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Sam Altman’s Eyeball-Scanning Crypto Project Worldcoin Is Having An Identity Crisis
Posted
August 15, 2023
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August 15, 2023
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7:35Now Playing“Beverly” stared into the orb, the machine continued to malfunction. The spartan silver sphere, which scans eyeballs for Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency project Worldcoin, had failed to record her iris despite several attempts.
It was August 2021, and Beverly, a top executive at Tools For Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, had come to Erlangen, Germany, to visit the fledgling startup’s headquarters. Two months earlier, before the project was even announced, news had leaked about Altman’s audacious new venture: an effort to create a “collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible,” a universal basic income on the blockchain. The eyeball scan she was struggling to complete was supposed to authenticate her as a unique individual so that she could only claim her allotment of Worldcoin tokens once.
The startup had sent an army of contractors, orb operators in company parlance, to collect eyeball scans across the globe, from Kenya to Indonesia. The aim was to spread Worldcoin’s gospel of crypto-utopia like missionaries, but in those early days, there was a setback: the orb apparently had particular trouble scanning the eyes of Asian people, according to three people involved with the company.
In Beverly’s case, the machine repeatedly struggled to make the scan, commanding her to “Open your eyes,” in a robotic female voice, two people with knowledge of the incident told Forbes. The prompt elicited laughter from the throng of coworkers gathered. Beverly, who is Asian American, laughed alongside them.
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