Eyes wide shut: When tech bros want to scan your eyeballs 

DON’T blink now, because Sam Altman’s World Network project, or World for short, is ramping up its bid for eyeballs. Launched globally as Worldcoin in 2023 and introduced in the US last month, this identity-verification project wants to help you prove you’re a human being and not an artificial intelligence (AI) bot by scanning your iris and generating a World ID. This “digital passport”, which is stored on the blockchain, might even be used in the future to prevent fraud in the distribution of universal basic income – the payout that humans might need once they’ve been replaced by AI.

When you consider the irony of Altman’s other venture, OpenAI, this development is only marginally less infuriating than when Amazon opened its own brick-and-mortar bookstores in 2015. But already, more than 12 million people’s identities have been verified with World’s iris-scanning orb devices. The project, managed by an outfit called Tools for Humanity, has already raised some US$240 million in venture capital funding from marquee-level names such as Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital. So here we all are.

World has understandably encountered regulatory suspicion and sundry complications – authorities in Spain and Portugal have cracked down on the platform’s activities over data protection concerns, while Hong Kong has ordered it to stop collecting iris and face images. Singapore, too, has grappled with other by-products of World’s existence – the police have cautioned the public against giving away or selling their Worldcoin accounts.