First Sam creates the situation where distinguishing humans from bots on the web becomes harder, then asks everyone to trust him with biometric data to work around the problem he created. Everyone loses, except for him.
Reminder that Worldcoin is a know scam, banned in several countries due to privacy concerns.
Altman came into my awareness because of WorldCoin, and that effort is what made me view him with deep suspicion. It's like he went out of his way to do a very creepy thing in the creepiest possible way.
I wouldn't be happy to use any "identity token" like that, but there's exactly zero chance that I'd be willing to use WorldCoin. I don't think they're anywhere near trustworthy enough as a company, and my trust in Altman is even lower.
If having some kind of identity token becomes nonoptional, then I want it to be run by the government -- they already have my identity information anyway so at least that way my surface area hasn't expanded.
>all it's done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor
I'm a worldcoiner. All that happened is I went to a cafe in London, they took a picture of my eyes without asking to know my name and gave me a Worldcoin account, which is mostly a crypto wallet, associated with that eye scan.
I've since received coins worth about $250 and changed half to usd. I don't feel scammed or exploited and my privacy is invaded a lot less than by the likes of Google and Facebook who know a lot about me rather than just account 555636... has retinas 6gg663gghhs...
I'm not sure database from the bodies of the poor really matches my experience.
Sam didn't create AI - it would have happened anyway.
As to World(coin)s other objectives of providing an anonymous id system and payment network I don't know. Those don't seem to have kicked in in practice although who knows. I think the take up is too low at the moment really.
> my privacy is invaded a lot less than by the likes of Google and Facebook
You don’t know that. All you know is what they say, and that’s worth very little. Companies lie and cheat all the time. For example, on their FAQ they say the orb deletes the data “by default”, which implies there is a way to not have it deleted. That alone should give you pause. And this is not yet widespread enough for anyone to know the worst consequences.
> Sam didn't create AI
Neither did I say he did.
> it would have happened anyway.
You don’t know (nor do I) if it would have been released this irresponsibly, making other companies do the same, if not for Sam and OpenAI. In fact, we know Google had working systems like this before ChatGPT and they chose to not release them.
Respectfully, one person’s subjective opinion doesn’t mean much. Those reporters spoke to much more than one person. It doesn’t even seem like you investigated it or anything, you’re just going by gut feeling based on what happened to you individually. It’s like you’re seeing a report of an earthquake that demolished half a city and calling them biased because your house didn’t collapse.
Actually looking at the articles again most of the discrepancy seems to be they were from 2022 before the Worldcoin crypto payouts started in 2023 which is why the people in them were annoyed they hadn't been paid, whereas I joined after that and was paid out straight away.
I thought Zuckerberg is a blowhard for renaming Facebook to Meta but calling a company "World" really takes the cake. Will Altman go after people using the word "World" without paying a license fee?
Do they want to keep a centralized database of everybody's eyeballs? I'm not sure I'm interested in this. I'm predicting people getting their eyes gauged out in high stakes robberies.
It doesn't work that way. If you want to steal my worldcoins you need my private key off my phone rather then my eyeballs. The only relevance of the eye scan database is if I try to get more worldcoin accounts the eye scan should show I've already had one and are so not eligible for another. Though I haven't actually tried that yet. Maybe I could get contact lenses with a couple of marks on for that purpose?
but then how will we prove that you aren’t a GPSlop bot?? If you don’t put your eyes in this database we’ll just have to debank you for your own good. Last thing we need is AI bots emptying out people’s bank accounts right?
Sadly the worldcoin thing doesn't even work for bank accounts etc. I still have to upload passport scans, utility bills, fill forms and the like. And now sometimes proof of funds. What if you made money decades ago and don't have proof of how? It's all become a pain in the neck. It would be cool for me if worldcoin worked but it's basically just a crypto pump with added eyeballs.
He really makes it easy to search for this project online. A good thing in this case, if you ask me.
If you like a single online identity, perhaps consider https://nostr.com/, where you can just throw your key pair away and start fresh. Unlike in Sam creepy vision.
And the quest for the most embiggened company name continues:
1) Google embiggened its name to "Alphabet" (which encompasses anything).
2) Facebook felt jealous and embiggened its name to "Meta" (one layer above
"Alphabet").
3) Musk embiggened Twitter to X, a variable that can stand for anything,
so it can be construed to encompass both "Alphabet" and "Meta".
4) Altman embiggens Worldcoin to World.
"World" is actually quite modest, and reminds one of the IPO of WorldOnline in 2000, which was a flop and predated the stock market crash by a couple of months.
That’s an interesting observation, but I think your conclusions are wrong. The reasons for those names (apart from rebranding to change people’s perceptions of the companies) are documented.
Alphabet makes sense because Google has a ton of services with different names, many of them often represented by the first letter in their name.
Meta is for “Metaverse”. Zuckerberg was infamously all in on that idea at the time.
X is a name Musk has obsessed with and tried to push for years, at least since the Paypal days, even naming one of his children with the letter.
World is trying to hide the direct cryptocurrency affiliation (though the coin still exists) as it pivots.
The problem of identification is a real one for hundreds of millions of people and it has nothing to do with AI. What's shocking to me is how much people aren't pizza gating these eye scanning orbs when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ID2020 which is a good faith attempt to solve the real ID problem for the right reasons in a practical way has been a favourite of conspiracy nutjobs for years https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/articles/mosip-digital...
> What's shocking to me is how much people aren't pizza gating these eye scanning orbs
That’s an interesting point. It got me thinking and I think it might be related to the (for lack of a better term) “revolutionary messaging”. What I mean is that conspiracy theorists are guided by a mindset of revolution: It’s always about how the status quo is constructed to fool and control you, thus the truth is by necessity a revolutionary idea known by a select few who must rise up to fight the tyrannical ideas and brainwashing of the world government.
So scammers appeal to that notion. Instead of trying to work with others to enact real change to the systems in place, they hype themselves as lone wolves that are proven right because others disagree with their ideas.
It’s hard to make a conspiracy theory against something which already defines itself by being outside the norm and fighting the status quo. Cryptocurrencies fall squarely in that.
The orb thing is a bit to open to make a good conspiracy theory. I mean you can go to an orb place and check them out - they are really just fancy digital cameras and just take a pic - they don't need your name address phone number or anything. And the biz model is mostly yet another crypto coin which may be a bit scammy but not a very interesting conspiracy.
Now that Gates thing, I find it hard to figure what they are up to.
Dunno. He does quite interesting projects- fusion, agi, ubi, world id etc. Also here's a paste from an Atlantic article:
>But Graham had always had intense convictions about Altman. “Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking, ‘Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19,’” Graham once wrote. Altman, too, excelled at making Graham and other powerful people in his orbit happy—a trait that one observer called Altman’s “greatest gift.” As Jessica Livingston, another YC co-founder, would tell The New Yorker in 2016, “There wasn’t a list of who should run YC and Sam at the top. It was just: Sam.” Altman would smile uncontrollably, in a way that Graham had never seen before. “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful,” Graham said in that same article.
He seems a good deal maker but a bit sneaky and shifty.
Reminder that Worldcoin is a know scam, banned in several countries due to privacy concerns.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin#Legal_and_regulatory...