DailyPost 2950
WORLDCOIN
Email id freed us from geography and the whole world became our address. With no checks and controls worth its name, authenticity came organically to it. Naturally too. We have a long way to go and now we have innumerable methods of misuse. Digital validation as a given does not exist, we are far away from it today. Innumerable other identities have been created which create a smokescreen on the person’s identity. DeepFakes have created a totally different set of issues; audio, video and interactive. How much can Captcha help you? Can there be a universal digital identifier?
CAPTCHA, “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” may be treated as a solution / tool for this purpose in the non-AI age. When AI rules the roost with Chatbots, AI agents, AI systems and mechanisms even beyond our comprehension, maybe tomorrow with AGI, we need to know whether we are talking / interacting with an AI avatar or human being for a variety of reasons. This would be at the core of our trust / faith in both; human beings and AI. The ensuing AI world will be a digitally vitiated one, if we go by the non-AI digital world’s track record and also the experience of the nascent age of AI.
Worldcoin pioneered by Sam Altman is all set to solve this problem. The startup behind this project Tools for Humanity believes that “advanced artificial intelligence will make it hard to differentiate whether you are talking to a real human or an AI chatbot.” There can be innumerable variants of it, given the technical capability and complexity of AI. Worldcoin recently rechristened as World will offer human verification services using blockchain. World says this can be done by an account called World ID, which would be accessible to “real humans.”
How do we establish the uniqueness / validation of each person on the face of this earth? The project aims at achieving this goal using iris scans. Orbs, a new generation of iris scanning device has recently been launched. To start with, Worldcoin aims to onboard millions of users to prove this reliable way to authenticate humans online. Though it sounds both exciting and futuristic, it has started running into rough weather. Various governments across the world have suspended the company’s operations over privacy concerns. Once the full-blown AI world is unleashed on us, we might be left with no choice.
WORLD HUMAN DIGITAL ID WOULD BE A FIRST STEP TOWARDS A SAFER AI AGE.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.