WORLDCOIN ORB - I went to L.A. to get my eye scanned for WorldCoin [my experience]

Key Takeaways

I got my eyes scared today by World coin in La I think this is one of the first times this was available in the US so World coin is a project backed by Sam Altman of openai as well as some of the big shot Silicon Valley Tech entrepreneurs and investors so part of this project is a cryptocurrency token now I'm not a crypto Guy this is not a crypto Channel this channel is about AI but this is adjacent to it this is related to AI so quick disclaimer nothing here is financial advice nothing here's medical advice to participate in this you have to give your iris scan your iscan to World coin many people are strongly against giving this information to them this data to them I myself would normally be very hesitant I myself decided to do it for a few reasons one is I do report on AI so I'm kind of doing this from a journalistic angle kind of like that guy that infiltrated that biker gang and live with them for a year so he can write a book about it this is kind of like that this is all for you the other part was that I was near La this morning so that was part of my decision so Sam Allman raised several important problems that AI will bring and how worldcoin is attempting to solve some of those problems the goal here is to do a couple things as AI becomes a bigger and bigger part of the world so you can think of world coin as three things one is an ID two as money slash currency and three as this global payment system so it all starts with this machine that scans your eye called the orb this is there to make sure that you're a unique human and it's going to prevent you from making another account you can only make one account next you have your world Coin App aka the world app that's your digital wallet as well as the place where you receive your grats your weekly free distributions of world coin so you can think of it like a direct deposit but instead of dollars going into your bank this is World coins going into your app to get started all you need to do is go you know first download the app then go to where one of these orbs are in person and look at it for 30 to 60 seconds that's how long it takes so my experience was really fast there was one over been three three people ahead of me I think I was done within five minutes looks like there was over 2 million people that are that signed up at the time so I'm somewhere just over the 2 million so the app right now is experiencing massive traffic so things are slow and many of the functions are disabled each app has a wallet where you can attach your Bitcoin and ethereum to and you can also locate nearby orbs so they can go there and get scanned and then you get a little ID in an image of an ID that's your ID to use the app so that's about it in the app right now really so there's a grant page where you can claim your weekly distributions but that's not available yet it's coming soon likely they're going to want to give people some time to be able to join before they started before they start out giving out this money but the rollout's kind of slow so there's plenty of time it doesn't seem like too many people are aware of this happening quite yet although to be fair Sam Altman has been talking about it for quite some time he's been telling us exactly what he's going to do and what he's going to launch and this is just him continuing on his plan but as I was driving through a lay one thing occurred to me by the way there are people that love La for its energy for its people for its culture I am not one of those people I really try to avoid L.A and every time I find myself in a light I question all my life decisions that led up to that point but one thing that I found very interesting is that I saw a lot of people with picket signs there was a protest for the writer's Guild the writers strike I believe that refer to it so there's a lot of them out there marching around the studio that I assume that they work for and it was it wasn't just on one street there was like four or five different spots with a bit of people marching around with these bigot signs the surrounding area also has a lot of the the homeless population like most of La in fact and in California in general in fact as I was exiting the freeway and unfortunately I didn't catch this on camera but there was one gentleman that rolled out right in front of my car on one of those little kids bikes but the tires were missing it was just the metal rims that he was riding on it was it was bizarre I wish I had captured that video because I think that would really help you immerse yourself into this trip to really to really put you there on the spot but a lot of this was happening as I was driving to that place it seemed kind of ironic because all of this is somehow seems related so Sam Altman is rolling out AI they can do a lot more than most people realize right now but the most obvious thing it can do is write and so this is one of the big concerns for this Rider strike do you want to get paid more and make sure that the AI doesn't take their job that's one of the demands that they have one picture I saw online was you know the guy who played salt Goodman Bob Odenkirk he's holding up a sign saying something along the lines of I'm not going to memorize lines written by a computer there's a lot of people on board with this idea that we don't want AI writing our stories and writing our scripts Etc they're trying not to get displaced by AI meanwhile a lot of the homeless people you can argue are also displays due to Rising costs automation Etc the reality of that it's kind of complicated there's a lot of hard to navigate political issues there California has something like a quarter or a third of the nation's homeless population so 75 000 in LA county for example which is staggering do you think that there's in that one County in L.A there's 75 000 people on the streets and that's not because no one cares or because there's no money being spent on this there's no political action on this there is there's a lot of political attention there's a lot of assistance going to the people there's a lot of various different organizations that are trying to help but there's just no easy solutions so as I'm driving through all this to find this office suite where I would get my eyes scanned and get a bunch of crypto tokens for my participation I could not help but think that like all of this is kind of related and that I don't think we're ready I think we're ready for the wave that AI will bring so I'm very excited about Ai and the progress it will bring but I think the speed at which is progressed seeing the speed at which it's gonna wash over everybody it's it's so much faster than our ability to deal with the changes that it's going to bring to society to the economy Etc let's get back to World coin and AI because I'm out of my depth here I don't really have a clue about how to fix it or any solutions necessarily it was just a little bit strange to me to see all that happening on the same day in one you know 30 minute trip and that it was all somehow related anyways let's get back to it but my point was that the one thing that I agree with Sam Altman about is that we need to start thinking about this now so maybe worldcoin is a terrible solution for this and we need something else maybe this is just a scam that's not going to go anywhere but we do need to start thinking about something some way for to get ready for the AI wave that is coming so you know here's once I got to the office the parking was good this is 5570 Melrose Avenue Los Angeles California 90038 that's across from the Paramount Studio that's getting picketed so alright overall it was a very nice little pocket chill area good parking clean you know as clean as La gets so I walked in the orb was on a table there was a few people ahead of me I set up an appointment every single person was pretty obviously in Tech in some way or another so I I set up an appointment but really didn't need one I ended up going 30 minutes before my scheduled time so overall I was really fast and easy I was in and out in five minutes very painless they gave me a little sticker that says unique human on it and also a shirt that says unique human on it so there's that let's dive back into World coin and what it is and why it's connected to AI so again so as I mentioned think of world coin as three things it's an ID it's a currency and it's a global payment system slash Marketplace so first instance it's an ID so it's important to understand there are many important reasons why it would be helpful to have every person in the world cataloged digitally somehow it would help us understand to how to help people and make the world a better place also it could potentially be a nightmare certainly we've seen many examples in history where corporations in government collecting data on people that's been damaging to the people that has been abused and horrible stuff happened now with the rise of AI another important reason why IDs are important is because of a threat of something that's called a civil attack so right now today for example I could create with the help of Chad gbt some script that would create many fake online profiles on Twitter and Reddit Etc and then I can use Chad GPT to have it create unique content have them act like real humans have them interact gain some following Etc so then I could use them to coordinate attacks to disrupt various networks to affect boating for example some sort of a resource allocation I can manipulate data I can do a lot of stuff you know recently I think we saw somebody basically get in trouble for creating a network that had like 99 fake Bots and profiles and it was you know pulling investment money and most of it was fake so there's a lot of things where fake AI people or fake scripts could create a lot of damage and that's referred to as a civil attack so it's basically in a nutshell one person having multiple fake profiles acting as multiple sort of fake people and so real fast nothing here is meant to be my approval or disapproval of something I'm just laying out the thought process here so I'm not saying this is good or bad or whatever but the thought process goes something like this having each digital profile be verified as a real human being could be beneficial to protect against attacks of the sort now the obvious way of doing that would be to have your real name attached to this profile and and your real name verified by some government ID that would be the most sort of basic and straightforward way of doing that but not everybody wants to have their real identity out there and really we don't need their real identity we don't really care what their real name is necessarily we just need to know if that account belongs to a real unique human and that real unique human doesn't have a million accounts that's really what we care about and this is where worldcoin comes in so they have this machine called the orb they manufacture themselves they design it engineered it themselves they stress that it's not made in China I believe it's manufactured in Germany what it does is when you look into it it scans your eyes it creates a little Iris code as they call it that is now unique and can be used once to create your ID and so in theory and how it's supposed to work is that you would not be able to make another ID so only one ID per one unique set of eyes so Sam up and Alex blenya went on the bankless podcast today to talk about the system so basically as far as I can tell their claim is that once your eyes are scanned the iris code is stored everything else gets deleted all your other biometric data gets deleted so none of your info is stored but the iris scan prevents the same person from creating another account meaning that nothing from the information that is stored can necessarily be traced back to you the only information that they would have is they would be able to tell when somebody else scans their eyes are they already in the system or not now a lot of people sort of pushed back against the saying including Edward Snowden who said hey this is you're still Gathering data there's still ways to see to match up the iris scan to people's eyes so don't do it and so that's the ID that you need to operate the the app in order to participate in this sort of economy next there's the world coin token that's the cryptocurrency part of this so it's on the back of ethereum if I understand correctly so it's part of the ethereum network but ethereum was founded by metallic buterin who interestingly he was part of the teal Fellowship the program that was running by Peter Thiel and so he pays these college age kids that have big projects and high IQs he pays them money to skip the college and go build their projects and it has a pretty staggering win rate like a lot of big names come come out of that but this was one of them so he created ethereum so I think that put him to a billion dollar worth at some point I think now it's saying that it's down to half 550 5 million but like a lot of these people may staggering amounts of money and you know he's still building we're a lot of people believe we're still in very early stages of this and so the talk by the way he did comment on world coin he had a few criticism of the orb saying it could be manipulated by open AI itself you know there are certain potential security concerns and it's it's centralized and they could potentially add you know create some sort of back door to add people to it Etc but he also state that you know he doesn't necessarily have a better solution he's just pointing out some potential problems but it didn't sound like he was against it he was just saying well here's the good part of it here's the bad the good part that he said was the fact that user privacy you know the people that are getting their eyes scanned this would be a good way to keep their identity private to keep it secret they didn't have to put all their information out there in order to participate in this and so with the world coin and and so here's some notes about the world coin so there's going to be a total of 10 billion of these tokens it sounds like they want to give at least one to every human being on the planet and those will be slowly dripped out over a 15-year period starting right around this time so this is July 2023 so sometime around this time they're going to start doing these they're going to start doing these grants where people can receive the tokens in their account so in the white paper it's specified that 75 of the total ultimate supply of the tokens will be available to the world coin community so that's sort of like everybody the people while 13 and a half will be available for investors 9.8 for the initial development team and 1.7 set aside as Reserve anyway so I'll kind of end it right here because again because I don't want to go too deep into the white paper again this is not a crypto Channel if you guys are interested comment down below I'm more than happy to do a little video going over everything Point by point it's just this isn't really an AI this is more crypto but I do think that this is important to keep an eye on so Sam Alvin hinted that if this gets traction eventually this could be used you know for everybody to have some sort of vote on for AI governance so you know if you have you know six billion people on this and we can all sort of vote with our tokens you know he could for example and everybody is a unique person in a unique individual then perhaps there's a way for us to implement some sort of voting system where he might say how do you want to handle this issue if AI how do you want to help this issue and everybody kind of puts it in there puts in their vote and so that would be a fairly Democratic process to move AI forward certainly you know if it's implemented correctly it certainly seems like it could work well who knows but either way I think it's important to pay attention to this project whether it succeeds or not it's important to pay attention to this project because if it succeeds it would behoove you to at least have some awareness of crypto and what the implications and limitations of it are and unfortunately we did see a lot of the insanity with people you know gambling with crypto the people buying jpegs for millions of dollars the non-fungible tokens nfts whatever that whole side of it was kind of a nightmare for fortunately the speculation frenzy you know it doesn't track con artists and gamblers and all sorts of unsavory characters you know we saw a lot of people go to jail for various bad things that they did and several big companies going under tons of lawsuits Etc but besides all of that and that's unfortunately the part of the crypto that a lot of people are familiar with but the original point of for example Bitcoin was really hey guys let's have a form of money that the governments can't take from us and let's have something that they can't just dilute to Zero by printing an infinite amount of money so it was basically saying hey like we need a form of money something that we can put our wealth into our money our wealth into that is not controlled by some third party that may or may not have our best interests at heart so that in itself that's not a bad idea does Bitcoin saw that issue I mean I have no idea but the idea itself isn't bad and so here if worldcoin says hey let's figure out how we can have uh proof of humanness like to prove if you're a human on a global scale while keeping your identity private like you need some passport to be able to say hey I'm not a bot I'm a real unique individual like the sticker says but I don't necessarily want to prove it by getting giving you my ID my government ID with my address on it I don't want you necessarily knowing my name I just want you to know that hey like the best person you're talking to is human that's all and then if I want to share the rest of the information with you I could but I don't have to again that idea that's not a bad idea now is it going to succeed or is it going to be a casino filled with Shady characters I have no idea but we do need a solution for that and if this fails we're still going to need a solution for that so keep an eye on this because whether it succeeds or fails it's still an important data point if it succeeds that's going to mean something if it fails that's going to mean something none of this is meant to get you to buy some weird crypto tokens on some foreign marketplaces or anything like that I do not recommend you do that stay far far away but I'll so don't completely dismiss this thing because this or something like this will be implemented either by openai or some government or some other agency but it's coming in it's it's going to affect all of us so my name is Wes Roth and I thank you for watching