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OpenAI's Altman launching a cryptocurrency with an eye-scanner gimmick. Does this impact how you feel about AI?
Link information
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- Title
- Ready for your eye scan? Worldcoin launches-but not quite worldwide
- Authors
- George Hammond and Scott Chipolina, Financial Times
- Published
- Jul 24 2023
- Word count
- 505 words
"Central to the effort is an eye-scanning physical “orb,” which Worldcoin’s founders say is necessary for a future in which distinguishing between humans and robots becomes increasingly challenging due to a surge in artificial intelligence technology. Once users have proven they are not robots, they can be issued one of the company’s tokens."
With how scammy crypto has proven, this feels more like an effort to further boost the AI doomer hype (which is endlessly good for AI's market value) while cashing in on the attention he's getting. The whole thing reeks of a guy who's going to leave behind a lot of bagholders when he f*cks off to a private island.
More or less agree with what you wrote. Also to answer your question in the post, it doesn't much affect my opinion on AI itself, because crypto has nothing to do with it. It does, however, lower my opinion of Altman which wasn't even that high beforehand. Doesn't do many favors for my opinion of OpenAI either.
Okay, I actually wasn't that skeptical of worldcoin until this:
If this becomes a major part of the world economy (which it sounds like it wants to be), 20% of all tokens ever issued is a disgustingly greedy amount of economic power concentrated in the hands of a few.
I'll take my chances with fiat currency backed by nation states.
I'm a person that likes to concept of crypto. I do think there's a place for the usecase of crypto but it will never replace our fiat currency. I think it's good to have a international and stable currency in countries where the default currency can't be trusted and has way too much inflation. Also I think that it's ok for international online platforms for example creators to have a native token or something like ETH.
But over the years I have become really sceptic when it comes to crypto projects. They usually solve problems that do not exist and are boasting about how revolutionary their solution is to their own made-up problem.
But I do expect that crypto will be here for a long time and that there will be interesting breakthroughs in the future. But sadly this is not the case for Worldcoin and I think you're completely right.
This is a project founded in 2019 when cryptocurrency was all the rage. Apparently the news is that it started trading today.
Crypto was the buzzword to attach to your products before to get eyeballs and funding. Now that buzzword is AI. This project just seems like it's double dipping in the hype hyperbole bucket.
I am really beginning to believe that most of the befits of tech have been fleshed out to the point where there is just less new shit to come up with. People still expect big things every year from the tech world but the best they can come up with is rehashed older ideas with digital hypewords attached.
"Decentralized, paradigm,shifting, trustless, revolutionary digital AI currency solutions are here to.."
What, confuse the shit out of me ?
This all reminds me of back in the 90s when I had to buy all my music the was on cassettes, on CDs. Then, all my music on cd's needed to be mp3's. Then, I didn't even need to buy music I could just pay 10 bucks a month forever.
None of it has made my life listening to music much different. The only thing that really happened is the music container in my car has gotten smaller! Which, while nice to have the extras space is not really "paradigm shifting" enough for me anymore.
Ah, yes, this. The article fails to mention that this started about three or four years ago, primarily was pushed in developing countries, and then hit roadblocks as governments realized just what the fuck he and his company were doing.
Every aspect of such a project fills me with disgust and despair, for the project, for the tech industry, and for unrestrained capitalism and neocolonialism this so profoundly embodies. There is no one I'd trust less with vast biometric data - in exchange for monopoly money, no less - than Sam Altman.
What do I think about biometric proof of personhood? - Vitalik Buterin
[...]
Yeah, this article covers a lot of interesting risks, but I'm not sure if it arrives at a real solution. And the idea that this kind of project would remain actually decentralized and not directly in the control of a handful of big corporations or government, or both, seems vanishingly slim.
This all seems eminently (and immanently) abusable...either you leave it open to faking, you exclude certain people, or you open it up to the same problems that make legislation like KOSA such a danger. Or all of the above at once.
I'd way rather solve the problems this attempts to solve through legislation and enforcement on bad actors and platforms instead of placing the onus on the public to buy into another invasive system.
The amount of fraud is never zero, even for government identity schemes like drivers' licenses and passports. Someone's going to get fake ID's.
Possibly these schemes might resist fraud enough to be statistically useful, like captchas? I don't know what anyone's motivation would be actually bothering with them would be, though, if there's little you can do with them yet.
In a way it's sort of cheering that some people are anti-establishment enough to want to work on such problems, even if it's really hard and current solutions aren't so great. If you're not ideologically committed to never working with governments, you could use a service like Stripe to verify government id's and that's good enough.
Does this impact how I feel about AI? Not at all.
Does this impact how I feel about OpenAI? (Or at least, its CEO). Certainly.
Outside of maybe Bitcoin because of institutional and cultural interia, I'd be much more interested in these crypto projects if they dropped the currency and monetary value angle and instead presented themselves as a tech solution to an actual problem. Crypto and block chain technology, in general, has perpetually had the problem of being a neat solution and neat technology in search of a problem. This isn't a dig against it. The laser was invented first as a cool thing and applications were found later, but we're very much still looking for that "killer app" that this tech actually solves and improves the world with.
Tying my identity on the internet to a cryptocurrency to fight against the incoming apocalypse of AI fraud is definitely in the dystopian side of things...
Tbh I think USDC is the killer app, especially for institutions.
I don’t think there presently exists a cheaper or faster way to send any arbitrary amounts of dollars to anyone globally, particularly when sending over Solana (sub-penny transaction fee, 400ms finality.)
Even SAP is enabling it for cross-border payments.
When I played in crypto (now I just hold a little BTC as I mainly just made a fool of myself) I used USDC over USDT because I heard some really shady things about USDT -- but despite this it looks like USDT is dominating the stablecoin market. Any idea why that is?
First-mover advantage.
But reality is that BlackRock is a massive corporate partner and investor in USDC through Circle. So when it comes to US financial institutions, USDC will be a preferred choice, and that will permeate into the instruments these institutions use.
I’m skeptical of the notion of retinal scan global biometric pki layer although the largest centralized and less transparent one is probably Apple’s FaceID.
That said, the path of least resistance for AI in financial systems is likely permissionless networks (crypto). We already see this with the number of bots invoking transactions and onchain programs. Worldcoins selling point, I think, is that you can tell the difference human users from the bot/AI users. So it makes sense to me why the founder of OpenAI would think this is worth building along side the AI itself.
FaceID seems rather different since it's a way of logging in to a user's own account, and it's optional. You can use a password instead. (Or did I miss something about how it works?)
Worldcoin is about proving a very specific fact about an account to anyone in the world. But the situations where you need to know that the account was created by a someone with a unique retina and only that seem like a pretty small niche?
In many cases where captchas are useful, you don't need proof, just a probabilistic claim. If you're protecting a website from DOS attacks, it's okay if a few bots get through. And a good thing, too, since in some cases the boundaries between bot-controlled accounts and human-controlled accounts are blurry. After all, a person can create a gmail account and give it to a bot, or it could be a collaboration.
Meanwhile, for many situations, we will want to know more about the person who owns an account than "yes, this person has a unique retina." A driver's license or passport tells you more than that.
I may be biased because crypto has made me a lot of money but I don't understand why leftist websites hate it so much. It's an unregulated free market for the most part and it's only natural to have a plethora of scams. That doesn't mean crypto doesn't have valid use cases.
While I don't speak for all leftists, I'm generally against totally unregulated free markets, especially for things that have no intrinsic value like crypto, and I believe I'm not in the minority among leftists there. Heck, even a lot of non-leftists would agree on that.
That said, my biggest qualm with crypto is more fundamental. Even in a hypothetical best case scenario without scams and speculation, in which it's actually feasible to use as a currency (I don't think we've ever come close to this), the design of crypto is such that the rich get richer. Both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake explicitly encode this, albeit through different (but ultimately very similar) metrics. And that's before you get to the hypercapitalist rhetoric in crypto spaces -- they are not spaces dedicated towards making everyone more equal, especially not economically. They're spaces for those who hope to personally get rich, and it shows. It's not hard to see how this view of the world is fundamentally opposed to that of many leftists.
When you add onto this the prevalence of scams and speculative nature of the crypto market and the waste of resources and the myriad practical failings in trying to use it as an actual currency... it's a no-brainer to me. But even if these things were suddenly solved, I don't think they can solve the ideological disagreement I have with how crypto is designed.
To paraphrase an influential video on the topic, a lot of crypto boosters see the boot on their neck and conclude, "It should be my boot on someone else's neck."
As a leftist, I already hate whatever comes after this statement. Leftists do not like unregulated free markets as a rule. So it's natural that you'll see a lot of them argue against crypto.
Spending time in lefty online communities has made me feel that many are really into "scam porn", content that glosses over details to emphasize how certain things are scams. Most folks who identify as lefty typically identify with positions leading to greater rights, more equality, and vigilance against discrimination. I suspect scam porn strikes a chord in this morality. Look at the sinner, who takes from the disadvantaged and gives to the advantaged, this scammer is running a grift! There's entire Youtube channels whose content is completely based around showcasing scams. It's a flavor of reaction videos that seems to thrive on negative emotion.
Crypto being an unregulated free-for-all is full of scams and is a gold mine for scam porn content.
As a lefty, Crypto has it's uses. And I'm almost glad it was able to grow and develop without too much regulation. I think it's okay to be a bit reactive rather than proactive with new technologies in order to avoid stifling innovation while gathering legitimate data on what the kinks are rather than preemptively trying to predict what they will be someday. That said we know what the kinks are now and it's clearly time to regulate it.
As for the other part of this discussion, Lefties love to point out scams like crypto because they serve as proof that unregulated capitalism will screw the many to enrich the few - a fundamental assumption upon which most left-wing economic theories rely. Crypto is a pretty solid argument against right-wing economics as a whole. It's an especially strong indictment of libertarianism in my opinion.
Not sure I agree but that's a fair point, I like it.
You know, you're right. I don't think it even begins to cover all of right-wing economic theory. But it certainly hurts the unregulated or less-regulated capitalism part upon which most of the American right has based their economic decisions since at least Reagan. And it does support the idea that the few will screw the many to get rich, something that lefties have been shouting about right-wingers and capitalism for a long time.
Is that more fair? Sorry, I overstated my position. That was perhaps hyperbole.
Nah it's fair. Upthread I chose "lefty" to denote a large constellation of positions, not all of which have the same ideas on capital and markets, but I like your framing as the reason why a lot of lefties like to point out crypto scams. We can of course start a large comment thread on different political economic positions, but I think you really got to the heart of what's relevant in this thread! Thanks.
As a lefty, my core issue with the notion of crypto as a currency alternative is more fundamental than my politics: cryptos are not currencies. And you can't convince me that it's a good idea to use asset tokens as a medium of exchange that, by their very design, funnel value up from new investors to established investors. I mean, good on ya for democratizing systems of wealth consolidation, but that's fundamentally a pyramid scheme.
For me, besides "unregulated free market" being an obvious nightmare it's because all the crypto pitches basically invoke some techo-feudalism.
Take for example the whole "get in early" BS, which accepts as a fundamental concept that your work (how you make money) will be worth less than dirt compared to some dude having clicked a button a year earlier.
It accepts that the early adopters will wield more power than you simply because they are early adopters.
Since I didn't fall into the FOMO camp the only reasonable alternative seems to be "hell no".
You made a lot of money on crypto and good for you. You made that money off other crypto adopters. That's fine they should have known what they were getting into but a dog eat dog unregulated marketplace with an economy controlled by whoever has accumulated the most capital with an established ruling class that has a huge leg up has nothing that would interest leftists and it's pretty obvious why they'd be against it.