Odd Lots - The Eyeball-Scanning Plan Designed to Save Us From AI

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

There are all kinds of societal concerns emerging out of the rise of artificial intelligence. Will it put us all out of work? Will fraudsters be able to use deepfakes — technology that can replicate our images and our voices — to scam us? We're in uncharted territory and nobody knows for sure how society will negotiate these risks. While many people are familiar with ChatGPT, its founder Sam Altman also co-founded Worldcoin, which aims to mitigate these risks. Enter: The Orb, an eyeball-scanning device that could provide everyone with a unique personal identifier. Think a global social security number, except you never have to share what it is with anyone. On this episode, we speak with Alex Blania, the CEO and co-founder of Tools For Humanity, the developer behind the Orb and the Worldcoin project, on his company's vision for how this tech can be used for things like proving one's humanness or collecting a Universal Basic Income in a world where AI predominates. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real. Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. We're talking top grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, analysts, analytics. We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, analysts, lists and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal.

And I'm Tracy Alloay. Tracy, do you remember a few weeks ago or maybe a couple months ago now someone made a like a fake AI version of the Odd Lots podcast and they like replicated our voice? Yes, I think they used Chat GPT to do it. And they basically asked Chat GPT to create a script for Odd Lots and then they had someone replicate another app or something replicate the voices. It wasn't as someone. I mean, it was like somewhat like other like AI app is like, yeah.

It was pretty good. It was pretty good. I mean, it clearly like was not us. How much did it worry you, Joe? I think I'm more of an AI dumer worrier than you are. Interesting. I mean, I have concerns. Don't get me wrong.

But what do you think is the worst case scenario? Is it robots taking over the world? No, I think that like in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the oddlots podcast. And people will say, I don't really. need to listen to Joe and Tracy anymore. The AI is going. I don't know. I'm like, you know, but I feel like maybe that's a little paranoid. No, I feel like there is reason for concern. I hope maybe I'm just being an optimist here. I hope we are a few years away from the Oddlots

replic. I know, but I want to do this for like another 30 years. I don't want to just have like three or four years or a few years. That's the optimistic scenario is it doing this in 30 years time. Okay. All right. AI, lots of people expressing some worries about it. A million different kind of And we see all these, you know, good ways that the technology is being used, but also insidious ways. As you pointed out, someone made an Oddlots episode. I think that was in a very fun, spirited way, a nice way. But there are people who use this technology for more nefarious things. Yeah, I think there was like a 60 minutes recently where like someone was able to like impersonate someone's voice and say, hey, you know, you could imagine this scam where someone's like kids say, hey, I need to.

money or something like that and they call and it sounds just like them especially in a couple years when the tech gets better and it becomes a bit of a crisis in the sense it's like do I know that a person is a person when they talk to me on a Zoom when they talk to me on a podcast when they talk to me on a phone call etc well even on Twitter on a much more basic level you have all these bots and I don't know about you but there seems to be a new Tracy Allaway with the L as like an eye and fooling everyone almost like every few weeks and then you have to go through the whole bureaucracy of reporting to Twitter and proving that you are, in fact, the original Tracy Alloway.

And not to get too much of a tangent, but wasn't Elon going to solve this? Because he said, like, oh, I'm buying Twitter to solve the bots problem. And I don't, and as you say, it's not been solved. I think that's a whole other episode. But even with, like, really rudimentary, like, you know, fake Tracy's and fake Joe's. Like, that's the most rudimentary thing, just, like, taking our avatar and, like, changing, like, one of the L's in Alloway to, like, a I or whatever. whatever, or a one. Like, that's just going to get worse.

You know what's a really good business model? Creating a problem and then creating the solution to it. Yes, that's exactly right. So we have all of these AIs and they're going to like replicate us, or they're going to look like us and they're going to talk like us. But the good news, in a sense, good is that others are working on the problem of how do you prove that you are who you are in a world in which AIs can replicate our voices and our faces and our expression. Technology can save us from technology is the thrust of this, right? Exactly. So we are going to be speaking to someone working on a technology designed to

address this concern in part. And as you say, some of the people working on it are some of the same people behind some of the most cutting-edge AI research that's sort of like blowing everyone's minds in both good and scary ways these days. So I'm just going to go ahead and lay out my priors here, which are that I find this sort of instinctively dystopian. The topic of this podcast, what we're going to be discussing this technology creeps me out a little bit. But that said, I don't know that much about it. I don't know much about how it works. And so I am very interested to hear the bull case on eyeball scanning.

So you just jump right. We're going to be talking eyeball scanning. We are going to be speaking with Alex Blania. He is the co-founder of WorldCoin, an entity that was set up also by Sam Altman, who everybody, a name that everybody knows now because he's the co-founder or the founder of OpenAI, which powers Chad GPT and other tools. Other co-founder Max Novincern. We're going to be talking about how an eyeball scanner can allow us to theoretically prove our humanity in this future AI world. So, Alex, thank you so much for coming on Oddlots. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk.

So I'm trying to think, I mean, like the threat, how real is it that, you know, in a few years do you think? Not whether AI will be able to create a perfect replica of the podcast, but that let's say we're having this conversation. And I might really not know that I am talking to the real Alex Blania versus an AI that can perfect. replicate your voice and replicate your face. Like, is that two years away? Is that three years away? Like, how soon is that coming? Well, I think partially we are already there, right?

The technology is not completely open source yet, so you don't have widely deployed systems that can do that. But rather you have, right now, you have like a few entities that actually can do things like that or would be able to do things like that. But this is going to change because of course the progress is increasing. So you had it started with Dolly and you had stable diffusion and many other things that on the image generation side became increasingly impressive. And I think AI art is one of the coolest things of the last couple of the last year, to be honest.

So that's on the image generation side of things. And then of course you have chat chbti on the text generation side of things. So I think on Twitter, as you discussed in the introduction, you are, I think, already there, that it could happen that you just chat with a neural network and you have absolutely no idea that you chat with a neural network. And you might argue about odd lots for like an hour and don't realize that this is not actually a person. I'm just thinking like half the people I argue with on Twitter probably are bots.

Neural networks. Yeah. Well, maybe just to step back in time a little bit. I mean, Worldcoin has been around for a few years now. And to some degree, as Joe mentioned, you guys kind of anticipated this threat. What was the sort of aha moment that made this all come together? Like, how did this actually develop into a company? And what was the use case thesis when you were just setting out?

Well, we honestly did not, we didn't start off to solve a threat, right? That is not kind of a brief history in time. Sure. back then I did research so we started the company a little bit over three years ago and I was doing research in deep learning

applied to quantum physics so I basically predicted quenum system of neural networks and that's kind of I think it's a very promising field in physics and Sam was already working on the idea of all quant together with Max so I think they've already been on it for like six months

but of course Sam had a full-time job at OpenEI Max had a full-time job back then And so it was all like in a early idea phase. Then I got an email from Max back then to put with like an early paper describing the vision of WorldCoin. And then I should come by and talk. And then I had a couple interviews with Max, one with Sam. We spent a lot of time together and actually decided to proceed. But to go back to the initial proposition.

And I think that is very important. It is not about solving a threat, but rather how, I mean, Sam was already working in Open AI, and this was three years ago. So back then it was not yet an accepted topic that AI is going to happen, and it's going to be as powerful as today. It was a very niche topic, I think, although Open AI, of course, was already quite famous entity. But of course, Sam was motivated by the idea of AI and what it's going to do to the world, and it's going to be this very powerful technology. And so the initial proposition of Rockwind was really, what is the societal infrastructure that we can build that makes sure that AI is for the better of all of society versus a few? And so there's many things actually to come together here. Like proof of personhood is what you just described is the ability to prove that you're an actually human being on the Internet, which is basically just a much more capable identity system.

But it goes as far as, uh, we think eventually UBI will become a thing, and it actually is like a big chance. If you have like a very, very powerful technology, and it's not about kind of political redistribution, but you have a very centralizing technology that you wanna share the upside with the world with. And that was another motivation.

Kind of Rolkine can actually be the infrastructure to do that because you have a very capable identity system. You have a economic system that connects everyone. So there were like a couple of very ambitious reasons what we think, something like, that so basically creating and bootstrapping the largest identity and financial network that is actually open and privacy preserving versus relying on centralized government systems that might not work in large parts of the world is a very important proposition for the coming decades so let's

just jump right to it uh if you're listening people who are listening to this podcast you might want to actually watch the video version. We're recording this on video as well. People just the audio, but here on set, I'm just going to, I was going to wait a little while before unveiling it, but this is, I'm holding in my hand. I feel like we need extra music. A big orb. It feels about six pounds. I don't know. How, how heavy is this, Alex? I'm sure you know the exact weight. It's a little bit over one kilogram. Oh, okay. So I was wrong on, so that's like just under like two and a two point, about two and a half pounds. Okay. Okay. That's fine. About two and a half pounds and it's an eyeball scanner.

And so here it is and it's not working right now or we're not scanning right now. So I can like tilt this in our face. It's not scanning. But let's like talk about what this piece of hardware that I'm actually holding it is that I'm going to set it on the table in front of me. It is an eyeball scanner. What does it do? So the short answer is one, it will start with short and then the longer answer. The short answer is that it first ensures that whatever is interacting with the device as an actual human being. So not a display or...

Not a photograph of an eyeball. Not a photograph or like more sophisticated optical attacks because there's like many things you can do here. So that's the first step checking that whatever we see is an actual human being. And then the second piece is it takes an image of my eye, calculates a unique embedding out of this picture, everything happens on a device. And that embedding then is signed by the device. And that's then the only thing that actually leaves the device.

And it gets compared against all other users. And if that uniqueness check is successful, then me, that I just verified with an orb, I then can later do a zero knowledge proof that I am included in that set. And if you're not familiar with your knowledge proof, proves what it allows you to do is it lets you prove something without actually revealing the underlying information. So what that enables us to do is it builds essentially a self-custodial identity network where the data control is with the user. And there is no centralized entity that actually has the information of who you are, where you're from, all of these things.

But rather, this person is a unique human being and has verified revocon before. while the user could decide to attach more information to that. So that's kind of the short of it. I think we should talk much more about the why in a second because that's not trivial, but yeah. Yeah, maybe just to help us get to the why, you could talk about what would be a practical use case for this technology? Because if I think about something like, you know, you mentioned UBI, universal basic income, If I think a government starts some sort of UBI program, then I would assume that they identify people by something like a social security number or whatever the equivalent might be in that country. So what does this do that those traditional systems of identity do not?

Well, so when you start with traditional identity, the really hard thing for governments is actually making sure everyone only has one passport. And that is with an identity, it's called deduplication. It's a really hard problem because all the systems, all the technologies you use usually in your life, let's say your iPhone, face ID. What that actually does is just it reauthenticates you. So it realizes I'm the same person, again, logging into that phone. And that's a one-to-one comparison, and that is fairly easy to do. What is really hard to do is making sure, okay, Alex did not sign up compared to a billion other people.

And so that's why many governments actually have biometric systems in place, because otherwise, also their social security number system would completely break. But that's not rolled out globally. So in fact, a good mental model is about 50% of the global population actually have a digitally verifiable identity. That's a huge number of people that just don't have it. And so I think United States is pretty good, or at least decent. It's actually not a really good identity solution. Europe in parts is pretty capable. The strongest is India, although there's definitely privacy concerns here because they don't

use knowledge proofs and things like that. But for example, India, they have a program called Adhahr that also used ours recognition to kind of roll out to the global population. And it really accelerated the whole economy like crazy. So they had Ad Haar and then they built UPI on top, which just as a payment rail. And so whenever you talk to people that are in that kind of area of technology, everyone always brings up India as the most prominent example of like what identity plus

a strong financial rail can actually do to accelerate an economy. So, and this is what Rollcoin is doing. Basically, Rollcoin is able to create a deduplication set. So it provides me with the ability to prove that I'm actually unique against everyone else. But then also there's World ID, which is an identity protocol on top of that. And let's start with the basics. So the first thing I could do is I could log into Twitter and I could say, I don't already have a Twitter account without actually reeling my name. And then if you think a little bit forward, you could even cryptographically sign every tweet you make.

So that you kind of lay a trace of like, okay, this is actually Alex versus anyone else. And I think this is really where this is going to go, right? Because this progress around AI is definitely an exponential. So we will get to a place where you will have to authenticate pretty much everything you do on the internet. So that's the basic. But then with World ID, which is a protocol that lets you add verifiable credentials and many other things within identity space, you can actually bootstrap a whole identity system on top. So this was like a quick rant.

No, it's good. So it's not that it's proving that you are, you know, a Joe Wisenthal or a Tracy Allaway. It's proving that there is only one of you without necessarily the ID attached or the name attached. That is exactly. So that is the whole point. Because then, but then what World ID lets you do. So if you're not into crypto, but this whole idea of.

self-custody is very important, right? Of course, I'm pretty sure it came up before. What that lets you do is you basically, you verify for, well, can you receive your World ID? And then it might be that for some applications, you actually want to prove that you're over 18 or you're Joe Wiesel, then the World ID protocol, which is literally just like an open source protocol, and every developer, every company could implement with that, you as a user, you can then decide to,

also attach additional information to your role eddie. So that is my name or that is my KWC information. And then you can decide to reveal that to some applications with zero knowledge proofs as well. But no one other than you actually has that information. So I think, God, I have like hundreds of questions. There are so many different ways. So, you know, one basic, but one idea, you keep mentioning zero knowledge proven just to sort of like the basic idea, and this is the short is like, you know, I go to website sometimes. government websites you enter in your social security number. But the idea is with a zero knowledge proof,

it would be I prove to the government that I know my social security number without telling the government what my social security number is. Well, I mean, that one is actually tricky because in that case, you would reveal the social security number. What is a much more, what is a much better way to explain it is? The website asks you, are you on any kinds of sanction list?

or are you over 18 or are you actually a U.S. citizen, right? And then these things you could prove of zero knowledge. And then basically what comes out of this is like a proof runs on your phone that you're not included in a sanctions list, let's say. And that the only thing that comes out and ends up with the website is yes or no, but the website does not know what is the social security number you checked against. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute.

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scanning your eyeball, it's going to make anyone anxious, and I'm like totally up for it. And even I'm like, you know, a little bit anxious about it. How do you establish, so there's no, unlike say clear at the airport, which also uses an eyeball scan so that you can go by security, there's no centralized database of our irises. And how do you sort of like establish or prove to people that there's no database? Because if my understanding, there has been reporting that at least at some point in the process of the development of WorldCoyne as you've grown as a start.

up that at one point, or at least currently, there was a Irish database. Okay. So there's many things here. Yeah. I'm going to start with explaining or how to develop comfort around the idea and why, why it's necessary. So, sure. First of all, I, I hate the idea of building the orb.

Like, when I actually started working a rock and roll kind of like it, it was absolutely horrific because we've been four people sitting in a small apartment in San Francisco and the idea of building high. hardware devices that take biometric data and roll them out globally was a horrific idea back then. One, because it's very complicated, expensive. And then... Yeah, I imagine pitching that one to VCs would be kind of tricky, right? Oh, it was, it was horrific. It was in the middle of... It was also like, I mean, Bork Coin is also a crypto project. And we started...

Yeah, I want to ask you about that too. Yeah, we started in like in the middle of a bear market. So I remember back then when we talked to the first investors, they're like, okay, like, like other than Ethereum or Bitcoin, nothing will exist. Like all of those nonsense. What do you talk about AI also? No one cares about that also. Like, what are you even doing?

So, but again, so neither me or anyone else was really excited about building a hardware device. But really, we spend almost a year doing research in pretty much everything you could do to solve the problem. And solving the problem is, okay, issuing a privacy preserving. identity that works globally, not only in the United States, not only in Europe. What do we have to do? And there's basically like three big answers to this.

One is you use government K. Right. Which might be a sufficient answer for some parts of the world, but it was pretty shocking to realize for how few. So kind of that very quickly disqualified. Second is what people call Web of Trust. So this whole idea that you're just like, you build reputation up between people and that also like in short just didn't work. And the second and then the third is is biometrics and everything that surrounds that whole field.

And within biometrics, we then build prototypes for pretty much everything you could imagine. We built palm scanners. We built kind of a face ID like implementation of it. We build fingerprint scanners, all these things. But the short of it is to solve. this deduplication problem, so this uniqueness check, you need a lot of entropy, so information about each user. If you don't have that, your error rate explodes exponentially. So, simple example, if you would use Face ID to solve the same problem, after tens of millions

of users, you would have to reject everyone. So you don't have a constant error rate. You don't have like 5% constantly reject, but you just hit a wall and your system breaks. And so face does work. Same is true for fingerprints. And the only thing that really works is and is proven to work is Irish recognition. So that's why we ended up there. And then even within Irish recognition, we even had to build our own hardware. We had to build our own lens, which sounds absolutely ridiculous.

But we kind of had to build this whole device from the ground up to make that happen. So much to the why. And how do we get people or like, how do we think about, this whole headline of comfort around this. There's a couple things. One actually built a privacy preserving system that goes way further than what you're used to. And that's, I think, really what we did. Because there is no information about you that you actually reveal by using Worldcoin.

And I think that's pretty remarkable. It's definitely counterintuitive because you're like, okay, we use eyeball scanning. Yeah. But so this is headline one, headline two. And that's a journey for sure is open sourcing everything. So I think that's one of the core parts of the crypto ethos is just you don't have to trust, but rather you can verify. And the hardware is completely open source already, the software to meaningful parts,

the protocol completely. So everything will be open source in the coming months. and so that's that's answer two and then three it actually is way less of a thing than than you would think so we have now 1.7 million users roughly 600,000 of them that use the app on a monthly basis I travel the world very frequently I talk to a lot of users on the ground and just like try to understand what's kind of what's what's your feeling what do you understand what you not to understand and it is very much. much, yeah, like broadly speaking, globally speaking, this is way less of a concern, which

obviously does not lower our bar, but it's the case. So I have two things on that, and I think they're sort of related. But one, why does open source seem to be such a thing in AI in particular? And then secondly, what is the crypto role in this project? Because, you know, we mentioned WorldCoin, I can only imagine what it was like pitching to VCs in the midst of crypto bear market saying we want to scan everyone's eyeballs and oh, by the way, there's also like a crypto element to this as well, a token. Why have that component of it? I mean, at this point, I'm actually not an AI expert anymore because I think I'm basically two years out of the field and pointed to crypto, which is an interesting journey also. But soon you'll be going back into AI probably.

That's what all the crypto people are doing now, right? Well, no comment. I'm joking. I'm joking. So why is open sourcing such a thing? It is basically around AI specifically, it is that you have a technology that is probably as foundational as electricity, as literally, it's still, I think, incomprehensible to people. What a big deal this is, right? This is like one of the biggest paradigm shifts in technology that happened ever. And there is different approaches of how to deal with this and all the underlying risks.

And basically two different lines of thought is one is you open source everything. Everyone should be able to verify and understand how everything is happening. And then the other is, well, you actually kind of have to lock down these models because if it ends up in the wrong hands, and malicious actors have a lot of power. And I think, I mean, open AI is definitely in the center of discourse because it started with open sourcing. And then the team realized throughout the years that actually this whole premise of open sourcing is probably a terrible idea.

So that's why it's a discussion within AI. Within crypto, it is just that the whole thesis of crypto is that you you build actual protocols, not companies. So you build systems that are not dependent on a small group of people can be completely verified and can run over decades without being interrupted by M. And that's open source is just like the core of this together with decentralization. So I think that's AI and I actually do think with an AI, it's a very overblown discussion. I think within crypto, it's the core thesis almost.

And so the crypto element with WorldCoyne, as I understand it, is to insert a degree of, I guess, community control over that technology, right? Like there's some talk about the tokens coming with voting rights and things like that. There are so many things there actually. One is, I think, crypto and that's something that is, if you're not kind of deeply in the space, that is hard to kind of really. what a big deal is this, but it is this idea that tokens build business models for networks, almost. So you don't have a company, but rather you have a, let's say Ethereum. Ethereum is a very powerful protocol, but it has kind of an underlying business model, but it's not that Vita Lick gets rich by that. It is fees on the system. He well, he did, but because

he was early, not because now he still makes money. It's not that the company is printing money and then VTIL it gets rich every month, but rather you have a token and you have a fee structure. And as the utility increases, the network can basically sustain itself. So it can sustain its security. It can sustain its operation and things like that. And so you basically find a way how you fund a decentralized operation and can let it sustain over time. And that is one of the big core things here. is you build very, like, when RollConn works,

it's really foundational infrastructure. It's, I think, without being overconfident, I think it is a very big deal because it's a very foundational piece of technology that just doesn't exist right now. That should not be in the hands off a few people, but rather it should be governed by a wider group of people and it should actually be decentralized.

So also that it cannot break just if I'm in a bad mood, let's say, that would be definitely. it would be so instead of having like a centralized actor who controls the orb which is a sentence i didn't think i would say today um you have this decentralized group of investors slash stakeholders is that how it works yep got it this is like the sparks now like a whole other part of conversation but um basically how it works is so the orb is open source hard of advice right now the company I'm the CEO of Tools for Humanity is the only ones that produce these orbs, but this will change. So you will have, like, if you'll fast forward two or three years in the future, you're going to have many

companies that produce their implementation of the orb following the same standards that connect to the rollcon protocol, right? So you basically have... So Apple could produce an or theoretically one. Apple, Microsoft, like whatever. They could produce their own orb, follow their own standards, make it, design it the way they want. but it will connect to the protocol and that will allow for just a very foundational protocol on the internet that everyone can use that doesn't break. And the token distributes the governance and also the incentive mechanisms all around the same goal.

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of the Consortium National of Formation in Santee in Santa, Canada. So, I mean, you talked about the importance

of like, okay, if this is going to be this foundational infrastructure that everyone uses in some way to verify themselves or whatever, and also is the sort of rails, perhaps, for some universal basic income that we all need because, you know, AI is going to put half of us out of jobs in theory. Like, okay, it better be like not just controlled, no offense by Alex Blanya and Sam Altman. Like, that would be kind of weird. But how do we know that's not the case? And I want to go back to a question I asked specifically about, like, in the past,

Have you had an iris database? So how it works is, and that's not a secret. Basically, when you verify with Rollcoin, quickly go to the flow. So let's say here about Rollcoin, you're excited about it, whatever. You want to sign up. You download an app. Right now there's only one app that lets you do that,

but soon that also will change. So right now that is called a rolled app. It's a non-custodial wallet. You click verify now. A map pops. up. Hopefully we were near you. You go to an orb and then you show Kiarco to the open 30 seconds later. You receive your rolled ID and you also receive roll coin on a rolling basis. Every week, you receive like a small part of roll coin. And in that sign up flow, because we're in beta, we actually did

not launch yet, right? The launch is something that's going to happen reasonably soon. It's also why we talk right now, why it's a very important moment in time for us. There, you had two options, opt in or opt out. Opt out is basically we don't have any data of you. Opt-in means we basically have custody of your data for the reason that the neural networks that are on this device right now are still in development. And so if you opt out, it could happen

that you have to re-reify in a year or so because we basically just updated a model as we went. But where this is going is very, clearly by default and I think actually launched it will be completely opt out. This is just the nature of being in beta and developing technology as we go. So I take the point that you're in beta at the moment, but you know, the arc of recent technological innovation seems to be that people often come up with something with the best of intentions or in order to solve an identified problem and then it often gets used in the

worst possible way. So what's like the terrible use case arc of this technology? Because one thing that springs to mind, and we could talk about robot invasions and like Terminator style AI takeovers, but like one more realistic thing that would spring to mind is, okay, you set something like this up. And then as you walk through a shopping mall, you know, there's some other technology that's scanning your eyeballs, identifying who you are, and maybe pitching, targeting. ads or something like that. How do you separate the identity verification from companies using that for other purposes? Yep.

So we actually have quite in-depth for extreme in the company right now in Tools for Humanity, and we will publish this as we go. that just like we try to come of the worst weirdest scenarios of like whatever China's attacking the network with billions of dollars like what could actually happen what could go wrong right so the thing is given sear knowledge proofs separate your wallet from kind of the uniqueness check the only thing that could happen and to be clear in some cases that actually like if you think 10 years in the future and you think like we're Roan, this is very powerful technology, that could actually be bad, is people could say, okay, that individual is verified with Rolecoin, yes or no. Right. And that might, like, you could definitely think of scenarios of like, okay, China is banning Rolecoin because it's literally the antithesis of what they're building with their identity system because it's privacy preserving that you might actually have, or it might be bad for you to be verified

before coin or you, whatever, right? So there's like, there's some scenario. here, but I think that's, that is pretty much the worst case scenario you're looking at. Because otherwise, the only, like, let's go even to the far extreme, which to be very clear is not what is the case. But let's say there would be like a huge database of, of biometric images of all users. It's not connected to your actual account. So you still have the most, there's like multiple layers of privacy in between that make sure and nothing really bad is happening there.

Well, I'm going to go into a slightly macabre arc of this or maybe sci-fi angle. But since we're just talking about bad things happening, I'm just going to go there, which is eyeball theft, someone cutting out if a really important person who uses WorldCoyn to verify themselves on some network, a criminal attacker physically maiming someone. Like, I imagine these sort of scenarios are digging up the dead for their eyeballs. These must come up in your conversations about really extreme scenarios. Can you talk about some of these sort of like weird out there physical risks? Yeah, all of these signups would not work because the orb would realize that you are,

that person's desires are not alive and are not connected to an actual alive. This is the moment on all thoughts when we talk. about degenerating eyeball tissue. Yeah, this is like, I don't know anything about it. I think we should stop this whole part of discussion, but. No, no, no. I mean, I am sure. I make sure, like, this is a, like, what is a live in this check?

Like, and I guess it goes back to your question of like, why eyeballs and not thumbprints or why not fingerprints or face ID or your gate or something. Like, talk to us about that verification. Why an eyeball can't be replicated? Why wouldn't work if not attached to a live person? Like, these must come up. This would, this is what would freak me out. Sure. So the device has multiple sensors in front.

There's like a lot of computer on this device. There's like a separate GPU and there's seven neural networks that basically at all time run. And what a large part of these networks is doing is just to make sure that whatever we see is an actual human being alive, no fraud attack, no kind of weird cases. And then there is in front, there's multiple sensors that make sure that that's the case. And you could even go as far as like an AI trying to attack the system because that can also happen in the future. So all of that should not happen.

And so what the orb does, it images multispectral. So what that means is across multiple wavelengths in the electric magnetic spectrum, all at the same time. And this is just like you can think of very sophisticated optical table attacks. Like I did a lot of this physics when I was younger. You can think of these things, but it's extremely expensive. And I think even that will not be possible in the future. So it's just really, really hard to fool this device.

I mean, of course, to be clear, the infrastructure is there. Like the neural networks are still, we were still building the up. So right now we are actually aware of a couple attacks that can still happen. And that will still be the case for the next year. Like, all of this technology is not perfect yet, so we'll still take time. But at least the technology is there to make sure that none of these attacks will ever go through. So setting aside the worst case scenarios, maybe a slightly easier question. But what is the path to adoption that you see here?

Because, like, there are a lot of things it feels like to overcome. One is the creepiness factor of having your eyeball scan. But secondly, you know, if you're touting this as a way to, you know, to identify people who might be in need of some sort of official identification in countries that don't necessarily have those systems yet or have subpar systems. I imagine like there has to be a reason why they would want to have this done. You know, in most places, in almost all places in the world, no one is getting universal basic income yet.

So what is the path to adoption and what are the incentives for people to do this? Right. This is kind of the the everything question. Of course, if I would have the perfect answer to us, I would tweet it out. That's a good answer. I can't even answer to every question we've ever.

Yeah, keep going. This is why we're worried about being replaced. We don't need that. Right. Right. Right. Just tweet. Anyway, sorry, keep going. Okay. So there's a couple different Arn Institute. to the response to this question, right?

So one is when we launch, there's going to be a token of a cap supply that will play a very important role in that kind of the whole evolving nature of this project. And when you sign up, you basically receive on a running basis, you receive ownership in a network through the token. And I think that's exciting for a lot of reasons. Like, one, it's a direct incentive. It's a direct, like you literally get money, basically, that you could sell. or you can do anything with.

So it's already like a very small form of, it's not basic because it's not enough money, but it's a small form of UBI in some sense. I think that will motivate a lot of people. And we already see it's like moving a lot of people to, like we have the crazy, like literally right now is the craziest time for me running this project because it's blowing up.

Like all the dashboards completely go vertical. And we have like people flying from Japan to Port, to go to sign up and whatever. Like, it's pretty, really? It's pretty crazy. So that certainly does something. That's one.

Two is, of course, integrations. So making sure that kind of large technology companies or services actually integrate with World ID. And that's going to, I mean, it's going to take a while because you have a chicken and egg problem. You need a lot of users for that to be interesting to products and so on so forth. So just like a little bit of a balancing act. I'm sure it's going to happen. And once that is the case, once you have like major integrations,

then kind of an actual flywheel is starting because as a user, you will be able to use a lot of services that you're just not able to use without it. And so that's kind of, that's a short of it. And I have a lot more specific. Specific answers are much more localized as well. So for example, we are in Bonozeris. And so we will work on local integration.

in Argentina. So it will not start with Twitter or meta. It will start with like very localized applications. But yeah, that's where it goes. Since this is odd lots, I have a really quick question. You know, you built this, I'm going to pick it up again because it's really kind of fun to hold. The orb.

You built this piece of hardware. Yeah, this orb. Do you have any interesting supply chain issues in terms of the optics or the semiconductors or the semiconductors or I mean, it's a, and how much is it right now cost to build an orb? So we had, especially during COVID, we had crazy supply chain crunches. So it's like generally like Elon talked a lot about this in the earlier days, but I definitely also ran into this. It's like you have a perfect running prototype.

And then it just feels trivial to produce this thing. But it's just not. It was absolutely terrific. Like we had this, we had this prototype. then building up a production line and really being able to produce like thousands of them was a completely different challenge so that almost took like a year to to completely lock this in and then within COVID we had crazy supply chain issues but that's now mostly gone that kind of the industry has completely recovered what was the hardest component to get

oh man it was it was death by a thousand cuts it was everything from the computing unit to random capacitors, weird ones that we use. We have like the actual lens right now is single source supplier, which is something that obviously has to change. But since we customly had to build this lens, there's only one company in the world that builds that lens. So that was a really tricky one to kind of ramp it up over time. How much does it cost right now?

Right now is still, we're still pretty expensive. But honestly, it doesn't really matter because, so right now it's like $4,000 to $5,000, depending on the exact batch. It's coming town to be around $1,500 at mass manufacturing. And I think in a couple of years, it's going to be below $500. We got to put the orb. It's less than I would have thought. We've got to put the orb into the fed's inflation basket. We're getting so much better at producing eyeball scanning orbs.

Yes. Yes, health care and medical care, massively inflated, but we can all scan our eyeballs at cheaper and cheaper crops. Excellent. Alex Bonia, this was such a fascinating conversation. It's like, I mean, there's like a million more things I could want to ask and maybe we'll have you back in a year. And then in two years when we're all on UBI, because we've been put out of work by AI,

and so, you know, whatever it is. But this was far and away our most sort of like futuristic sci-fi-ish conversation we've ever had not something I would have ever contemplated in the past. Thank you so much for coming on Lopla. Amazing. I take that as a compliment. Thanks for that. Absolutely. Without question. Yeah, that was really interesting. Tracy, are you going to get scanned? You know what? I think I'm going to wait a little bit until there's some visible upside for me, which which is kind of that last question that I asked Alex, which, you know, I am reasonably, I understand the use case of having some sort of like wall.

or portable identification that you can take with you across the internet and like various outlets that kind of makes sense to me and I think we've spoken about that use case before. However, at this point in time, I don't see a lot of upside. You know, maybe it would be easier to file some claims against Twitter for like bought copycats, but it's not much. Yeah, but and to your point though, like, or and really, or sorry, to Alex's point, Like, it's on Twitter. Like, do they want to integrate the World Coin API?

Which I don't actually get the impression that, like, I'm, it doesn't seem like any of the big networks, like, are anywhere. Like, that's on the roadmap of anyone right now. Well, this is the other thing I'm thinking about is, you know, part of the World Coin use case is this decentralization aspect of it. But what we've seen time and time again throughout history is that the world tends towards middlemen. and verification of some sort. So I can imagine a future where maybe you do get your eyeball scanned, but maybe it's not by WorldCoin or a decentralized entity. Maybe it's Twitter itself.

And this is even more dystopian. You know, like Twitter keeps its own database of your eyeballs. Well, that's the thing. Like I used clear. You know, like I already like scan my eyeball at the airport. And it's like, I was $100. That's a centralized database. I save a few minutes.

It's like I've already, when it comes to privacy, I've already like basically I've already given it all up to save about five minutes and then airline. So I guess I've just like, yeah, you know, I'll get scanned. Why not? But I'm skeptical. You know, actually, honestly, it's not even like the privacy or anything like that or like the dystopian scenarios so much as like I don't really want a scenario in which like computers put us all out of jobs and we need the UBI.

And I think we didn't really get into like this scenario in the future. like where will the political impulse from an UBI come from? It'll come from in an economy that's so lopsided in who reaps the benefits of AI that we like have to have it for political stability, which is that's like the scenario that like freaks me out more than anything. Right. In the future where you really need WorldCoin, like the most insidious thing is that you need it because no one has jobs. That's right. Right. Like more than anything else to scan, the whatever, it's this scenario in which like, oh, I need to get my UBI from like somewhere and like they tax Sam Altman. so that we can all, like, that's like the part more than the scan or the privacy or the,

you know, the digging up the dead that freaks me out. Yeah, I'm telling you, great business model, create the problem and the solution. On that happy note, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Alex Blanya. As he said, he might just tweet it out. He might just tweet out the answer to all of these things. He's at Alex Blanya. And follow our producers on Twitter, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin and Dashel Bennett at Dashbot.

And follow all of the Bloomberg podcasts onto the handle at podcasts. And for more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots, where we have a blog, we have a transcript, and a newsletter that comes out every Friday. And check out our Discord. It's super fun. People chatting about Odd Lots stuff with other listeners 24-7. go to discord.g.g.

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