월드코인의 오브: 인간 신원 확인의 미래

월드코인의 오브는 인간과 봇을 구분하여 생체 데이터 수집 및 신원 확인에 대한 윤리적 문제를 제기합니다.

### 월드코인의 오브: 논란의 여지가 있는 생체인식 신원 확인 솔루션
* 🌐 스타트업 툴스 포 휴머니티가 개발한 월드코인의 오브는 **홍채를 스캔하여 사용자에게 고유한 디지털 신원**을 제공하는 생체인식 기기입니다.
* 💰 월드코인이 홍채 스캔을 허용하는 사용자는 **소량의 월드코인 암호화폐를 받고 실제 살아있는 사람으로 인증**되어 인터넷 사기를 줄이고 은행 및 소셜 서비스에 대한 접근성을 개선하는 것을 목표로 합니다.
* 👁 홍채는 엔트로피가 높아 얼굴이나 지문 인식과 달리 **수십억 명의 고유한 개인을 식별하는 데 적합**하기 때문에 선택되었습니다.
* 🔬 오브는 **7~9개의 신경망**을 사용하여 홍채 이미지를 캡처하고 홍채 코드로 변환한 후 **이더리움 블록체인의 탈중앙화된 머클 트리**에 저장합니다.
* 🏭 이 오브는 광학 기술의 중심지인 독일 예나에서 제조되며, **개당 약 1,500달러의 생산 비용**이 소요됩니다.
* 🌍 이미 **6백만 명이 넘는 사람들이 이 오브에 자신의 신원을 등록**했으며, 앞으로 **수만 명이 더 등록**할 계획입니다.
* 🤖 비평가들은 특히 개발도상국에서 **생체 인식 데이터 수집의 윤리와 사용자 착취 가능성**에 대한 우려를 제기합니다.
* 🌐 월드코인의 CEO인 알렉스 블라니아는 오브의 기술이 민주주의와 경제적 접근성을 향상시킬 수 있는 미래를 구상하고 있지만, **규제 문제와 탈중앙화의 필요성**을 인정하고 있습니다.

Our story begins in the future. It could be any town, planet Earth. But let's just say we're in Nuremberg, Germany. Because it's extra pretty. Now imagine that AI is so good, so sophisticated that it becomes nearly impossible to tell the difference between man and machine, human and bot. What is real and what is the other. If you're like me, at this point, you're going to develop a little bit of tech-infused paranoia. Is this guy real? How about him? Is that a baby bot? this handsome metal hunk? Is this ice cream or just gelato? How can you tell? Calm down. Ashley. What if - just go with me here. What if there were some type of otherworldly device that could separate the humans from the humanoids? What if there was some kind of. Magical orb? Well, in some countries, it's already arrived. And in other countries, it's already been banned.

So what is this thing, exactly? Well, we'll get into it all because that possibly necessary, possibly dystopian, possibly nesstopian future is now. The orb before you is made by a startup called Tools for Humanity. If it looks all too dramatic, that's sort of the point. The backers of the company, which include Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, have put $250 million into this venture and want folks to take notice of their orb. This is because they want to use it to scan the irises of as many people around the world as possible. All as part of their main project, known as Worldcoin. If you allow Worldcoin to scan your iris, two things happen. You get a small chunk of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency, and you're certified as a real living human. Which the company hopes will lead to a reduction in fraud on the internet and provide better access to banking and social services.

Critics, however, are wary about the ethics of biometric collection and the possible exploitation of users from developing countries. To learn more about what all this means, I met with Alex Blania, the head of Worldcoin, at a cafe in Nuremberg, about 20 minutes from his childhood home. Usually, biometrics solve a one-to-one problem, which is: I'm Alex, and I'm trying to log into my phone, and the phone knows how Alex looks like. Right? I've seen you before. Is this still the guy that I saw before? Yeah, and conceptually, it's actually a pretty easy problem to solve because it's really hard for me to look exactly like you. I need to build a mask or whatever. But for this proof of humanist problem, we need to attest that I'm unique amongst a set of whatever, a billion people. So it's not anymore I look like Ashlee, but I look like any other arbitrary human that did not sign up before.

Figuring out if a user is one of the 8 billion unique snowflakes in the world means choosing a robust biometric system for identity. Loads of these exist: fingerprints, voice recognition, veins in your palm. So why the iris? So very simply speaking, entropy is information per individual. And that is an important metric because it defines at which scale will the system start making meaningful mistakes. And actually, if you just calculate how much entropy to actually make that work on a billion people scale, face and fingerprints and those things will actually start breaking. But iris has enough entropy that you can actually scale to theoretically eight billion people. So then it’s different enough. You can find those differences clearly enough for enough people that it keeps working. The next step was building a device powerful enough to get the job done. Enter the orb. There's somewhere between seven or nine neural networks on a device that take all these sensor inputs and check that what you see is an actual person.

And then it takes a picture of both eyes, which is actually, in the grand scheme of things, a very common thing to do. Many airports have it, many countries have it on a government level. I do it all the time, yeah. And it takes a picture, calculates what is called an iris code, so it actually just turns that information into bits, deletes the picture. And then splits it into multiple pieces, sends it to multiple servers. And so, actually, not a single one of them has all the information. They compare it against all other previous users. If that comparison is successful, meaning you're actually unique, then that gets inserted into what is called a Merkle tree on Ethereum, which is just a data structure, a decentralized one. And what that actually achieves is that your wallet and your app are fully disconnected from your biometrics, so they don’t know who you are, you just proved that you’re actually a unique person to that service.

That you’re unique and you’re a human. I wanted to meet one of these orbs up close, so I caught a ride with Fabian Bodensteiner, the brains behind the orb. Fabian took me to a town called Jena, about 2.5 hours outside of Nuremberg, where the devices are made. What calls to you about the vision? Why did you decide to dedicate so much time to this? I think because especially in the beginning it had a huge philosophical element to it. Let's build the largest identity and financial network on the planet. This is a big goal. I was like, look, how often do we have the chance as a hardware guy to really change the world? We're going to the town of Jena for a reason. Carl Zeiss founded his company here in 1846, and more optics empires followed. During its industrial height, more than a third of the city's 100,000 inhabitants worked in the optical field.

This is one big reason that Worldcoin chose Jena as its manufacturing hub. The whole city basically was Zeiss back in the days. And then you had like a lot of best-in-class glass manufacturers here. You have all different kinds of companies here that are familiar with micromechanics when you have to move lenses in a very precise way. So there's just a high density of talent. Worldcoin has been shipping its orb around the world for more than a year. More than 6 million people have already registered their identities with the device. Now, the company is in the midst of perfecting and upgrading a new orb that it hopes to produce by the tens of thousands. Fabian agreed to show me how the bratwurst was made, and the secret ingredient is lots and lots of tech. So what you see here is the core of our imaging technology. The central opening that is for capturing a high-resolution image of the iris.

The central opening that is for capturing a high-resolution image of the iris. We are looking for heat, for depth, different wavelengths in the visible spectrum, in the infrared spectrum. This is a mirror that redirects the field of view of the camera. Here you now see the gimbal unit. It gets mounted to this aluminum base plate, and then you see a bunch of different sensor systems like a heat camera, a 2D time-of-flight camera, an RGB camera. Here's the technology that is called liquid lenses. It's basically an oil film, and if you apply current, you're able to change the shape of the oil, and without any mechanical parts, I can change the focus. So this is after all those assembly steps are done. This is the station where there's a full device test, and only if it passes this test, it's then okay for being finally assembled. So this is where after they pass the quality check, they receive their shells, then in the end,

this is how the whole thing looks. And unless I'm wrong, I mean nobody had ever really paired all this stuff together before for this job. Right? Right. That’s right. And a lot of this is your work, right? This is something you've been thinking about for years. That’s true. Yeah, it was hard. So basically you get different high-level requirements. We want to have a high-resolution image in this wavelength or that wavelength. At the same time, we want to fulfill certain industrial design requirements as well. And this is where as an engineer you kind of then try to balance all of this. All said and done, it costs about $1,500 for Worldcoin to make each orb. And the unique design is a big part of that calculation. There are infinite ways you could make this look. And you guys have chosen something quite dramatic, I would say. I think for some people it might be more intimidating than staring into a very generic sort of box.

So, this was a decision mainly driven by Alex, Sam, and his co-founder Max, where they came into the room and said, We need to have something that clearly sticks out. I always fought for, Let's make it a box in black. It's simple and cheap to manufacture, but to be honest, three years into building such products, I actually now enjoy it. Once you get used to it, it's actually pretty cool. Meanwhile, A.I. is getting better every day. And for Alex, there's no time to waste. It’s going to get much worse. These systems will be superhuman in many ways. Right. Like they will be able to politically influence whole democracies. I think there's a lot of issues, particularly in the United States, that would be materially different if we could have a popular vote online where you actually knew it was not being gamed. Is that at all part of where you guys see this going? At core, it gives everyone a democratic vote and it gives everyone economic access. I think no

one can argue with that being bad things. But as you might expect, Worldcoin has been trailed by controversy. In the early days, PayPal tried to encourage people to learn about its service and use it by giving these referral bonuses, money, you guys give people part of your crypto. Some people have argued you're encouraging people to give up their iris, their identity, especially in poor countries to sign up for this service. Yeah, I mean, I think that there would be a valid criticism if they actually would give something up. For example, if it would be a pharma company and we would take your whatever DNA data or to build a product, but actually at the current point in time, we don't take anything. There's no underlying business model of selling data to anyone or something like that. But it's rather, it's the bet that is network becomes bigger and bigger, there will be all kinds of things that other people will build on top of it and it will be increasingly valuable to you in your daily life.

Clearly, not everyone agrees. We've seen regulators here in Europe. I think Spain and Portugal recently shut the service down, and other people are questioning. I think Germany might be the only country in Europe right now where you can sign up for the service. In short, we just work with all regulators. For example, in Spain, in Portugal, I think the app was number one in the app store for a couple of months, things like 5% of Portugal signed up. So very much, I think it's the job of the regulators to ask questions, and if they think they don't understand things, to take their time and actually dig deeper. Like, I can see the problems you're trying to address, but people will be naturally fearful of even if you build this amazing system of having one company in control of all these identities. Well, if you say it like that, then it is. Which, in fact, we are not trying to build a company here, but

We are a company trying to build a protocol that is fundamentally different. It's like Ethereum. There was a founding team around it, but now it has evolved to be this whole big thing, and other people, including us, build companies and products and other protocols on top of that. And so, I think Worldcoin actually will only work if it's actually a decentralized open protocol that you don't have to trust a single company. In fact, even the design of the orb is open source. Theoretically, any orb enthusiast can download the plans and build an orb of their own. That is, of course, if there are even enough orb fanatics for any of this to matter. What I mean is, will the world come to love the orb? Without question, the company has the money to make a real go of trying. And Alex strikes me as someone who's committed to and passionate about the task at hand.

All that said, you need a technical whitepaper at the ready to explain the orb and what it does. It's an awful lot for passers-by on the street to digest. And that's before your mind even wanders into sci-fi dystopia land. Might I suggest, though, that the orb is less daunting than it seems? That world coin is up to something that the world will indeed need to think about and deal with in the years to come. If you buy into that, then it's time to embrace the orb.

The Making of Sam Altman’s Eyeball Scanner | Hello World

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논란의 오브: 월드코인의 인간 검증

미래의 독일 뉘른베르크에서는 '인류를 위한 도구'라는 스타트업이 극적인 구슬을 사용해 사람들의 홍채를 스캔하고 그 대가로 월드코인 암호화폐와 실제 인간으로서의 인증을 제공하고 있습니다.

이 회사의 목표는 인터넷 사기를 줄이고 은행 및 소셜 서비스에 대한 더 나은 액세스를 제공하는 것이지만, 비평가들은 생체 정보 수집과 악용 가능성에 대한 윤리적 우려를 제기하고 있습니다.

월드코인의 대표인 알렉스 블라니아는 단순히 개인을 매칭하는 것이 아니라 10억 명의 사람들 사이에서 인간의 신원을 증명해야 하는 독특한 과제에 대해 설명합니다.

고유한 신원 확인을 위한 홍채 인식의 힘

홍채 인식은 80억 명에게 효과적으로 확장할 수 있는 충분한 엔트로피를 가진 강력한 생체 인식 시스템으로, 독특하고 신뢰할 수 있습니다.

오브 디바이스는 여러 신경망을 사용해 양쪽 눈의 사진을 촬영하고 홍채 코드를 생성하여 사용자의 신원을 확인합니다.

이더리움의 탈중앙화된 데이터 구조는 사용자의 지갑과 앱이 생체 인식과 분리되어 고유한 신원 증명을 제공합니다.

예나에 위치한 월드코인의 제조 허브

월드코인이 제조 허브로 예나를 선택한 이유는 유리 제조와 마이크로메카닉스 분야에서 풍부한 역사를 가진 도시로 인재가 밀집해 있기 때문입니다.

이 회사는 오브에 600만 개 이상의 신원을 등록했으며, 현재 수만 개를 더 생산하기 위해 업그레이드 중입니다.

액체 렌즈와 다양한 센서를 포함한 이 오브의 고유한 이미징 기술은 홍채의 고해상도 이미지를 캡처하는 데 중요한 역할을 하며, 오브 한 개당 제작 비용은 1,500달러에 달합니다.

월드코인의 정체성과 민주주의에 대한 논란의 여지가 있는 접근 방식

월드코인의 창립자인 알렉스, 샘, 맥스는 독특하고 영향력 있는 제품을 만들고자 단순한 블랙박스 디자인을 사용했습니다.

이 회사의 사명은 모든 사람에게 민주적인 투표권과 경제적 접근성을 제공하는 것이지만, 암호화폐를 위해 홍채를 포기하도록 부추긴다는 비판에 직면해 있습니다.

유럽에서의 논란과 규제 당국의 반발에도 불구하고 월드코인은 규제 당국과 협력하는 것을 목표로 하고 있으며, 성장하는 네트워크가 사용자에게 점점 더 가치가 있을 것이라고 믿고 있습니다.

월드코인은 이더리움과 유사한 탈중앙화 개방형 프로토콜을 구축하는 것을 목표로 하며, 오브의 오픈 소스 디자인을 채택하고 있습니다.

이 회사의 설립자인 Alex는 오브의 성공을 위해 최선을 다하고 있지만, 그 개념은 사람들이 이해하기 어려울 수 있습니다.

이러한 어려움에도 불구하고 월드코인의 사명은 중요한 글로벌 문제를 해결하는 것이며, 따라서 오브의 역할은 미래에 중요한 역할을 할 것입니다.