The recent TIME essay 'The Orb Will See You Now' (June 23, p. 48) was upsetting to read for sure. But it appears with the rate of A.I. impostors metastasizing, humans will need a tried and true way of validating they're really human in any digital transactions. The recent case of an A.I. agent imitating Secretary of State Marco Rubio's voice to five other officials, is only the most noteworthy of a multitude of incidents.
And the most terrifying aspect? These A.I. bots and agents are surpassing humans in smarts. One example from the article: A University of Zurich study found that for one Reddit subgroup, A.I. generated agents were more than twice as successful as humans in their powers of persuasion.
Coming to the rescue, as it were - to halt A.I. impostor proliferation - is an outfit called 'Tools for Humanity (TfH). Created by Sam Altman using $50 m (of a $244 m investment) from investors like Coinbase and the venture - capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, the 'Orb' extracts biometric data from your iris.
Why the focus on the human iris? Well, because A.I. agents lack them, so it becomes the ideal identifier for actual humans.
Once the data is extracted the Orb uses it to activate a 'World ID' which is stored on your phone. Now, you can literally go anywhere (theoretically at least) and have a privacy preserving way of proving you are not an A.I.
Today, we're informed, there are around 1,609 around the world (the exact number isn't known), and TfH plans to launch 7,500 across the U.S. within the next 12 months. Already, TfH is well on the way to confirming over a million humans in South Korea.
As shown in the accompanying image, the S. Korean must get close enough to have her iris assayed. To check if she's human the first thing the Orb does is to use a neural network that takes input from various sensors. These include an infrared camera and thermometer. The Orb then takes a high resolution photo of her iris and an algorithm turns the picture into a 12,800 digit binary number called an iris code.
As you might surmise, the same iris will always yield the same code. In addition, the Orb examines whether any other Orbs have seen your iris code to be compared without revealing the underlying data itself.
In order to prevent duplicates being generated, the Orb anonymizes the iris code by converting it into several distinct encrypted codes and sends each to a secure server. This prevents users from repeatedly signing up (the completion of the process yields a packet of bitcoin in one' World App.)
The one bugbear in the system appears to be real privacy and protection of the iris data. For example, according to the article:
"If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, it will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. It argues those are no longer your personal data at all. In other words, once you look into the Orb a piece of your identity remains in the system forever."
Well, I'm not sure that I'm okay with that, thought Sam Altman and the other gurus insist if you really could delete your data "the premise of one ID per human would collapse."
Tools for Humanity's chief privacy officer Damien Kieran, when asked for a more complete explanation (p. 51) says:
"If total deletion was allowed, people could just delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or they could claim their bitcoin tokens, sell them, and cash n again."
Sounds plausible, but "the argument fell flat with E.U. regulators who recently declared the Orb posed fundamental data protection issues."
So who are you going to believe? In the end it may not matter. If the Orb becomes a permanent piece of internet architecture, people may have no choice but to participate in the TfH network in order to access social media or online services.
See Also:
Video: ‘The Orb’ verifies that internet users are human. Here’s how | CNN Business
And:
I Looked Into Sam Altman’s Orb and All I Got Was This Lousy Crypto | WIRED
And:
Sam Altman's Orb verifies your humanity for $42 of his crypto | Windows Central
No comments:
Post a Comment