The video explores a Dystopian yet potentially essential future where AI becomes indistinguishable from humans, posing challenges in identifying real humans from humanoids. Enter the "Orb" created by Tools for Humanity, backed by Sam Altman of OpenAI, designed to scan irises globally in exchange for Worldcoin cryptocurrency and certified human status. This venture aims to reduce internet fraud and enhance access to banking and social services, although it faces ethical scrutiny regarding Biometric data collection.

Through discussions with Worldcoin's head, Alex Blania, the video delves into the Biometric technology's Uniqueness—iris scans were chosen for their scalability to the world's population. The video describes the intricate engineering of the orb, balancing high-level requirements for functionality and design, revealing a product as groundbreaking as it is controversial. Ensuring identity Uniqueness without corporate control, the system leverages Decentralized structures like Ethereum, cultivating dreams of a Decentralized identity network.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. Paranoia [ˌpærəˈnɔɪə] - (n.) - An irrational and persistent feeling of being persecuted.

If you're like me at this point, you're gonna develop a little bit of tech infused Paranoia.

2. Biometric [ˌbaɪoʊˈmɛtrɪk] - (adj.) - Relating to the statistical analysis of biological data.

Critics, however, are wary about the ethics of Biometric collection.

3. Sophisticated [səˈfɪstɪˌkeɪtɪd] - (adj.) - Having, revealing, or involving a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge.

Now, imagine that AI is so good, so Sophisticated, that it becomes nearly impossible to tell the difference...

4. Entropy [ˈɛntrəpi] - (n.) - A measure of the uncertainty or randomness in a system.

So, very simply speaking, Entropy is information per individual, and that is an important metric.

5. Humanoid [ˈhjuːmənˌɔɪd] - (adj.) - Having an appearance or characteristics resembling those of a human.

What if there were some type of otherworldly device that could separate the humans from the humanoids?

6. Dystopian [dɪsˈtoʊpiən] - (adj.) - Relating to an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.

Because that possibly necessary, possibly Dystopian, possibly utopian future.

7. Apprehension [ˌæprɪˈhɛnʃən] - (n.) - Anxiety or fear that something bad will happen.

All that said, you need a technical white paper at the ready to explain the orb.

8. Decentralized [diːˈsɛntrəˌlaɪzd] - (adj.) - Transferred from central to local government; more distributed in control.

It will only work if it's actually a Decentralized open protocol.

9. Exploitation [ˌɛksplɔɪˈteɪʃən] - (n.) - The action of making use of and benefiting from resources.

Critiques wary about the ethics of Biometric collection and the possible Exploitation of users.

10. Uniqueness [juˈniːknəs] - (n.) - The quality of being the only one of its kind.

You just prove that you're an actual unique person to that service.

Decoding the Orb: Worldcoin's Bold Cryptocurrency Spin

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 gonna develop a little bit of tech infused Paranoia. Is this guy real? How about him? Is that a baby bot? What about 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 nestopian future. 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 looked like. Right? I've seen you before, right? Do you still? Is this 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. All right, I need to build a mask and whatever, but for this proof of humanness 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 Ashley, 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 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, like, if you just calculate how much Entropy to actually make that work on a billion people scale, face and fingerprint, and those things will actually start breaking. But Iris has enough Entropy that you can actually scale to, theoretically, 8 billion people. So it's different enough. It's different. 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, like, in the grand scheme of things, it's a very common thing to do. Many airports have it, many countries have it on a government level, and it takes that picture, calculates what is called an iris code. So it actually just turns that information into bits, deletes the picture, and 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 Merkel tree on Ethereum, which is just a data structure, a Decentralized one. And what it actually achieves is that your wallet, and, like, your app, is fully disconnected from your biometrics, so they don't know who you are. You just prove that you're an actual unique person to that service. You're unique, and you're a human. Yes.

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 two and a half hours outside of Nuremberg, where the devices are made. What calls to you about the vision? Like, 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, like, let's build the largest identity and financial network on the planet. This is a big goal that I was like, look, how often do you 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 size, 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 micro mechanics. 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 orbital 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. We're 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 aluminium 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 is a 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, like, 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. And then at the end, this is how the whole thing looks. Unless I'm wrong. I mean, nobody had ever really paired all this stuff together before for this job, right?

Yeah, 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, like, 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, like, let's make it a box and black. Like, 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, AI is getting better every day. And for Alex, there's no time to waste. It's going to get much worse, that these systems will be superhuman in many ways. Right? Like, they will be able to politically influence all 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. 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, like, 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 poorer countries, to sign up for this service. I think that would be a valid criticism if they actually would give something up. Right? Like, for example, if you would be a pharma company and we would like, take your, whatever, DNA data or to build, like, a product. But actually, at the current point in time, we actually don't. We don't take anything. There's no underlying business model of selling data to anyone or something like that.

But it's rather the bet that as this 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 it. 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.

Okay. Things like 5% of protocol 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. Yeah. Which in fact, like, we're not trying to build a company here, but we are a company trying to build a protocol, which is fundamentally different.

It's like something like Ethereum. Yeah, right. 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 Rollcon 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 white paper at the ready to explain the orb and what it does. It's an awful lot for passerby 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 worldcoin 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 orbital.

Technology, Innovation, Science, Biometrics, Identity Verification, Sam Altman