In the north end of San Francisco stands a house on a hill. The property is walled off from the street by vine-draped concrete, and its amenities include a wellness center and a James Bond-style garage with a car turntable. It’s the place where tech’s biggest power players gather to catch a glimpse of the future. And this damp February night was no different.
Twenty crypto enthusiasts poured into the great room of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home. Altman was presenting an update from Worldcoin, his embattled identity-verification startup. The company hopes to create a registry of everyone in the world by scanning their eyeballs with a silver, melon-size orb. Altman imagines that billions will eventually use these unique digital identities to collect universal basic income.
On a table, one of Worldcoin’s chrome devices had been taken apart for display, its mechanical guts splayed out alongside the hors d’oeuvres. Investors and friends gazed into another orb’s telephoto lens. Click. They were in the system.
When Worldcoin came out of stealth two years ago, critics tore it apart as a dystopian nightmare. “The human body is not a ticket-punch,” the whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted. That evening, as the company got investors and friends up to speed on an impending launch, Altman was admittedly feeling uncertain. But, “you do at some point need to start having contact with reality,” he told Insider.