Worldcoin should go beyond verifying our humanness

livemint.com:

I am a sucker for new technology. Whenever a new gadget comes along, I feel almost compelled to buy it so that I can see for myself how it works and what it can do for me. As soon as a new digital service opens its doors to beta testers, I am almost always as far up at the head of the line as my time zone will permit.

Which is why the moment I heard of WorldCoin, the first thing I did was identify the locations in India where registration services were being offered. The inspiration behind the creation of Worldcoin is the very real concern that at some time in the not-so-distant future, the world will become so saturated with artificial intelligence (AI) that we will find it difficult—impossible even—to determine whether those we are interacting with are humans or not. The solution on offer is to create a verifiable digital identity that users anywhere in the world can use to identify themselves as human, so that we can all tell whether we are having a conversation with a bot or not.

The first step in the process of registering for a World ID involves visiting in-person one of the many locations in the world where a WorldCoin Orb has been placed. This is a device with special biometric imaging technology that can verify humanness and uniqueness in a privacy-preserving way. After using its sensors to confirm that the person standing in front of it is a human, it captures a series of iris images that it then processes into a unique digital representation of your iris.

Once this iris code is created, the image data is deleted from the Orb. Each iris code is compared with every other iris code created anywhere in the world in order to establish uniqueness. If you have never been previously verified, your World ID is added to