That bloke in the black shirt above is Alex Blania, the CEO of Worldcoin. The guy standing next to him, in the olive shirt, is Sam Altman, whom you might recognize as the CEO of OpenAI -- the company behind AI superbot ChatGPT. The third man in the pic is a guy named Doc Holliday, and if you know you know.

Alex Blania's company, Worldcoin, has the unbelievably dystopian goal of literally scanning the eyeballs of every human being on Earth in order to create some "Worldcoin ecosystem" involving a global crypto economy. And he's got big backing.

In a feature story about the company, Coindesk describes their insane goals thusly:

To do this, they invented a physical device called "The Orb" that can scan your eyeball. The goal is for The Orb to eventually scan every eyeball of every human who walks the Earth. And at some point, if all goes well, everyone will have access to open-source and decentralized financial tools.

If Worldcoin was the brainchild of some random crypto bro, maybe it could be laughed away as a delusion of grandeur. But the project has real intellectual heft. It was co-founded by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), who's arguably the most central player in the development of AI. Altman suspects that the world will change forever if — or when — AI becomes so advanced that it achieves AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, meaning it truly surpasses the abilities of humans.

Yes, yes, indeed, let's let these two maniacal dweebs scan our Irises! Who's first in line?? 😂

The story gets even creepier now, because of a comment Blania made in the same Coindesk article/interview linked above. Here is what he said in response to a question the interviewer asked about the obvious privacy concerns of a worldwide database of every human's eyeballs:

• [Coindesk] People care! And people, of course, are worried about what The Orb means for surveillance and privacy. How do you respond to these concerns?
• [Blanie] So my high-level response is that something like World ID will eventually exist, meaning that you will need to verify [that you are human] on the internet, whether you like it or not. I think that's certainly going to happen with the progress in AI. It's probably going to happen in the next couple of years.

These people are so out of touch with reality that it's absurd.

You're gonna scan my eyeballs for a global database whether I like it not, are ya, Alex?