Worldcoin, the sage, the finger and the moon

In the torrid boreal month of August that has just ended, when the north of the world was looking for relaxation and refreshment (well, not all of them, there are some people who are not relaxing at all) the launch of an ambitious and overwhelming project went quite under the radar.

We are talking about the launch of Worldcoin, the project created by S. Altman, the father of ChatGPT. Without going into technicalities, it consists of unique personal identification through retina scan. Those who join, and therefore undergo a retina scan using special equipment, will be given 25 units of a new cryptocurrency, namely the Worldcoin. The name itself is indicative, the project is on a global scale. The objective of the project is not to identify people, and in fact it is not necessary to have an ID, but only to make proof of “humanity” possible. What’s the point? Because the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make the various captchas and similar methods based on human capabilities less and less effective and therefore it will be increasingly difficult to establish whether behind a computer there is an automation (bot) or a human being.

An outcry by the European privacy-community and beyond. For heaven’s sake, with solid technical-legal reasons. To tell the truth, perhaps it is a different type of risk, much more dependent on the user than on the system, but this will perhaps be the subject of another post.

Some got lost behind the fee, let’s call it that, in crypto. Anathema! Multinationals buy our personal data, for who knows what diabolical purposes.

Without bringing up the story of the wise man, the fool, the finger and the moon, we risk losing sight of the quantum leap of an approach of this type. A single organization launches an ambitious supranational project, anticipating a real problem, already current but increasingly pressing in the future, making, if not obsolete, but at least challenging, the first world system on the subject of privacy. Furthermore, it also relies on an instrument, cryptocurrencies, which is still viewed with distrust, if not opposed, by the global financial establishment. Bingo. Challenge two systems at once. It is interesting how the reference levels are different: Worldcoin has a supranational and anticipatory approach, that of privacy is localistic, or at most supralocalistic, and in natural progression of the phenomena.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, in many Countries (Italy e.g.), to date, there are no active Orbs, as the device that scans the retina is called, so anyone interested must book and go abroad (here is the list).

In any case, however, as always, when talking about the Metaverse and its phenomena, we need to get up from the sofa and think from a global perspective, abstracting ourselves from our comfort zone.

What is good hic et nunc may not be good tomorrow 10,000 km away and vice versa.