11 ms·

Humanness in the Age of AI

102 points by allanberger 4y ago

ssss11 4y ago
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.
- satellite2 4y ago
  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.
- astrange 4y ago
  > A small fee to use a service will get rid of fake identities and bots. No, it'll get rid of bots worth less than the account fee to run, except for people who can do payment fraud. It won't get rid of fake identities because you have to do identity verification for that; otherwise you can impersonate a corporation.
- obscur 4y ago
  This is intended to be a way to fairly distribute UBI, so a fee alone does not work in that case.
wskish 4y ago
It's only when you are the product that you actually need to prove you are human
- calculated 4y ago
  What about when you try to have a social network without bots?
  - throw_m239339 4y ago
    People aren't going to submit themselves to biometric checks just to post stuff on reddit... These social media will probably die when people realize that they are wasting their time answering bots, but these bots will take over soon or later.
    - calculated 4y ago
      Ok what about going to court, submitting evidence - a video of someone committing fraud?
      - groestl 4y ago
        What about that?
      - notahacker 4y ago
        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...
        calculated 4y ago
        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.
  - wwweston 4y ago
    Which social network doesn't have people as the product?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Any social network not run by a for-profit organization. Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) being one, Mastodon being another.
xch 4y ago
Polygon is a scam
- ssss11 4y ago
  I didn’t see any reference to Polygon in the article. Can you elaborate on your comment?
plainOldText 4y ago
Interestingly, Sam Altman is behind both OpenAI and Worldcoin. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/worldcoin-cofounded-by-sam-altman-is-betting-the-next-big-thing-in-ai-is-proving-you-are-human/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/worldcoin-cofounded-by-sam...
frabcus 4y ago
ELI5, how does this work? It claims to both identify humans and be zero knowledge. What’s to stop me registering a bunch of times then letting my bot use my identities? The answer is implied to be my iris scan. But then it isn’t zero knowledge for some entity is it? Unless it is relying on the Orb never being hacked? Any good third party write ups on it? The WorldCoin page is a bit long and doesn’t quickly explain how it works at a basic level.
- macrolime 4y ago
  Seems it creates an "iris code" from the iris scan. Then they want to develop some new hash function to hash the iris code to get an iris hash. This iris hash should then be stored in some decentralised database like a blockchain or something. https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    So if you damage your iris you're fucked ?
    - aramachandran7 4y ago
      Yes. That is how biometric data works; if my finger gets cut off I can no longer unlock with touch ID on my iPhone. Wonder if they have a backup ID method of some sort or if it’s solely iris data
      - Phemist 4y ago
        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.
boringuser2 4y ago
At this point it seems like simply cedeing computing to AI and reentering the real world might be the way to go.
- hkt 4y ago
  Yep. Stick to emailing people you already know, human moderators etc. Ban anyone confirmed to be using AI.
  - AlecSchueler 4y ago
    That sounds like the opposite of what the parent was suggesting?
Thorentis 4y ago
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. This is just another crypto scam coin.
gavi 4y ago
From their docs: (https://docs.worldcoin.org/ https://docs.worldcoin.org/) In broad strokes, this is how World ID works. - 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.
- gavi 4y ago
  Orb seems to be open source hardware https://github.com/worldcoin/orb-hardware https://github.com/worldcoin/orb-hardware 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.
aorth 4y ago
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_cofounder_pleads/ 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. 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/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... I really don't get good vibes from this whole thing...
- hdivider 4y ago
  >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.
- 50 4y ago
  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."
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    Why censor Sontag’s statement? However people feel about her statement, she chose those words.
voz_ 4y ago
Anything blockchain is a scam, move along.
CTDOCodebases 4y ago
Selling the poison and the cure. Why look for a market when you can make one? Nice move!
- swader999 4y ago
  I've seen this movie recently. Wasn't a fan.
scotty79 4y ago
The design is very human.
hkt 4y ago
It is a crazy world when digging up PGP's web of trust model seems like a simpler safer solution, but here we are.
- oefrha 4y ago
  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.
neom 4y ago
Here is a talk the engineers gave on the orb scanning system including a hardware breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2ttYtUbF8&ab_channel=ETHGlobal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2ttYtUbF8&ab_channel=ETHGl... This whole thing gives me the heeby jebies...
hkt 4y ago
..why do we suppose an iris scan can't be faked by an AI?
- notahacker 4y ago
  I suspect it's not an especially difficult thing to achieve if you have a big database of iris scans....
  - hkt 4y ago
    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.
affgrff2 4y ago
What would prevent a malicious party from 'reaping' identies by force?
seydor 4y ago
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.
hkt 4y ago
> creating 1,000 bot accounts would require finding 1,000 human users willing to consistently verify their authenticity. New mechanical turk-alike in 3, 2, 1. Really though. This would barely dent the budgets of disinformation campaigns.
pffft8888 4y ago
Weird coincidence, I tweeted roghly the same idea two weeks ago: https://twitter.com/marcfawzi/status/1636115903959158785 https://twitter.com/marcfawzi/status/1636115903959158785 Obviously, it's a no-brainer idea at a high level. The devil is in the details.
hrqay 4y ago
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?"
- capableweb 4y ago
  OpenAI - A for-profit, closed company acting behind closed doors WorldCoin - A for-profit, limited liability US-based company (soon only available in the US) Seems on brand :)
hkt 4y ago
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.
astoor 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065 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.
- 93po 4y ago
  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.
_Nat_ 4y ago
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. Then it's also great to see that they seem to be pretty open about stuff, [including their hardware](https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-inside-worldcoin-biometric-imaging-device https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-insi... ). 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.
- latexr 4y ago
  > Their claimed goals and ethics sound pretty compelling. Yet their actual ethics are pretty abysmal. Worldcoin is a known scam. Notably, it’s also by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
  - _Nat_ 4y ago
    > Worldcoin is a known scam. In what way is it a scam? For example, is it a pyramid-scheme, pump-and-dump, pretext to trick people into downloading malware, etc.? [That story (2022-04-06)](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... ) did offer one major concern: > 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?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
swader999 4y ago
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.
- speedylight 4y ago
  What’s wrong with Wikipedia? It’s probably one of the best things that came out of the internet.
  - swader999 4y ago
    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...
latexr 4y ago
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. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
- capableweb 4y ago
  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.
  - ritzaco 4y ago
    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.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      > 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.
phreeza 4y ago
I read this as humane-ness. Found the opposite...
makingstuffs 4y ago
Another cryptocurrency project giving away free money. Brings back to the age old saying “if something seems too good to be true…”
beej71 4y ago
When AI produces better quality content than most people, will we really care? It makes me sad to even ask, but I strongly suspect the answer is no.
Hoasi 4y ago
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.
sswam 4y ago
[dead]
93po 4y ago
> 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.

102 points by allanberger 4y ago

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.

satellite2 4y ago
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.
astrange 4y ago
> A small fee to use a service will get rid of fake identities and bots. No, it'll get rid of bots worth less than the account fee to run, except for people who can do payment fraud. It won't get rid of fake identities because you have to do identity verification for that; otherwise you can impersonate a corporation.
obscur 4y ago
This is intended to be a way to fairly distribute UBI, so a fee alone does not work in that case.

wskish 4y ago

It's only when you are the product that you actually need to prove you are human

calculated 4y ago
What about when you try to have a social network without bots?
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  People aren't going to submit themselves to biometric checks just to post stuff on reddit... These social media will probably die when people realize that they are wasting their time answering bots, but these bots will take over soon or later.
  - calculated 4y ago
    Ok what about going to court, submitting evidence - a video of someone committing fraud?
    - groestl 4y ago
      What about that?
    - notahacker 4y ago
      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...
      - calculated 4y ago
        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.
- wwweston 4y ago
  Which social network doesn't have people as the product?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Any social network not run by a for-profit organization. Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) being one, Mastodon being another.

xch 4y ago

Polygon is a scam

ssss11 4y ago
I didn’t see any reference to Polygon in the article. Can you elaborate on your comment?

plainOldText 4y ago

Interestingly, Sam Altman is behind both OpenAI and Worldcoin. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/worldcoin-cofounded-by-sam-altman-is-betting-the-next-big-thing-in-ai-is-proving-you-are-human/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/worldcoin-cofounded-by-sam...

frabcus 4y ago

ELI5, how does this work? It claims to both identify humans and be zero knowledge. What’s to stop me registering a bunch of times then letting my bot use my identities? The answer is implied to be my iris scan. But then it isn’t zero knowledge for some entity is it? Unless it is relying on the Orb never being hacked? Any good third party write ups on it? The WorldCoin page is a bit long and doesn’t quickly explain how it works at a basic level.

macrolime 4y ago
Seems it creates an "iris code" from the iris scan. Then they want to develop some new hash function to hash the iris code to get an iris hash. This iris hash should then be stored in some decentralised database like a blockchain or something. https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive
- moonchrome 4y ago
  So if you damage your iris you're fucked ?
  - aramachandran7 4y ago
    Yes. That is how biometric data works; if my finger gets cut off I can no longer unlock with touch ID on my iPhone. Wonder if they have a backup ID method of some sort or if it’s solely iris data
    - Phemist 4y ago
      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.

boringuser2 4y ago

At this point it seems like simply cedeing computing to AI and reentering the real world might be the way to go.

hkt 4y ago
Yep. Stick to emailing people you already know, human moderators etc. Ban anyone confirmed to be using AI.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  That sounds like the opposite of what the parent was suggesting?

Thorentis 4y ago

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. This is just another crypto scam coin.

gavi 4y ago

From their docs: (https://docs.worldcoin.org/ https://docs.worldcoin.org/) In broad strokes, this is how World ID works. - 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.

gavi 4y ago
Orb seems to be open source hardware https://github.com/worldcoin/orb-hardware https://github.com/worldcoin/orb-hardware 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.

aorth 4y ago

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_cofounder_pleads/ 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. 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/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... I really don't get good vibes from this whole thing...

hdivider 4y ago
>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.
50 4y ago
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."
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  Why censor Sontag’s statement? However people feel about her statement, she chose those words.

voz_ 4y ago

Anything blockchain is a scam, move along.

CTDOCodebases 4y ago

Selling the poison and the cure. Why look for a market when you can make one? Nice move!

swader999 4y ago
I've seen this movie recently. Wasn't a fan.

scotty79 4y ago

The design is very human.

hkt 4y ago

It is a crazy world when digging up PGP's web of trust model seems like a simpler safer solution, but here we are.

oefrha 4y ago
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.

neom 4y ago

Here is a talk the engineers gave on the orb scanning system including a hardware breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2ttYtUbF8&ab_channel=ETHGlobal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2ttYtUbF8&ab_channel=ETHGl... This whole thing gives me the heeby jebies...

hkt 4y ago

..why do we suppose an iris scan can't be faked by an AI?

notahacker 4y ago
I suspect it's not an especially difficult thing to achieve if you have a big database of iris scans....
- hkt 4y ago
  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.

affgrff2 4y ago

What would prevent a malicious party from 'reaping' identies by force?

seydor 4y ago

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.

hkt 4y ago

> creating 1,000 bot accounts would require finding 1,000 human users willing to consistently verify their authenticity. New mechanical turk-alike in 3, 2, 1. Really though. This would barely dent the budgets of disinformation campaigns.

pffft8888 4y ago

Weird coincidence, I tweeted roghly the same idea two weeks ago: https://twitter.com/marcfawzi/status/1636115903959158785 https://twitter.com/marcfawzi/status/1636115903959158785 Obviously, it's a no-brainer idea at a high level. The devil is in the details.

hrqay 4y ago

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?"

capableweb 4y ago
OpenAI - A for-profit, closed company acting behind closed doors WorldCoin - A for-profit, limited liability US-based company (soon only available in the US) Seems on brand :)

hkt 4y ago

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.

astoor 4y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065 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.

93po 4y ago
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.

_Nat_ 4y ago

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. Then it's also great to see that they seem to be pretty open about stuff, [including their hardware](https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-inside-worldcoin-biometric-imaging-device https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-insi... ). 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.

latexr 4y ago
> Their claimed goals and ethics sound pretty compelling. Yet their actual ethics are pretty abysmal. Worldcoin is a known scam. Notably, it’s also by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
- _Nat_ 4y ago
  > Worldcoin is a known scam. In what way is it a scam? For example, is it a pyramid-scheme, pump-and-dump, pretext to trick people into downloading malware, etc.? [That story (2022-04-06)](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... ) did offer one major concern: > 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?

deleted 4y ago

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swader999 4y ago

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.

speedylight 4y ago
What’s wrong with Wikipedia? It’s probably one of the best things that came out of the internet.
- swader999 4y ago
  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...

latexr 4y ago

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. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

capableweb 4y ago
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.
- ritzaco 4y ago
  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.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > 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.

phreeza 4y ago

I read this as humane-ness. Found the opposite...

makingstuffs 4y ago

Another cryptocurrency project giving away free money. Brings back to the age old saying “if something seems too good to be true…”

beej71 4y ago

When AI produces better quality content than most people, will we really care? It makes me sad to even ask, but I strongly suspect the answer is no.

Hoasi 4y ago

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.

sswam 4y ago

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93po 4y ago

> 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.