are places uh that are already starting to ban this technology or at least to take a hard look at it. So, uh, World Coin has been banned in Hong Kong. Regulators in Brazil also not big fans of it. Uh, and then there are places in the United States like New York State where you can't do this because of uh a privacy law that prevents the collection of some kinds of biometric data. So, I think it's sort of a race between world and worldcoin and regulators to like see who can like whether the the scale can arrive before the regulations. Well, So let's talk a bit about the privacy piece because on one hand you are giving your uh biometric data to a a private entity and they can then sort of you know do do many things with it some of which you may not like. On the other hand they're trying to sell the idea that this is much more privacy protecting than something like a driver's license that might have your your picture on it. Right. So Kevin, can you sort of walk me through the the privacy arguments for and against what world is trying to do here? Yeah. So, they had a whole spiel about this at this event. Basically, they've done a lot of things to try to protect your biometric data. One of them is like they don't actually store the like scan of your iris. They just hash it and the the hash is stored locally on your device and doesn't like go into some giant database somewhere. But I do think like this is the part where a lot of people in the US are going to kind of fall off the bandwagon or or you know maybe be more skeptical of this idea is like it just feels creepy to upload your biometric data to a a private company one that is not like you know associated with the government or any other entity that might you might inherently trust more. And I think the bull case for this is something like what happened with like Clear at the airport, right? I remember when Clear and TSA PreCheck were launching. It was kind of like creepy and weird and you would only do it if you were like not that concerned about privacy and it was like, "Oh, I'm just going to like upload my fingerprints and my face scan to to this thing that I don't know how it's being used. " And then over time, like a lot of people started to care less about the privacy thing and and sort of get on board because it would let them get through the airport faster. I think that's one possible outcome here is that we start just like seeing these orbs in like every gas station and convenience f get on board because it would let them get through the airport faster. I think that's one possible outcome here is that we start just like seeing these orbs in like every gas station and convenience store in America and then we just sort of become desensitized to it and it's like, oh yeah, like I did my orb. Have you not done your orb? I think the other thing that could happen is like this just is a bridge too far for people and they just say, you know what, I don't trust these people and I don't want to give them my eyeballs. Yeah, let me ask one more question about the financial system undergirling world, Kevin, which is I I just learned uh in preparing for this conversation with you that World is apparently a nonprofit. Is that right? So, it's a little complicated. Basically, there is a for-profit company called Tools for Humanity that is sort of putting all this together. They're in charge of the whole sort of scheme. And then there is the world foundation which is a nonprofit that owns the intellectual property uh of the sort of protocol uh on which all this is based. So as with many Sam Alman projects the answer is it's complicated. Uh I think here's where this gets really interesting to me Casey. So Sam Alman co-founder of world also CEO of Open AI. Mhm. Open AI is reportedly thinking about starting a social network. One possibility I can see quite easily actually is that these things eventually merge. That world IDs become sort of the means of logging into the open AI social network, whatever that ends up looking like. And maybe it becomes the way that people will pay for things within the kind of open AI ecosystem. Maybe it becomes the the currency that you get rewarded in for contributing some valuable content or piece of information to the open AI network. I think there are a lot of different possible paths here including by the way like failure. I think that is obviously an option here. But one path is that this sort of becomes uh either officially or unofficially merged and that worldcoin becomes some piece of like the open AAI chat GPT ecosystem. Sure. Or here's another possibility. Sam has to raise so much money to spread world throughout the world that uh he decides that it will actually be necessary to convert the nonprofit into a forprofit. Could you imagine that, Kevin? That would never happen. No, you don't think that could ever happen? No. Let there's no precedent for that. Let me ask one more question about Sam Alman. Um, you know, I I think some observers may feel like that this is essentially Sam uh causing one kind of problem with Open AI and then trying to sell you a solution with world, right? Open AAI creates the problem of well, we can't trust anything in in the media or online anymore. And then World comes along and says, hey, all you got to do is give me your eyeball and I'll, you know, I'll solve that problem for you. So, is that like a fair reading of what's happening here? Potentially. Yeah. I've heard it compared to like the the arsonist also being the firefighter, you know, and um I don't think it's a problem that OpenAI single-handedly is causing. I think we were moving in the direction of like…

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