LONDON/TOKYO/BENGALURU, July 25 (Reuters) – People around the world are getting their eyeballs scanned in exchange for a digital ID and the promise of free cryptocurrency, shrugging off concerns among privacy campaigners and data regulators.
Founded by Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, the Worldcoin project says it aims to create a new “identity and financial network” and that its digital ID will allow users to, among other things, prove online that they are human, not a bot.
The project launched on Monday, with eyeball scans taking place in countries including Britain, Japan and India.
At a crypto conference in Tokyo, people on Tuesday queued in front of a gleaming silver globe flanked by placards stating: “Orbs are here.” Applicants lined up to have their irises scanned by the device, before waiting for the 25 free Worldcoin tokens the company says verified users can claim.
Users told Reuters they weighed concerns over data collection against their curiosity about the project, which says it has issued IDs for more than two million people in 120 countries, mostly during a trial period in the last two years.
Email I just sent to a friend who sent me this article:
In so many ways they already have us all identified and know where the hell we are all the time anyway. How can we escape this? I seriously doubt there’s anything you can do. I tend to see all of this in the context of, to use a simple term, the AI singularity, which may also include the alien singularity and the digital genetic evolutionary singularity where humans are raised out of body and have IQs three times what we have today and maybe even more with computer brain connections
It is my fairly well considered opinion, which I am always open on, that pretty much everything we are concerned with today like race, nationality, true or false history, psychology, sociology, and on and on, every topic, everything we think about is going to be massively subsumed by the indeterminable singularity that is looming down on us and doesn’t seem too far away at all. As mentioned, this great inflection point will entail a meeting of many disparate and complex forces making it impossible to predict. Maybe I’m just an incorrigible optimist, but there are many possible outcomes from this that are good and we would probably like. One factor that I think is very important is generally speaking highly intelligent people are more moral. I know that there are many exceptions to this, but if we have a planet where average IQ s are 300 or more, it will not be the case that the vulgar crude visceral and disgusting energies that guide so much of the world today will be guiding that world. In addition to this factor, there is great possibility that world wide wealth will increase as much or more than IQ ‘s. This will mean there is even less reason for people to struggle and wrangle over status and wealth and other pomposities (ABN)
American Buddhist Net 