This Eyeball Orb Wants to Save Us From AI | Hello World with Ashlee Vance

Our story begins in the future. It could be any town, planet Earth. But let's just say we're in Nuremberg, Germany.

Because it's extra pretty. Now imagine that AI is so good, so sophisticated that it becomes nearly impossible to tell the difference between man and machine, human and bot. What is real and what is the other.

If you're like me, at this point, you're going to develop a little bit of tech infused paranoia. Is this guy real? How about him?

Is that a baby bot? this handsome metal hunk? Is this ice cream or just gelato?

How can you tell? Calm down. Ashley.

What if - just go with me here. What if there were some type of otherworldly device that could separate the humans from the humanoids? What if there was some kind of.

Magical orb? Well, in some countries, it's already arrived. And in other countries it's already been banned.

So what is this thing, exactly? Well, we'll get into it all because that possibly necessary, possibly dystopian, possibly nesstopian future is now. The orb before you is made by a startup called Tools for Humanity.

If it looks all too dramatic, that's sort of the point. The backers of the company, which include Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, have put $250 million into this venture and want folks to take notice of their orb. This is because they want to use it to scan the irises of as many people around the world as possible.

All as part of their main project, known as Worldcoin. If you allow Worldcoin to scan your iris, two things happen. You get a small chunk of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency, and you're certified as a real living human.

Which the company hopes will lead to a reduction in fraud on the internet and provide better access to banking and social services. Critics, however, are wary about the ethics of biometric collection and the possible exploitation of users from developing countries. To learn more about what all this means, I met with Alex Blania, the head of Worldcoin at a cafe in Nuremberg, about 20 minutes from his childhood home.

Usually biometrics solve a one-to-one problem which is: I'm Alex and I'm trying to log into my phone and the phone knows how Alex looks like. Right? I've seen you before.

Is this still the guy that I saw before? Yeah, and conceptually it's actually a pretty easy problem to solve because it's really hard for me to look exactly like you. I need to build a mask or whatever.

But for this proof of humanist problem, we need to attest that I'm unique amongst a set of whatever, a billion people. So it's not anymore I look like Ashlee, but I look like any other arbitrary human that did not sign up before. Figuring out if a user is one of the 8 billion unique snowflakes in the world means choosing a robust biometric system for identity.

Loads of these exist. Fingerprints, voice recognition, veins in your palm. So why the iris?

So very simply speaking entropy is information per individual. And that is an important metric because it defines at which scale will the system start making meaningful mistakes. And actually if you just calculate how much entropy to actually make that work on a billion people scale, face and fingerprints and those things will actually start breaking.

But iris has enough entropy that you can actually scale to theoretically eight billion people. So then it’s different enough. You can find those differences clearly enough for enough people that it keeps working.

The next step was building a device powerful enough to get the job done. Enter the orb. There's somewhere between seven or nine neural networks on a device that take all these sensor inputs and check that what you see is an actual person.

And then it takes a picture of both eyes, which is actually in the grand scheme of things, is a very common thing to do. Many airports have it, many countries have it on a government level. I do it all the time, yeah.

And it takes a picture, calculates what is called an iris code, so it actually just turns that information into bits, deletes the picture. And then splits it into multiple pieces, sends it to multiple servers. And so actually not a single one of them has all the information.

They compare it against all other previous users. If that comparison is successful, meaning you're actually unique, then that gets inserted into what is called a Merkle tree on Ethereum, which is just a data structure, a decentralized one. And what that actually achieves is that your wallet and your app is fully disconnected from your biometrics, so they don’t know who you are, you just proved that you’re actually a unique person to that service.

That you’re unique and you’re a human. I wanted to meet one of these orbs up close. so I caught a ride with Fabian.

Bodensteiner, the brains behind the brains behind the orb. Fabian took me to a town called Jena, about 2. 5 hours outside of Nuremberg, where the devices are made.

What calls to you about the vision? Why did you decide to dedicate so much time to this? I think because especially in the beginning it had a huge philosophical element to it.

Let's build the largest identity and financial network on the planet. This is a big goal. I was like, look, how often do we have the chance as a hardware guy to really change the world?

We're going to the town of Jena for a reason. Carl Zeiss founded his company here in 1846, and more optics empires followed. During its industrial height, more than a third of the city's 100,000 inhabitants worked in the optical field.

This is one big reason that Worldcoin chose Jena as its manufacturing hub. The whole city basically was Zeiss back in the days. And then you had like a lot of best in class glass manufacturers here.

You have all different kinds of companies here that are familiar with micromechanics, when you have to move lenses in a very precise way. So there's just a high density of talent. Worldcoin has been shipping its orb around the world for more than a year, More than 6 million people have already registered their identities with the device.

Now, the company is in the midst of perfecting and upgrading a new orb that it hopes to produce by the tens of thousands. Fabian agreed to show me how the bratwurst was made, and the secret ingredient is lots and lots of tech. So what you see here is the core of our imaging technology.

The central opening that is for capturing a high resolution image of the iris. The central opening that is for capturing a high resolution image of the iris. We are looking for heat, for depth, different wavelengths in the visible spectrum in the infrared spectrum.

This is a mirror that redirects the field of view of the camera. Here you now see the gimbal unit. It gets mounted to this aluminum base plate and then you see a bunch of different sensor systems like a heat camera, a 2D time of flight camera, an RGB camera.

Here's the technology that is called liquid lenses. It's basically an oil film and if you apply current, you're able to change the shape of the oil and without any mechanical parts, I can change the focus. So this is after all those assembly steps are done.

This is the station where there's a full device test and only if it passes this test, it's then okay for being finally assembled. So this is where after they pass the quality check, they receive their shells then in the end, this is how the whole thing looks. And unless I'm wrong, I mean nobody had ever really paired all this stuff together before for this job.

Right? Right. That’s right.

And a lot of this is your work, right? This is something you've been thinking about for years. That’s true.

Yeah, it was hard. So basically you get different high level requirements. We want to have a high resolution image in this wavelength or that wavelength.

At the same time, we want to fulfill certain industrial design requirements as well. And this is where as an engineer you kind of then try to balance all of this. All said and done, it costs about $1,500 for Worldcoin to make each orb.

And the unique design is a big part of that calculation. There are infinite ways you could make this look. And you guys have chosen something quite dramatic, I would say.

I think for some people it might be more intimidating than staring into a very generic sort of box. So this was a decision mainly driven by Alex, Sam and his co-founder Max, where they came into the room and said we need to have something that clearly sticks out. I always fought for, let's make it a box in black.

It's simple and cheap to manufacture, but to be honest, three years into building such products, I actually now enjoy it. Once you get used to it, it's actually pretty cool. Meanwhile, A.

I. is getting better every day. And for Alex, there's no time to waste.

It’s going to get much worse. These systems will be superhuman in many ways. Right.

Like they will be able to politically influence whole democracies. I think there's a lot of issues, particularly in the United States that would be materially different if we could have a popular vote online where you actually knew it was not being gamed. Is that at all part of where you guys see this going?

At core, it gives everyone a democratic vote and it gives everyone economic access. I think no one can argue with that being bad things. But as you might expect, Worldcoin has been trailed by controversy.

In the early days, PayPal tried to encourage people to learn about its service and use it by giving these referral bonuses, money, you guys give people part of your crypto. Some people have argued you're encouraging people to give up their iris, their identity, especially in poor countries to sign up for this service. Yeah, I mean, I think that there would be a valid criticism if they actually would give something up.

For example, if it would be a pharma company and we would take your whatever DNA data or to build a product, but actually at the current point in time, we don't take anything. There's no underlying business model of selling data to anyone or something like that. But it's rather, it's the bet that is network becomes bigger and bigger, there will be all kinds of things that other people will build on top of it and it will be increasingly valuable to you in your daily life.

Clearly not everyone agrees. We've seen regulators here in Europe. I think Spain and Portugal recently shut the service down and other people are questioning, I think Germany might be the only country in Europe right now where you can sign up for the service.

In short, we just work with all regulators. For example, in Spain, in Portugal, I think the app was number one of the app store for a couple of months, things like 5% of Portugal signed up. So very much I think it's the job of the regulators to ask questions and if they think they don't understand things to take their time and actually dig deeper.

Like, I can see the problems you're trying to address, but people will be naturally fearful of even if you build this amazing system of having one company in control of all these identities. Well if you say like that, then it is. Which - in fact we are not trying to build a company here, but we are a company trying to build a protocol which is fundamentally different.

It's like - so like Ethereum. There was a founding team around it, but now it evolved to be this like whole big thing and other people including us, build companies and products and other protocols on top of that. And so I think Worldcoin actually will only work if it's actually a decentralized open protocol that actually you don't have to trust a single company.

In fact, even the design of the orb is open source. Theoretically, any orb enthusiast can download the plans and build an orb of their own. That is, of course, if there are even enough orb fanatics for any of this to matter.

What I mean is, will the world come to love the orb? Without question, the company has the money to make a real go of trying. And Alex strikes me as someone who's committed to and passionate about the task at hand.

All that said, you need a technical whitepaper at the ready to explain the orb and what it does. It's an awful lot for passers by on the street to digest, And that's before your mind even wanders into sci fi dystopia land. Might I suggest, though, that the orb is less daunting than it seems?

That world coin is up to something that the world will indeed need to think about and deal with in the years to come. If you buy into that, then it's time to embrace the orb.