Controversial Worldcoin Scans Retinas at ETH NYC, Skips Over its Messy History

In our ongoing series exploring the increasing intersections of blockchain and AI, we’ve highlighted both novel approaches to combining the two exponential technologies in sectors like healthcare that impact everyone, as well as how blockchain can ensure both privacy and transparency. The latter is particularly important given the risks posed by AI — its potential to eliminate millions of jobs, including those previously deemed more immune to technology, the acceleration of deep fakes that threaten our increasingly slippery hold on what is true, the reduction in the ability of humans to control weapons of mass destruction and more. (And as evidence that these are collective concerns, when you type “biggest risks of” in Google search, its top suggestion to complete the thought is “risks of AI”.)

And for an industry characteristically overoptimistic about the ability of technology to fix every problem (including those it creates), it’s notable that we’ve recently seen leaders in AI call for tighter regulation because of their concerns over its potential to create or exacerbate catastrophes that are global in scale — and in some cases irrevocable: “A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn“.  It’s concerning, however, that these warnings are deemed too little, far too late by some, including Eliezer Yudkowsky, a leader in the field for 22 years who has called for all AI efforts to be shut down immediately — in part because Elon Musk and others brazenly passed up the opportunity years ago to make a good-faith effort to align on safeguards for AI when they would have had a better chance of succeeding. Yudlowsky is a decision theorist who leads research at the Berkeley, CA-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

As if these risks aren’t enough, how about adding a crypto element into the mix to spice things up further? Surely given crypto’s ongoing negative image — gleefully fueled by such influential figures as US Senator Elizabeth Warren, she of the “shadowy super coders” histrionics — no one who claims to admire the positive values of cryptocurrency and blockchain would think it wise to offer up a project with Big Brother elements as the answer to the deepfakes and nightmares AI is accelerating. But alas, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) believes that Worldcoin, the crypto project he also co-founded, “could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI” (the last acronym there referring to “universal basic income”, the concept of providing all citizens a guaranteed income, without a work requirement or means test).  

The backlash against this idea and the way the company has gone about pursuing it — paying people in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia $50 in WLD tokens to allow one of Worldcoin’s custom designed metallic “orbs” (see one staring you down in the photo to the left) to scan their eyeball’s iris as the biometric basis of a supposedly unique ID, paying local officials to look the other way and other shenanigans — was swift and vociferous. In an April 2022 article entitled “Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users”, MIT Technology Review interviewed 35 people in 6 countries who “either worked for or on behalf of Worldcoin, had been scanned, or were unsuccessfully recruited to participate” and “found that the company’s representatives used deceptive marketing practices, collected more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent”.

That deceptive marketing included enticing villagers in Indonesia with the promise of a “social assistance giveaway” and collecting emails and phone numbers (the company insists that only a hash of the iris’ image is saved, not the image itself or any other information connecting the data to the person who agreed to the scan: “No personal information required. We don’t want your name, email, passport, or a selfie,” Worldcoin’s website proclaims). And the compensation of $50 worth of crypto? Until Worldcoin’s ERC-20 token WLD debuted on July 24, 2023 participants who didn’t receive payment in local currency or Bitcoin were promised an indeterminate number future tokens. The WLD token traded as high as $3.58 on launch day according to CoinMarketCap, dropped to a low of $0.97 on September 13th and is trading for $1.55 at the time of publication.

In May 2023 TechCrunch reported that, “Hackers have installed password-stealing malware on the devices of multiple Worldcoin Orb operators, giving them full access to the Worldcoin operator dashboard.” So much for privacy, security and social good.

With this context in mind, I was both surprised to see Worldcoin as a key sponsor of ETHGlobal’s myriad 2023 events and eager to hear how they would frame the controversy around the project in their primetime talk at ETHGlobal in New York on Friday, titled “Global Proof of Personhood with World ID”. At this point you may be able to guess how much of the company’s background the presenter addressed. Answer: zero. His approximately 15-slide presentation launched right into Worldcoin’s purported values (“For every human. Privacy-first. Owned by everyone”), walked through the various options the company explored for unique identification methods (online accounts, KYC, web of trust and social graph analysis) before settling on the iris scans (“Authenticating a user via FaceID as the rightful owner of a phone is very different from verifying billions of people as unique,” Worldcoin’s website explains), and then spent most of the time on how the hackers at the event could build cool stuff with the company’s World ID, software developer kit and API.

Plus how much the devs can win if their project is one the the 7 winners or takes home cash as part of the $3,000 prize pool “distributed equally among all qualifying submissions”: $20,000 in total prize money. Those generous amounts — 7 other ETH NYC sponsors are awarding as much, while 38 others offer total prizes ranging from $5,000 (the Ethereum Foundation, Unlock Protocol and Sunscreen) to $16,000 (zero-knowledge rollup Scroll) — is pocket change for Worldcoin, which initially raised $100 million in March 2022 at a $3 billion valuation and this May another $115 million in their Series C round led by Blockchain Capital and joined by a16z, Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global.

So how did conference and hackathon attendees react to Worldcoin’s presentation and booth? The 20-minute presentation had attendance similar to others that day, and while the booth didn’t garner the kind of attention that sponsors like Filecoin and Metamask did (having established brands and kickass swag certainly helps), it did get some action and those manning the booth reported that approximately 30 event attendees had signed up and gotten scanned in the first day and a half. (Booth personnel declined to speak on the record, however, deferring to Worldcoin’s press manager; Modern Consensus has contacted the company for comment and will publish their response if we receive one.)

Nico Marotta, an environmental design professor attending ETH NYC told Modern Consensus after seeing the presentation, “I eagerly try out new technologies, especially interesting ones in the crypto & NFT space. And I’m generally open to providing PII [personally identifiable information] if the product seems like it may be beneficial. But the idea of Worldcoin’s retinal scan was very alarming from day one.”

We will see how people in the blockchain community and beyond continue to react to both Worldcoin’s product and their mission to “become the world’s largest identity and financial network” (isn’t the current state of financial surveillance terrifying enough?). But given their journey to signing up the 2,317,380 “unique humans on Worldcoin” the website’s ticker currently counts, one can only hope they don’t end up doing the kind of damage Altman’s OpenAI is charged with: “OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit”.