9 ms·

Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball

153 points by ChiptuneIsCool 1y ago

DonHopkins 1y ago
Speaking of Dickish dystopian "Minority Report style technology": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398910 DonHopkins on Nov 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Eyes Have It (1953) "Lies, Inc." aka "The Unteleported Man" had an eye eater! https://www.academia.edu/2360689/The_Missing_Pages_of_THE_UNTELEPORTED_MAN https://www.academia.edu/2360689/The_Missing_Pages_of_THE_UN... Freya said, "Tell me. What is the 'eye-eater'? I have to know." Her breath caught in her throat; raggedly, she managed to breathe, but with difficulty. "A fungiform," the taller of the THL agents said briefly. "One that resides here." He said nothing further. [...] The eye-eater said pleasantly, "Mr. Ben Applebaum, reach inside me and you will find a slightly-different edition of Dr. Bloode's Text. A copy of the twentieth edition, which I ingested some time ago... but as far as I can determine, not already dissolved by my gastric juices." The idea seemed to amuse it; the lower portion of its face split apart in a peal of excrutiatingly-penetrating laughter. "You're serious?" Rachmael said, feeling disorganized. And yet the eye-eater was correct; if it did possess a later edition of the text he most certainly had reason to seek it out -- wherever it lay, even within the body of the offensive eye-eater. "Look, look," the eye-eater exclaimed; it held in one of its longer [...] https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/dick15-0.html https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/dick15-0.html "A lie," the eye-eater rumbled ominously; again its pseudopodia whipped viciously, seeking out the agile creditor balloon, which dipped and bobbed barely beyond the flailing reach of the several sucker-impregnated arms. "As a matter of fact, this gentleman here-" It indicated Rachmael. "My understanding is that the lady and this individual are emotionally involved. Miss Holm is-was, whatever-a friend of mine, a very close friend. But hardly my mistress." The eye-eater looked embarrassed. [...] https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=4193 https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=419... Let me quote one of Dr. Bloode's quite singular Thingisms. "'Thingisms'?" Rachmael felt baffled -- and wary. He had a deep intuition that the Thingism, whatever it was, would not be amusing. Not to him, anyhow, or to any human. "I always enjoyed this one," the eye-eater intoned, its saliva spilling from its mouth as it writhed with glee. "Consider: since you are about to read the book, here is Thingism Number Twenty, dealing with books. "Ahem. 'The book business is hidebound.'" After a pause, Rachmael said, "That's it?" "Perhaps you failed to understand. I'll give you another gem, one more particular favorite of mine. And if that fails to move you ... Oooohhh! That's a Thingism! Listen! 'The representative of the drayage firm failed to move me.' Oooohhh! How was that?" It waited hopefully. Baffled, Rachmael said, "I don't get it." "All right." The eye-eater's tone was now harsh. "Read the book purely for educational purposes, then. So be it. You want to know the origin of this form which I have taken. Well, everyone will take it, sooner or later. We all do; this is how we become after we die." He stared at it. "While you ponder," the eye-eater continued, "I'll delight you with a few more Thingisms of Dr. Bloode's. This one I always enjoy. 'The vidphone company let me off the hook.' How was that? Or this one: 'The highway construction truck tore up the street at forty miles an hour.' Or this: 'I am not in a position to enjoy sexual relations.' Or --" -- "Lies, Inc.", by Phil Dick
9283409232 1y ago
Why are these rich assholes so obsessed with tracking everyone? > Tools for Humanity bragged about many large partnerships that should make any privacy advocates shiver in dread: the Match Group dating apps conglomerate (Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish), Stripe, and Visa are some of them. Visa and Stripe being involved in this should indeed make everyone shiver and push back against this. Altman is not a good person and this company has already had its unethical practices exposed[0]. [0] https://icj-kenya.org/news/worldcoin-case-postponed-amid-concerns-over-data-privacy-and-ethical-biometric-use/ https://icj-kenya.org/news/worldcoin-case-postponed-amid-con...
- batch12 1y ago
  Control. You have to have a good inventory to apply and audit controls.
- grumbel 1y ago
  In the AI driven future we are heading into, telling the difference between AI-bot and human might become a valuable good.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - nradov 1y ago
    Why? And how would that even work? Just because an online account is tied to a verified real human doesn't guarantee that the content isn't coming from an AI-bot.
    - financetechbro 1y ago
      The “person” could just be copying and pasting AI output. Eye scanning can’t stop that at all
    - creata 1y ago
      Maybe it would allow you to rate-limit and/or ban by the human, which is probably more effective than banning by IP address. (Obviously Worldcoin is shady as shit, I'm not defending it.)
tuyguntn 1y ago
This is the same guy who worked at OpenAI because he "loved" what he does and he wasn't doing it for money. ( Until this year obviously ;) )
- tuyguntn 1y ago
  P.S. Not blaming him for this behavior, probably I would also change my mind immediately if someone offered me 7% of $300B
  - udev4096 1y ago
    Do you really think everyone out there is willing to be a sell out?
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      Nothing wrong being a sell out - except when you claim to not be one.
    - tuyguntn 1y ago
      I clearly said: "probably I would", I didn't generalize it to everyone
    - gregoryl 1y ago
      Absolutely. Everyone has a price.
      - Disposal8433 1y ago
        Speak for yourself. I don't agree with your idea on prostitution.
  - preommr 1y ago
    He already had enough wealth that he was in a threshold where it wouldn't matter if he got a few more billion if that the was the lifestyle he was willing to lead. There isn't a magical kind of sugar, or drug that's available to a multi-billionaire but not someone with 100s of millions. If somebody is trying to get billions, they're doing it because they're the type of person that wants to be a part of politicis, and a power player. That kind of person was never going to just give up the opportunity to make more money and gather more power to do more things that they see as neccessary and as good.
iamthejuan 1y ago
They did that here in the Phillipines and they exploit the poor. They give money for people to allow them to scan their eyes. These people do not know the consequences of what they are doing.
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  What are the consequences?
  - andy_ppp 1y ago
    That you can be identified, cataloged and controlled, potentially. We have the technology to create heaven or hell depending on who controls it…
    - BurningFrog 1y ago
      That train has already sailed. We can be identified and found in any number of ways already. Our kids will not imagine any other way. As you say, the future can become heaven or hell.
    - alwa 1y ago
      Is it certain that impoverished people would weigh those potential consequences more heavily than being paid today? For that matter, do we expect that the impoverished people the gp commenter refers to would resist, say, government-led efforts to compel their biometrics from them? [0] [0] e.g. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2022/0425/On-biometric-IDs-India-is-a-laboratory-for-the-rest-of-the-world https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2022/0425...
      - andy_ppp 1y ago
        Everyone deserves food and political freedom in my opinion. We could probably do it too if we actually tried.
        1y ago
udev4096 1y ago
He can chortle my (eye)balls!
- moffkalast 1y ago
  Anton doesn't call me anything. He grimly does his work, then he sits motionless until it's time to work again. 4o could take a page from his book.
- someothherguyy 1y ago
  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chortle https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chortle
MaxPock 1y ago
They did that in Kenya and now a judge has ordered that they deleted all that data https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/worldcoin-ordered-to-delete-biometric-data-in-kenya-over-privacy-breach/ https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/worldcoin-ord...
- 9283409232 1y ago
  Which I'm sure he absolutely totally did. Trust him. Just like US judges telling Elon and DOGE to delete treasury data. I'm sure they did it, scouts honor!
roschdal 1y ago
Nein.
cube00 1y ago
Hopefully everyone who handed over their DNA to 23andMe will remember how that ended before they hand over their iris to Sam.
- echelon 1y ago
  They haven't seen any impact yet. Nobody is rejecting them from insurance or job offers yet. It's worse with 23andme, too, because the blast radius is all of your relatives that didn't take the test at all.
blindriver 1y ago
Altman is evil to want everyone’s retina scan but he will probably get it because most people don’t care anymore.
- ambicapter 1y ago
  The article describes him targeting the most vulnerable to get his first 500k users. It's not that people don't care it's that they are powerless in the fact of a well-funded adversary.
wnevets 1y ago
Even if you 100% believe in your heart that Altman would never do anything negative with these scans that doesn't mean someone else won't if/when they get access to them. People may trusted 23andMe with their genetic data but now no one knows who will end up owning it and why the buyer believes buying the data is profitable. https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23andme-users-genetic-data-is-at-risk-state-ags-warn-heres-how-to-delete-your-data/ https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23an...
- sssilver 1y ago
  Every company is exactly one CEO away from doing anything none would ever expect.
  - Squeeeez 1y ago
    Not only companies sadly.
  - usrnm 1y ago
    Most companies are exactly 0 CEOs away from that
- wing-_-nuts 1y ago
  When talking about government surveillance, people often ask some version of 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?'. My response is always, 'It's not that I don't trust our current government, I don't trust all future governments that come after this one'. I hope given the recent events of having some hired thugs rifle through government databases (including the OPM, which supposedly has very sensitive data from security clearance applications), that maybe letting people collect and store data on you should be avoided at all cost. The older I get, the more I understand the stereotype of the eccentric former techie who no longer wants anything to do with modern technology or society
  - the_snooze 1y ago
    > 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?' I like to go with the simpler "I hold lots of sensitive data for people who trust me: my family, my friends, my employer. One would have to be a sociopath to disclose other people's secrets without their consent."
mapcars 1y ago
Something I don't understand is how is that so bad? Even today one can buy passport data, social security numbers etc on black markets leaked by government employees in most countries. Once they start using more biometric data I'm sure it will be leaked as well. If we assume that all this information is permanently available in a public blockchain, how does it change anything for society really? I can think of security checks becoming better, what are the negative possibilities?
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Why would anyone want anything to do with Sam Altman to have control of it though? At least if it's open, access is equal.
- creata 1y ago
  Justifying what Worldcoin is doing by comparing them to black market leaks isn't helping their case.
  - mapcars 1y ago
    I'm not justifying Worldcoin and I don't know all the details about what they are doing. My realistic assumption is that all this data will become public one way or another, so I'm trying to understand how we can make sure it can't be abused.
fnord77 1y ago
terrifying now, common place in 10 years. like fingerprints or facial scans
voytec 1y ago
Biometric data is valuable. Assuming that Musk's DOGE crew copied data obtained from US gov agencies, they may have also obtained biometric data of EU citizens. At least some countries have shared citizens' fingerprints with the US. Not just Visa Waiver Program applicants' but as I understand, previous government of Poland made a deal to share all citizens' fingerprints. And these are collected from anyone renewing their government ID card.
- mzajc 1y ago
  > previous government of Poland made a deal to share all citizens' fingerprints This piqued my interest, but I couldn't find anything. Do you know where I could find more information about it?
  - voytec 1y ago
    Sadly, I'm unable to find specific documents confirming it. AFAIK, Poland agreed to biometric data sharing with the US Office of Biometric Identity Management in exchange for loosening travel requirements. That said, US seems to be pushing[0] for more such agreements. [0] https://www.statewatch.org/news/2023/august/eu-and-usa-plough-ahead-with-secret-discussions-on-biometric-data-exchange-scheme/ https://www.statewatch.org/news/2023/august/eu-and-usa-ploug...
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  You got me thinking and I’m not sure my fingerprints or any other biometric data have ever formally been recorded by the federal, provincial, or local governments. In most cases the most biometric data is your photo and I guess height? So beginning to normalize the collection of eyeball data as a thing is a pretty significant escalation.
  - n_ary 1y ago
    In EU, obtaining an identity card needs one’s recent biometric(important!) photo and certain finger prints. Not sure about US. Also where I work, to enter certain facilities, I also need to not only scan my badge, but also my fingerprint or sometimes palm(may sound absurd but I am sure some of you work in same sector).
jt2190 1y ago
For e-commerce to continue, there has to be a way to confirm that the transfer of funds from a bank or credit account to the vendor’s account is approved by a human who controls the bank/credit account. As AI-powered scams become more sophisticated, this confirmation will get harder/more expensive, to the point where e-commerce might not work for most goods. Perhaps generating “proof of humanity” digital signatures from retina scans isn’t the optimal solution, but I’ve yet to hear of any other privacy-preserving approaches. Perhaps transacting online will a require government-issued ID.
- mcshicks 1y ago
  In the US there is a bill that's been floating around Congress for a while called the improving digital identity act. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884/all-info https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884...
hsuduebc2 1y ago
I'm always struck by how sci-fi writers, in a way, act like prophets. It's as if common sense or imagination keeps pointing us toward the same outcomes. As strange as it sounds, if we don't wipe ourselves out, we somehow already know what the future holds.
caseyy 1y ago
Meanwhile, in reality, banks have solved proof of humanity, identity (KYC), and financial services for a long time. Any account in the world can be proven human by making a debit/credit card transaction from a card with a matching name. For the first time, you can now give your biometrics to OpenAI to do nothing more than you already can. This is just a pure cult of personality.
- josh2600 1y ago
  I can only assume that you don’t work in financial technology if you believe that KYC is a solved problem. Proving authenticity in an increasingly diasporic society is difficult. We should seek to either reduce or embrace entropy in the design of our systems. You either want systems which prove there are no Sybil attacks, or you manufacture halls of mirrors. This is a continuous battle, there’s no panacea here, even the eye scan has threat vectors. Calling KYC a solved problem is ludicrous.
  - lokar 1y ago
    It depends what you mean by solved. Banks tend not to over engineer things. KYC can be seen as a 3 sided trade off: cost of KYC infra/process/etc, lost revenue from denied business and fines from regulators. They (the banks) don’t really care about the social goals of KYC, they just try to best optimize for expected value in the trade offs. The regulators understand this, and are basically fine with it. They have their own trade offs they are balancing. Both sides mostly find and equilibrium.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      Even considering the social goals there's no need for a 100% solution. We only need to stop most fraud and reduce the impact of the fraud that does happen to a sufficiently low level. One of the more important goals isn't to directly stop fraud but instead to provide tools that give end users results that scale with the amount of effort invested. The level of risk should be a tradeoff that the end user is able to make. Current solutions mostly allow for that but certainly have some rough edges.
tim333 1y ago
I did the worldcoin scan thing a couple of years ago and it's all quite jolly. The article is a bit scaremongering. Re: >Simply put, the premise is this: scan your eyeball, get a biometric tag, verify yourself, buy our apps (and cryptocurrency). ... Minority Report style technology it's not really like that. They take a photo of your eye to check you are a new person and not someone who has an account already, then give you an account which is like an anonymous crypto wallet with a private key. You never do an eye scan again in normal use. They give you free crypto/money rather than you needing to buy anything. I've been given ~$300 - it fluctuates a fair bit with crypto prices. I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech.
- qwertox 1y ago
  > I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech. What does this have to do with curiosity or new-tech positivity? Nothing. Give biometric data, get fluctuating ~$300. You did nothing else than sell something you have. I'm not judging.
  - Jommi 1y ago
    how will we solve distinguishing real humans over bots online?
    - qwertox 1y ago
      It it's our goal to solve this issue via authentication, then we might as well let the government authenticate us, instead of Sam Altman.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  << I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech. I would ask that you elaborate a little more. I am an example of one. I like LLMs, but I cringe internally and externally at times at some of the things people seem to want to use them for ( and I just saw a presentation that basically said the equivalent of "add AI here, happy sunshine leaves there". And how? Magic. Nobody knows. ). I like crypto, but it is impossible to not see million rugpulls, scams and so on out there. I like technology, but I am very, very aware of the issues with basic human nature.
hsuduebc2 1y ago
So this is the future-billionaires won't just sell us services, they'll trap us in entire ecosystems they control. I'd be more surprised if X doesn't eventually turn into one of them in recent future.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  So where's the line? What as X not yet done to make you suggest that it is not already the kind of trap that you're describing?
  - hsuduebc2 1y ago
    They are not wanting to scan my retinas. For now. They are approaching it more from the bottom.
justanotheratom 1y ago
hey atleast it is a for-profit, so no chance of that particular rug-pull. "Tools for Humanity (TFH), a for-profit company co-founded by Sam Altman, Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern in 2019."
the_d3f4ult 1y ago
I'm an ophthalmologist. I look at irises all day. People's irises change over the course of their life. Sometimes dramatically if they have some kind of pathology. Are they updating their model periodically? What keeps someone from getting locked out of their crypto gains if they develop an iris nevus or have cataract surgery or start on flomax?
- sillyfluke 1y ago
  Thanks for this interesting point of view. However, it may makes sense to consider whether the gap you point to can be reduced significantly with AI, by training it separately with aging eye data using existing medical data independent from the general iris pool. I have no idea how realistic that would be personally.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    I wondered this with things like FaceID. In my head, every time it unlocks it’s tweaking and tuning the what it knows to be the user, so it can adapt as a person ages, goes through weight changes, etc. However, in practice this may not be the case, since there is an easy backup and a person can re-register pretty easily. On the topic of eyes, my dad recently had surgery on his eyes and they did one at a time, for obvious reasons. That could be a way to transition. Register both, have surgery on one, let it heal, register the healed eye, have surgery on the other, then register that. Always using the good and registered eye to authenticate. But this isn’t realistic. It requires way too much forethought and planning, when people’s minds are elsewhere.
  - beAbU 1y ago
    Are you willing to gatekeep you wealth behind an AI that might hallucinate that your iris has changed more than it actually has?
    - sillyfluke 1y ago
      Why would you assume I'm in any way partial to this technology? If AI is being used to tackle medical domains, it stands to reason they would try to use it to overcome what the GP considers to be important constraints, especially since the guy in question also runs an AI company. And what part of "I have no idea how realistic that would be personally" implies that I think it can be done without the danger of hallucinations.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Biometrics are not a viable solution to the sybil problem. The more biometric tech converges on the ability to get a cryptographic hash of one's body, the further it retreats from the kind of thing that a layperson will trust. You end up with a root of trust that <1% of the population can verify and then you end up asking 100% of them to rely on systems built on that root. You're never going to be able to convince even a majority of people that some clever hacker hasn't cracked an iris scanner and associated millions of fake ID's with millions of AI's for scam purposes. It needs to be the kind of thing that lets Alice assert that this key goes with Bob just after she shook Bob's hand in meatspace. Something where, in order for Bob to have two identities according to Alice, he'll have to meet her in meatspace twice and manage to have her not notice that she's already met him once before. PGP key signing parties were pretty much there, they just came too early (and not enough work was done to teach the masses about them). The web becomes more of a dark forest with each passing day. Eventually the cost of maintaining your part of the trust graph will be lower than the cost of getting screwed by some root of trust that you can't influence or verify. I'm sad to say that I think the point where these lines cross is significantly down and to the right of where we are.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > PGP key signing parties were pretty much there, they just came too early (and not enough work was done to teach the masses about them). I won't dispute that PGP key signing parties coupled with government ID work very well for certain very specific usecases such as validating distro maintainers. However for more mainstream and widespread uses that never occurred, what about work on the tooling? I've yet to see a web of trust implementation that really felt like it was properly generalized, scalable, and intuitive to interact with. Case in point, if you wanted to implement a distributed code auditing solution on top of git and signed commits, what library would you use for the web of trust graph calculations? And would key signing parties be a usable root of trust for that with the current state of the software ecosystem? My personal view is that both of those things are woefully lacking.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I'd agree that they're both woefully lacking, but there's nothing fundamental preventing them from being successful, it just hasn't been done yet because our existing institutions are not yet degraded to the point where that juice is worth the squeeze. Biometrics, on the other hand, are flawed for in a much more fundamental way.
Geee 1y ago
This whole idea doesn't make any sense. Someone with a world ID could still be running AI agents on their behalf with their private key, or use stolen / bought keys from other people. On the other hand, Sam Altman could be running millions of fake personas, because they can generate keys from thin air. Also, Sam Altman would have the power to invalidate your keys, or the keys of people he doesn't like. It would be an absolute catastrophe if this system was used for voting or something important.
water-data-dude 1y ago
Aside from the issue of biometrics not being covered by the 5th amendment (so I won’t use them for login purposes), I’m hesitant to arrange incentives such that melon baller based crime is lucrative.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
No.

Speaking of Dickish dystopian "Minority Report style technology": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398910 DonHopkins on Nov 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Eyes Have It (1953) "Lies, Inc." aka "The Unteleported Man" had an eye eater! https://www.academia.edu/2360689/The_Missing_Pages_of_THE_UNTELEPORTED_MAN https://www.academia.edu/2360689/The_Missing_Pages_of_THE_UN... Freya said, "Tell me. What is the 'eye-eater'? I have to know." Her breath caught in her throat; raggedly, she managed to breathe, but with difficulty. "A fungiform," the taller of the THL agents said briefly. "One that resides here." He said nothing further. [...] The eye-eater said pleasantly, "Mr. Ben Applebaum, reach inside me and you will find a slightly-different edition of Dr. Bloode's Text. A copy of the twentieth edition, which I ingested some time ago... but as far as I can determine, not already dissolved by my gastric juices." The idea seemed to amuse it; the lower portion of its face split apart in a peal of excrutiatingly-penetrating laughter. "You're serious?" Rachmael said, feeling disorganized. And yet the eye-eater was correct; if it did possess a later edition of the text he most certainly had reason to seek it out -- wherever it lay, even within the body of the offensive eye-eater. "Look, look," the eye-eater exclaimed; it held in one of its longer [...] https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/dick15-0.html https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/dick15-0.html "A lie," the eye-eater rumbled ominously; again its pseudopodia whipped viciously, seeking out the agile creditor balloon, which dipped and bobbed barely beyond the flailing reach of the several sucker-impregnated arms. "As a matter of fact, this gentleman here-" It indicated Rachmael. "My understanding is that the lady and this individual are emotionally involved. Miss Holm is-was, whatever-a friend of mine, a very close friend. But hardly my mistress." The eye-eater looked embarrassed. [...] https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=4193 https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=419... Let me quote one of Dr. Bloode's quite singular Thingisms. "'Thingisms'?" Rachmael felt baffled -- and wary. He had a deep intuition that the Thingism, whatever it was, would not be amusing. Not to him, anyhow, or to any human. "I always enjoyed this one," the eye-eater intoned, its saliva spilling from its mouth as it writhed with glee. "Consider: since you are about to read the book, here is Thingism Number Twenty, dealing with books. "Ahem. 'The book business is hidebound.'" After a pause, Rachmael said, "That's it?" "Perhaps you failed to understand. I'll give you another gem, one more particular favorite of mine. And if that fails to move you ... Oooohhh! That's a Thingism! Listen! 'The representative of the drayage firm failed to move me.' Oooohhh! How was that?" It waited hopefully. Baffled, Rachmael said, "I don't get it." "All right." The eye-eater's tone was now harsh. "Read the book purely for educational purposes, then. So be it. You want to know the origin of this form which I have taken. Well, everyone will take it, sooner or later. We all do; this is how we become after we die." He stared at it. "While you ponder," the eye-eater continued, "I'll delight you with a few more Thingisms of Dr. Bloode's. This one I always enjoy. 'The vidphone company let me off the hook.' How was that? Or this one: 'The highway construction truck tore up the street at forty miles an hour.' Or this: 'I am not in a position to enjoy sexual relations.' Or --" -- "Lies, Inc.", by Phil Dick

9283409232 1y ago

Why are these rich assholes so obsessed with tracking everyone? > Tools for Humanity bragged about many large partnerships that should make any privacy advocates shiver in dread: the Match Group dating apps conglomerate (Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish), Stripe, and Visa are some of them. Visa and Stripe being involved in this should indeed make everyone shiver and push back against this. Altman is not a good person and this company has already had its unethical practices exposed[0]. [0] https://icj-kenya.org/news/worldcoin-case-postponed-amid-concerns-over-data-privacy-and-ethical-biometric-use/ https://icj-kenya.org/news/worldcoin-case-postponed-amid-con...

batch12 1y ago
Control. You have to have a good inventory to apply and audit controls.
grumbel 1y ago
In the AI driven future we are heading into, telling the difference between AI-bot and human might become a valuable good.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nradov 1y ago
  Why? And how would that even work? Just because an online account is tied to a verified real human doesn't guarantee that the content isn't coming from an AI-bot.
  - financetechbro 1y ago
    The “person” could just be copying and pasting AI output. Eye scanning can’t stop that at all
  - creata 1y ago
    Maybe it would allow you to rate-limit and/or ban by the human, which is probably more effective than banning by IP address. (Obviously Worldcoin is shady as shit, I'm not defending it.)

tuyguntn 1y ago

This is the same guy who worked at OpenAI because he "loved" what he does and he wasn't doing it for money. ( Until this year obviously ;) )

tuyguntn 1y ago
P.S. Not blaming him for this behavior, probably I would also change my mind immediately if someone offered me 7% of $300B
- udev4096 1y ago
  Do you really think everyone out there is willing to be a sell out?
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    Nothing wrong being a sell out - except when you claim to not be one.
  - tuyguntn 1y ago
    I clearly said: "probably I would", I didn't generalize it to everyone
  - gregoryl 1y ago
    Absolutely. Everyone has a price.
    - Disposal8433 1y ago
      Speak for yourself. I don't agree with your idea on prostitution.
- preommr 1y ago
  He already had enough wealth that he was in a threshold where it wouldn't matter if he got a few more billion if that the was the lifestyle he was willing to lead. There isn't a magical kind of sugar, or drug that's available to a multi-billionaire but not someone with 100s of millions. If somebody is trying to get billions, they're doing it because they're the type of person that wants to be a part of politicis, and a power player. That kind of person was never going to just give up the opportunity to make more money and gather more power to do more things that they see as neccessary and as good.

iamthejuan 1y ago

They did that here in the Phillipines and they exploit the poor. They give money for people to allow them to scan their eyes. These people do not know the consequences of what they are doing.

ChadNauseam 1y ago
What are the consequences?
- andy_ppp 1y ago
  That you can be identified, cataloged and controlled, potentially. We have the technology to create heaven or hell depending on who controls it…
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    That train has already sailed. We can be identified and found in any number of ways already. Our kids will not imagine any other way. As you say, the future can become heaven or hell.
  - alwa 1y ago
    Is it certain that impoverished people would weigh those potential consequences more heavily than being paid today? For that matter, do we expect that the impoverished people the gp commenter refers to would resist, say, government-led efforts to compel their biometrics from them? [0] [0] e.g. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2022/0425/On-biometric-IDs-India-is-a-laboratory-for-the-rest-of-the-world https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2022/0425...
    - andy_ppp 1y ago
      Everyone deserves food and political freedom in my opinion. We could probably do it too if we actually tried.
      - 1y ago

udev4096 1y ago

He can chortle my (eye)balls!

moffkalast 1y ago
Anton doesn't call me anything. He grimly does his work, then he sits motionless until it's time to work again. 4o could take a page from his book.
someothherguyy 1y ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chortle https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chortle

MaxPock 1y ago

They did that in Kenya and now a judge has ordered that they deleted all that data https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/worldcoin-ordered-to-delete-biometric-data-in-kenya-over-privacy-breach/ https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/worldcoin-ord...

9283409232 1y ago
Which I'm sure he absolutely totally did. Trust him. Just like US judges telling Elon and DOGE to delete treasury data. I'm sure they did it, scouts honor!

roschdal 1y ago

Nein.

cube00 1y ago

Hopefully everyone who handed over their DNA to 23andMe will remember how that ended before they hand over their iris to Sam.

echelon 1y ago
They haven't seen any impact yet. Nobody is rejecting them from insurance or job offers yet. It's worse with 23andme, too, because the blast radius is all of your relatives that didn't take the test at all.

blindriver 1y ago

Altman is evil to want everyone’s retina scan but he will probably get it because most people don’t care anymore.

ambicapter 1y ago
The article describes him targeting the most vulnerable to get his first 500k users. It's not that people don't care it's that they are powerless in the fact of a well-funded adversary.

wnevets 1y ago

Even if you 100% believe in your heart that Altman would never do anything negative with these scans that doesn't mean someone else won't if/when they get access to them. People may trusted 23andMe with their genetic data but now no one knows who will end up owning it and why the buyer believes buying the data is profitable. https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23andme-users-genetic-data-is-at-risk-state-ags-warn-heres-how-to-delete-your-data/ https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23an...

sssilver 1y ago
Every company is exactly one CEO away from doing anything none would ever expect.
- Squeeeez 1y ago
  Not only companies sadly.
- usrnm 1y ago
  Most companies are exactly 0 CEOs away from that
wing-_-nuts 1y ago
When talking about government surveillance, people often ask some version of 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?'. My response is always, 'It's not that I don't trust our current government, I don't trust all future governments that come after this one'. I hope given the recent events of having some hired thugs rifle through government databases (including the OPM, which supposedly has very sensitive data from security clearance applications), that maybe letting people collect and store data on you should be avoided at all cost. The older I get, the more I understand the stereotype of the eccentric former techie who no longer wants anything to do with modern technology or society
- the_snooze 1y ago
  > 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?' I like to go with the simpler "I hold lots of sensitive data for people who trust me: my family, my friends, my employer. One would have to be a sociopath to disclose other people's secrets without their consent."

mapcars 1y ago

Something I don't understand is how is that so bad? Even today one can buy passport data, social security numbers etc on black markets leaked by government employees in most countries. Once they start using more biometric data I'm sure it will be leaked as well. If we assume that all this information is permanently available in a public blockchain, how does it change anything for society really? I can think of security checks becoming better, what are the negative possibilities?

ethbr1 1y ago
Why would anyone want anything to do with Sam Altman to have control of it though? At least if it's open, access is equal.
creata 1y ago
Justifying what Worldcoin is doing by comparing them to black market leaks isn't helping their case.
- mapcars 1y ago
  I'm not justifying Worldcoin and I don't know all the details about what they are doing. My realistic assumption is that all this data will become public one way or another, so I'm trying to understand how we can make sure it can't be abused.

fnord77 1y ago

terrifying now, common place in 10 years. like fingerprints or facial scans

voytec 1y ago

Biometric data is valuable. Assuming that Musk's DOGE crew copied data obtained from US gov agencies, they may have also obtained biometric data of EU citizens. At least some countries have shared citizens' fingerprints with the US. Not just Visa Waiver Program applicants' but as I understand, previous government of Poland made a deal to share all citizens' fingerprints. And these are collected from anyone renewing their government ID card.

mzajc 1y ago
> previous government of Poland made a deal to share all citizens' fingerprints This piqued my interest, but I couldn't find anything. Do you know where I could find more information about it?
- voytec 1y ago
  Sadly, I'm unable to find specific documents confirming it. AFAIK, Poland agreed to biometric data sharing with the US Office of Biometric Identity Management in exchange for loosening travel requirements. That said, US seems to be pushing[0] for more such agreements. [0] https://www.statewatch.org/news/2023/august/eu-and-usa-plough-ahead-with-secret-discussions-on-biometric-data-exchange-scheme/ https://www.statewatch.org/news/2023/august/eu-and-usa-ploug...
Waterluvian 1y ago
You got me thinking and I’m not sure my fingerprints or any other biometric data have ever formally been recorded by the federal, provincial, or local governments. In most cases the most biometric data is your photo and I guess height? So beginning to normalize the collection of eyeball data as a thing is a pretty significant escalation.
- n_ary 1y ago
  In EU, obtaining an identity card needs one’s recent biometric(important!) photo and certain finger prints. Not sure about US. Also where I work, to enter certain facilities, I also need to not only scan my badge, but also my fingerprint or sometimes palm(may sound absurd but I am sure some of you work in same sector).

jt2190 1y ago

For e-commerce to continue, there has to be a way to confirm that the transfer of funds from a bank or credit account to the vendor’s account is approved by a human who controls the bank/credit account. As AI-powered scams become more sophisticated, this confirmation will get harder/more expensive, to the point where e-commerce might not work for most goods. Perhaps generating “proof of humanity” digital signatures from retina scans isn’t the optimal solution, but I’ve yet to hear of any other privacy-preserving approaches. Perhaps transacting online will a require government-issued ID.

mcshicks 1y ago
In the US there is a bill that's been floating around Congress for a while called the improving digital identity act. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884/all-info https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884...

hsuduebc2 1y ago

I'm always struck by how sci-fi writers, in a way, act like prophets. It's as if common sense or imagination keeps pointing us toward the same outcomes. As strange as it sounds, if we don't wipe ourselves out, we somehow already know what the future holds.

caseyy 1y ago

Meanwhile, in reality, banks have solved proof of humanity, identity (KYC), and financial services for a long time. Any account in the world can be proven human by making a debit/credit card transaction from a card with a matching name. For the first time, you can now give your biometrics to OpenAI to do nothing more than you already can. This is just a pure cult of personality.

josh2600 1y ago
I can only assume that you don’t work in financial technology if you believe that KYC is a solved problem. Proving authenticity in an increasingly diasporic society is difficult. We should seek to either reduce or embrace entropy in the design of our systems. You either want systems which prove there are no Sybil attacks, or you manufacture halls of mirrors. This is a continuous battle, there’s no panacea here, even the eye scan has threat vectors. Calling KYC a solved problem is ludicrous.
- lokar 1y ago
  It depends what you mean by solved. Banks tend not to over engineer things. KYC can be seen as a 3 sided trade off: cost of KYC infra/process/etc, lost revenue from denied business and fines from regulators. They (the banks) don’t really care about the social goals of KYC, they just try to best optimize for expected value in the trade offs. The regulators understand this, and are basically fine with it. They have their own trade offs they are balancing. Both sides mostly find and equilibrium.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    Even considering the social goals there's no need for a 100% solution. We only need to stop most fraud and reduce the impact of the fraud that does happen to a sufficiently low level. One of the more important goals isn't to directly stop fraud but instead to provide tools that give end users results that scale with the amount of effort invested. The level of risk should be a tradeoff that the end user is able to make. Current solutions mostly allow for that but certainly have some rough edges.

tim333 1y ago

I did the worldcoin scan thing a couple of years ago and it's all quite jolly. The article is a bit scaremongering. Re: >Simply put, the premise is this: scan your eyeball, get a biometric tag, verify yourself, buy our apps (and cryptocurrency). ... Minority Report style technology it's not really like that. They take a photo of your eye to check you are a new person and not someone who has an account already, then give you an account which is like an anonymous crypto wallet with a private key. You never do an eye scan again in normal use. They give you free crypto/money rather than you needing to buy anything. I've been given ~$300 - it fluctuates a fair bit with crypto prices. I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech.

qwertox 1y ago
> I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech. What does this have to do with curiosity or new-tech positivity? Nothing. Give biometric data, get fluctuating ~$300. You did nothing else than sell something you have. I'm not judging.
- Jommi 1y ago
  how will we solve distinguishing real humans over bots online?
  - qwertox 1y ago
    It it's our goal to solve this issue via authentication, then we might as well let the government authenticate us, instead of Sam Altman.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
<< I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech. I would ask that you elaborate a little more. I am an example of one. I like LLMs, but I cringe internally and externally at times at some of the things people seem to want to use them for ( and I just saw a presentation that basically said the equivalent of "add AI here, happy sunshine leaves there". And how? Magic. Nobody knows. ). I like crypto, but it is impossible to not see million rugpulls, scams and so on out there. I like technology, but I am very, very aware of the issues with basic human nature.

hsuduebc2 1y ago

So this is the future-billionaires won't just sell us services, they'll trap us in entire ecosystems they control. I'd be more surprised if X doesn't eventually turn into one of them in recent future.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
So where's the line? What as X not yet done to make you suggest that it is not already the kind of trap that you're describing?
- hsuduebc2 1y ago
  They are not wanting to scan my retinas. For now. They are approaching it more from the bottom.

justanotheratom 1y ago

hey atleast it is a for-profit, so no chance of that particular rug-pull. "Tools for Humanity (TFH), a for-profit company co-founded by Sam Altman, Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern in 2019."

the_d3f4ult 1y ago

I'm an ophthalmologist. I look at irises all day. People's irises change over the course of their life. Sometimes dramatically if they have some kind of pathology. Are they updating their model periodically? What keeps someone from getting locked out of their crypto gains if they develop an iris nevus or have cataract surgery or start on flomax?

sillyfluke 1y ago
Thanks for this interesting point of view. However, it may makes sense to consider whether the gap you point to can be reduced significantly with AI, by training it separately with aging eye data using existing medical data independent from the general iris pool. I have no idea how realistic that would be personally.
- al_borland 1y ago
  I wondered this with things like FaceID. In my head, every time it unlocks it’s tweaking and tuning the what it knows to be the user, so it can adapt as a person ages, goes through weight changes, etc. However, in practice this may not be the case, since there is an easy backup and a person can re-register pretty easily. On the topic of eyes, my dad recently had surgery on his eyes and they did one at a time, for obvious reasons. That could be a way to transition. Register both, have surgery on one, let it heal, register the healed eye, have surgery on the other, then register that. Always using the good and registered eye to authenticate. But this isn’t realistic. It requires way too much forethought and planning, when people’s minds are elsewhere.
- beAbU 1y ago
  Are you willing to gatekeep you wealth behind an AI that might hallucinate that your iris has changed more than it actually has?
  - sillyfluke 1y ago
    Why would you assume I'm in any way partial to this technology? If AI is being used to tackle medical domains, it stands to reason they would try to use it to overcome what the GP considers to be important constraints, especially since the guy in question also runs an AI company. And what part of "I have no idea how realistic that would be personally" implies that I think it can be done without the danger of hallucinations.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

Biometrics are not a viable solution to the sybil problem. The more biometric tech converges on the ability to get a cryptographic hash of one's body, the further it retreats from the kind of thing that a layperson will trust. You end up with a root of trust that <1% of the population can verify and then you end up asking 100% of them to rely on systems built on that root. You're never going to be able to convince even a majority of people that some clever hacker hasn't cracked an iris scanner and associated millions of fake ID's with millions of AI's for scam purposes. It needs to be the kind of thing that lets Alice assert that this key goes with Bob just after she shook Bob's hand in meatspace. Something where, in order for Bob to have two identities according to Alice, he'll have to meet her in meatspace twice and manage to have her not notice that she's already met him once before. PGP key signing parties were pretty much there, they just came too early (and not enough work was done to teach the masses about them). The web becomes more of a dark forest with each passing day. Eventually the cost of maintaining your part of the trust graph will be lower than the cost of getting screwed by some root of trust that you can't influence or verify. I'm sad to say that I think the point where these lines cross is significantly down and to the right of where we are.

fc417fc802 1y ago
> PGP key signing parties were pretty much there, they just came too early (and not enough work was done to teach the masses about them). I won't dispute that PGP key signing parties coupled with government ID work very well for certain very specific usecases such as validating distro maintainers. However for more mainstream and widespread uses that never occurred, what about work on the tooling? I've yet to see a web of trust implementation that really felt like it was properly generalized, scalable, and intuitive to interact with. Case in point, if you wanted to implement a distributed code auditing solution on top of git and signed commits, what library would you use for the web of trust graph calculations? And would key signing parties be a usable root of trust for that with the current state of the software ecosystem? My personal view is that both of those things are woefully lacking.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  I'd agree that they're both woefully lacking, but there's nothing fundamental preventing them from being successful, it just hasn't been done yet because our existing institutions are not yet degraded to the point where that juice is worth the squeeze. Biometrics, on the other hand, are flawed for in a much more fundamental way.

Geee 1y ago

This whole idea doesn't make any sense. Someone with a world ID could still be running AI agents on their behalf with their private key, or use stolen / bought keys from other people. On the other hand, Sam Altman could be running millions of fake personas, because they can generate keys from thin air. Also, Sam Altman would have the power to invalidate your keys, or the keys of people he doesn't like. It would be an absolute catastrophe if this system was used for voting or something important.

water-data-dude 1y ago

Aside from the issue of biometrics not being covered by the 5th amendment (so I won’t use them for login purposes), I’m hesitant to arrange incentives such that melon baller based crime is lucrative.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

No.