Ah, Worldcoin has set up booths at many shopping malls here in Kenya. The first time I saw them a few months ago I was reminded of the "OneCoin" pyramid scam that was big in East Africa a few years ago. https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/20/crypto_ponzi_scheme_c...
Worldcoin gives off really similar vibes. The footer of their website reads:
> Worldcoin tokens are not intended to be available to people or companies who are residents of, or are located, incorporated or have a registered agent in, the United States or other restricted territories.
>I really don't get good vibes from this whole thing...
Trust your instincts here. This thing is hardly a democratic technology -- it seems like it's by the Silicon Valley Elite, of the Silicon Valley Elite, for the Silicon Valley Elite.
It makes me think of that astonishing line by Susan Sontag: "The [_____] race is the cancer of human history; it is the [_____] race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."
But also Emil Cioran: "What makes bad [technologists] worse is that they [are steeped only in tech-centric thought] (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched [and gain a sensible sense of ethics] only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant."
Your instincts are wrong. HN has been a safe place as far as I've ever known (imo you're modded for being unreasonable or irrelevant here - even dumb is fine), but it's not safe to assume that you can say things bluntly in any forum just because they're true and said in good faith. It may read as bravery, but it's really just hubris. They'll delete you and tell other people to delete you. They'll report you to police. They'll ask your friends and family members why they're bad people for not shunning you.
Magical incantations and bad words are also the easiest things to avoid while still being very aggressive. Adhering to arbitrary pieties in form is actually a nice shield against people who are allergic to substance.
I am going to quote this flagged/removed reply that I think only certain HN users can see, because I think it's important to address:
>Since you did not want to quote the whole thing, I will do it for you:
>The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
>And I will point out the obvious thing: yes, she's jewish. Most of the things against the so-called "white race" come from jewish people. Don't trust me, just verify this: every time you see something about "white people blah blah", check the author. 9 out of 10 times it's a jewish person and/or has jewish background. I won't elaborate on the causes, you're free to research yourself.
>Then on one side there are no races because we all are the human race. On the other side, there may be races, but we're all equal - well, except if we talk about the "white race", then we can say all kinds of truly trashy things because it's about whites and therefore it's all good.
>I wish this would stop already.
Hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of white nationalists and neo-Nazis react this way to such things. I'm not going to respond to it myself (it's total bullshit in many different ways), but just know that there are a lot of people out there who think this way. (And, of course, you don't want to know what this poster is writing on places like 4chan compared to the PR-friendly thing they wrote here.)
I’m not sure what’s being addressed here, but that you feel comfortable reiterating that an entire race is cancerous is concerning to say the least. What is the end goal of this rhetoric?
I'm not endorsing Sontag's quote at all. I disagree with her and think it's wrong and immoral to exhibit bigotry towards any race or to cast any sort of group judgment like that in general. Plus if any other race had been in the same position they'd very likely be just as rapacious towards the Earth. I think what she describes is a human problem and not a racial problem.
I had just wanted to provide the preceding sentences to give it full context. The part I was disagreeing with is the stuff about Jews and what I wanted to address is the specific ways people react to these things.
But, you're right. It's totally besides the point and is irrelevant; racism is racism. I removed the full quote.
Sam Altman is behind both OpenAI and Worldcoin, the latter being a well known scam to gather biometric data.
So Sam Altman first creates the situation that we can no longer distinguish humans from bots, then asks everyone to trust him with even more biometric data to get around the problem he created.
Either way he wins at everyone else’s expense. I urge you to not take this at face value, Sam has already shown with Worldcoin that he is not trustworthy.
I was tricked by a machine yesterday. I had to call up the bank because their online banking website had booted me out.
After only a couple of rings, and no hold music, I was straight through to a person! This is unprecedented. The call was something like:
"Hi, you're through to foobank. How can I help you today?"
"Hi, your online banking has locked me out and said I need to call this number to get my account re-enabled."
"No problem. What message do you get when you try to login?"
"Oh, I haven't actually tried to login again, I can try if you want. It just kicked me out and said my account was locked and I need to call to get it re-enabled".
"No problem. If you click the 'reset my password' button under the login form, you'll be able to reset your password."
"I'm not sure that's going to work, but I'll give it a try. It definitely said my account was locked and I need to call to get it re-enabled."
"No problem. If you click the 'reset my password' button under the login form, you'll be able to reset your password."
"...are you a machine?"
"I'm Ava (edit: maybe Ada[0]?), a virtual assistant. Would you like me to put you through to a member of staff?"
"Yes please".
And only then did I get to spend 10 minutes listening to hold music and ads, before a member of staff actually unlocked my account.
My only problem with these are that they are slow and difficult to navigate: menus tell you everything they can do, and you can fairly quickly figure out if you need to talk to a person. Instead, I've got to go back and forth with a machine that has a rudimentary understanding of English and offloads understanding of the problem to what is essentially a menu on the back end. So instead, it's 10 minutes of trying to divine what keywords are doing what, and then giving up and starting the process of waiting for someone who can help you.
I'm not bothered by the fact that my servants aren't people, it cheers me up. It's not a good job for a person, it is a very bad job with very bad pay.
thankfully i bet we're only a couple years away from chatgpt making these calls for us. google already has a great "hold for me" function on android, though a lot of companies now detect this and deliberate hang up on you if they know you're using it - and they only hang up once the hold time is over. fuck these companies
> So Sam Altman first creates the situation that we can no longer distinguish humans from bots…
Any time human communication is mediated by technology there’s the chance that the communication is not really what it seems to be. Are we watching live events on TV or a recording of live events or a reenactment of actual events or complete fiction?
In some sense, on the internet everything is already a bot, it’s just that right now the majority of the bots are directed by humans in real time. I fully expect the majority of bots will be semi or fully autonomous in the coming years. (Maybe we’ll stop staring at screens all day.)
We will look back on this time as the point we realized we're already cybernetic and have been for a while.
For instance, many of us are already offloading memories onto our phones, Johnny Mnemonic-style, wirelessly. Just because it doesn't look the way it does in science-fiction doesn't mean it isn't happening.
I'm absolutely on the train for the complete debasement of media, especially mass media. All of those networks of trust that we've been told are unwieldy at scale to implement are going to become a necessity. We'll finally be able to break people of the habit of using TV as a certificate authority.
I don't know the exact implementation of Worldcoin, so correct me if I'm wrong here.
But theoretically, you could implement the protocol in a privacy-preserving manner where the only thing that needs to be saved, is the hash of the biometric data, not the biometric data itself.
So lets say that your face + fingerprint + iris each outputs a value. Concat those and hash them, and you have a unique value that can be reproduced elsewhere, without having to store anything else but the actual hash of the input.
Again, I'm not sure if this is what they are doing, but if that's how it works, they wouldn't actually need to gather any biometric data, after creating the hash it can be thrown away.
at the point where you regularly have to scan that combination into a potentially malicious or compromised machine that knows how to generate and transmit the hash, you may as well just trust some centralised authority to store the originals.
If someone MITMs your password, you can rotate it. A bit harder to do that with your iris.
Of course, true for fingerprint scanning too which has been around for a while, but iris kind of takes that to a new minority report level for many.
> at the point where you regularly have to scan that combination into a potentially malicious or compromised machine that knows how to generate and transmit the hash, you may as well just trust some centralised authority to store the originals.
Why would you have to do that regularly? The point is to do it once in a trusted environment and then the only thing you need to verify whatever is the hash itself, not to re-encode again and again.
Note that this is the same Worldcoin that has been going round poor countries scanning people's eyeballs with an orb in exchange for some shady cryptocurrency with the primary objective of making some billionaires richer. See e.g. previous discussions on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065 . I thought trying to turn our world into a terrifying dystopia for private profit was scary, but this article trying to sell it as something that is somehow beneficial for humanity is even worse.
I would encourage people who are otherwise deeply cynical of anything crypto (I know I am, and I hate 99% of crypto projects) to not immediately discount Worldcoin and make their own judgements based on the content Worldcoin presents. Much of the hacker news discussion on this project is making claims and assumptions that are factually incorrect or at best, misleading.
Online discussion is already largely broken, and will get much more broken in the coming years without something similar to Worldcoin.
- User gets their World ID in a compatible wallet (e.g. the World App).
- User receives credentials in their World ID. The flagship credential is biometric verification, currently available by using the Orb. The user can also verify their phone number to obtain the respective credential.
- Project integrates with World ID.
- User connects their World ID to authenticate, and optionally prove they are a unique human doing something only once. The user's wallet will generate a Zero-Knowledge Proof to accomplish this.
- Project verifies the Zero-knowledge Proof, either by using the API or by verifying on-chain.
Interestingly: Tamper detection system not disclosed
For obvious reasons, these files do not including the PCBs and sensors related to the Orb's tamper detection system.
OpenAi started out as "open", this venture also uses rhetoric that sounds innocent if one is not used to newspeak.
More likely, they want to become the central identity provider for the whole planet and collect as much biometric data as possible.
UBI plans may also start out as UBI, but will degrade soon: "Hey, we know that it is supposed to be unconditional, but we are running into financial difficulties. Would you mind plucking some cotton to shore up your income?"
As I've been reading this (and lobbing remarks in the comments) I've tried to get to the bottom of why this makes me uneasy. I think I've worked it out well enough to express it now.
In biology, the more successful a species is, the more parasites, predators, and pathogens adapt to attack it. This means that over time a species has to change in order to survive, or die off by massive and continued attrition.
Technology, I think, evolves in the same way. It isn't static, it responds to markets, new techniques, and new threats. It can be exploited both technically and socially. And of course, the bigger the target in terms of both users and codebase, the more valuable and vulnerable it becomes.
This is a rough way of saying: I don't believe a world scale system like this could ever marshal enough continuous investment to respond to the enormousness of the capital that will be spent breaking it by criminals, spies, and probably advertisers.
The question of establishing trust in the world has always been hard, even before computers. It is harder now, and the odds are against us.
It is likely recording the whole time - e.g. also while the person is moving their iris in view of the camera.
So, I would expect them to have captured a seriously significant AND deduplicated (through the iris) database of faces as well.
Obviously, this is an extremely valuable database on its own merits, because it contains biometric data on a ton of people from "non-restricted" countries and may well solve some of the systemic biases current biometric systems show, due to lack of a representative dataset to train on.
These systemic biases are currently one of the major arguments _against_ the use of biometric systems at an even bigger scale and thus solving it will take away a big tool in the privacy-rights activists toolbox.
Are biases still systemic if at one point a significant amount of people from every geographical location on the planet has been included in the training set?
I can imagine arguing _for_ this position at the very least becomes a lot more complex.
There will be frameworks that build around your anonymous proof that allow people to block you across all platforms at your identity level. The default implementation of Worldcoin doesn't tie all your online accounts together, but I think many platforms would choose to use it in a way that doesn't identify you as any specific person, but does identify you as the same person across platforms.
With that particular implementation, if you spam on one account on one platform, people can block you across all accounts and all platforms. And I'm sure something like community maintained lists we have for adblockers will emerge.
Their claimed goals and ethics sound pretty compelling. Something along these lines was strongly called for, and if their project ends up serving the general role that they seem to be pursuing, it might serve as an essential element of future society -- either directly or as an early work.
That said.. it's hard to see terms like "coin", "wallet", "Web3", "NFT", etc., without a bit of concern -- even if, admittedly, such terms might be appropriate and justifiable in this sort of application.
Is there a page that shows their overall economic model, perhaps with flow-charts and such? This is, where are the cash/token/hardware/etc. in-flows and out-flows?
And is there an early-adopter incentive? And if so, is it significant, or is the system designed to be fair to folks whenever they might join?
Asking in part because the classic pyramid-scam thing, where early-adopters end up collecting huge rewards at the expense of late-adopters, seems like a major hallmark of dubious projects. Projects without such asymmetries would seem more credible, both in terms of not being yet another pyramid-scam and long-term viability.
> Others took issue with the company’s purported focus on fairness given that 20% of the coins had already been allocated: 10% to Worldcoin’s full-time employees, and another 10% to investors, like Andreessen Horowitz.
20% of coins being in the hands of a few does sound potentially pretty corrupting -- at least, if it's a system like Bitcoin, where there's a cap on the total such that, if mass-adopted, that small group of people would end up controlling 20% of the total wealth. But does it work like that?
Beyond that, it sounds like the article's suggesting that it's a scam to get iris-scans:
> Meanwhile, those who fear that the whole thing may have been a scam want to know what they’ve lost. “50 KS is not enough to give an eyeball away,” says Okach, the university student in Nairobi that spent a weekend recruiting others to Worldcoin. “That’s manipulation, taking advantage of students without clear clarification about what it is they are doing or what they want.”
But the idea of a scam to get folks' iris-scans, especially iris-scans of people in less-developed areas, sounds a bit strange.
I mean, if someone has a database of folks' pictures, DNA, or fingerprints, then that database might help track folks without their knowledge or consent -- plus DNA might also reveal things about a person that they'd rather have kept private.
But what might scammers do with iris-scans that might potentially justify the trouble of collecting them like that?
How does this prevent humans from posting content generated by AI using their own verified identities? This coin doesn't solve the core problem which is telling AI and human generated content apart. I don't care of there is a crypto coin equivalent of a blue tick next to it.
A small fee to use a service will get rid of fake identities and bots. The answer is charging a fair fee. Not scanning iris’ to track that every person only has one account.
In that case you are simply delegating indentity checks to credit cards companies / banks. Earning money independently is definitely within the reach of current AI models.
I'd rather like it if I was able to submit evidence in court without giving a scan of my iris to an agent working for an overseas registered cryptocurrency startup, and don't really see how Worldcoin helps either way with authenticating my video...
I wasn’t talking about worldcoin but generally. In the future there will have to be changes because everyone would be able to fake a video. Submission has nothing to do with it I was talking about the deepfaked video itself.
PGP’s web of trust requires honest people. It kinda works when it can only be used to send emails to whole dozens of people. When you push it to the scale of 8B people and involve money, it’s going to break down badly. Tell me, are all your acquaintances honest? Not in my case. Now, think of acquaintances of acquaintances and so on.
> It empowers individuals to verify their humanness online while maintaining their anonymity through zero-knowledge proofs. Advancements in AI make it difficult to distinguish between AI and humans on the internet, highlighting a need for authentic human recognition and verification.
I am absolutely relieved to see this. This is exactly what I've been saying we all need endlessly online for years now. And especially because the internet is about to be overrun with AI generated garbage.
Yes - we need to be cynical with any implementation of this. We need to find flaws and criticize every aspect of it. But we absolutely 100% need this technology if we want online discourse to continue. Reddit is already a hellhole of bots and generated content, and has been getting progressively worse for years.
Imagine the scene: deep faked irises making bot armies that crypto nerds refuse to acknowledge aren't people.
In fairness, identity is hard, and the idea put forward is ambitious, but the scheme is unlikely to achieve what it purports to. Identity is a social, not biological construct.
In the prison system, for instance, prisoners are often present under assumed names. In some circumstances it is hard for courts to prove who someone is, even if it is nailed on what they did. Some markers (tattoos, scars, etc) help but approaches to identity often miss the innately situational nature of the thing.
This will definitely become illegal by governments who don't want to lose their monopoly on private data. It is also already possible in many countries to digitally sign documents with government ID.
> (2) preventing the dissemination of AI-generated content
This is not preventing it, since humans can also disemminate such content. Real humans are behind the "bot networks" that some authoritarian countries use on facebook.
This whole identity verification narrative will rapidly veer toward a dystopian social credit system where tracking of your whereabouts and spending is inescapable and accepted by everyone.
But sure, let's first verify that you are a genuine human. Insert coin to play again, please.
I'm perfectly happy to let AI run its course and totally destroy reddit, Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook and so on with endless content that everyone can just ignore. Let the humans get back to IRL.
I guess I'm just annoyed by Wikipedia being a source of well regarded truth when I also suspect that a lot of the content is politically slanted. Also, it's an aggregator, not an original work. Maybe this is unfounded...
Worldcoin gives off really similar vibes. The footer of their website reads:
> Worldcoin tokens are not intended to be available to people or companies who are residents of, or are located, incorporated or have a registered agent in, the United States or other restricted territories.
That doesn't sound very good! And then there's this critical review of Worldcoin's operations in Indonesia https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
I really don't get good vibes from this whole thing...