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Cryptocurrency company Worldcoin has kicked up polarising conversations online surrounding their new project, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) scanning device that has been popping up in major cities worldwide.

The mirrored spheres containing this cutting-edge technology have been spotted in global cities including Paris, Dubai and New York, and, consequentially, have been spotting people right back.

Weighing in at just under three kilograms and resembling a smoothed-out mirrorball, Worldcoin’s new biometric imaging device has already tracked two million people in its beta phase.

Apparently the goal is to use the iris-scanning devices to create a global financial network in which users’ ‘humanness’ can be verified with one glance. Resembling something from a classic Steven Spielberg flick, the orb assigns and stores a unique code to the biometric details it collects.

Understandably, questions around unethical privacy and data collection have been brought up in response.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, started Worldcoin approximately three years ago, in conjunction with Alex Blania. The founders have responded to global skepticism around their newest venture, explaining that:

“The journey will be challenging and the outcome is uncertain. But finding new ways to broadly share the coming technological prosperity is a critical challenge of our time.”

Altman and Blania have also made it clear that the system does not store biometic data long-term, but rather tracks and stores the individual codes assigned to individual eyeballs.

All this may be exciting from a tech point of view, but there are still questions surrounding how data contained in the Worldcoin orbs will be handled long-term. Famous tech whistleblower Edward Snowden expressed his distain for Worldcoin’s wishy-washy privacy boundaries, saying, “don’t catalogue eyeballs.”

As Worldcoin continue to ensure wary netizens that “each aspect of Worldcoin is designed with privacy as a focal point”, it’s hard not to want to grab the popcorn as we see how this next wave of AI possibilities unfolds.

[source:artnet]