Altman’s Worldcoin idea is out to reinvent the Aadhaar wheel

livemint.com:

ChatGPT and its ilk have made that test redundant—it is quite easy for a machine to convince you that it is human by giving very human sounding answers. This new test treads into biology: To certify that you are a genuine human being, you need to go to an Orb, which is a biometric verification device, and get your iris scanned. Currently, Orbs in 25 cities across 20 countries are scanning human eyes and giving them Worldcoin for their trouble.

Reportedly, more than 2 million authentic human beings are now official citizens of World ID. The purpose is noble, and ostensibly visionary. Altman has looked beyond the Silicon Valley bubble and foreseen a world which is overrun by human-like AI and robots, many of them doing most of the work that humans do today.

With biometric identification, the value produced by this work can be distributed among human beings as a Universal Basic Income (UBI). To make that happen, we need to know who the real humans are, and for that, we need an inviolable identity—that’s where World ID comes in. The UBI envisioned will presumably be distributed as Worldcoin.

Not everyone thinks that this “decentralised, privacy-preserving solution" to the world’s AI problem is a crazy idea. Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Reid Hoffman and others have pitched in $115 million at a $3 billion valuation to make it happen. So has FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, but for some reason, he gets no front-and- centre mention in press releases.