‘Worldcoin can be interesting tool in AGI era’

The emergence of powerful artificial intelligence necessitates that world governments and businesses prepare a new set of rules and standards, as its consequences are predicted to have extensive impacts across different fields. Some argue that millions of people are expected to lose their jobs, while others believe that AI will enhance human productivity and efficiency.

Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO who is behind the beginning of the recent AI phenomenon, said cryptocurrency and blockchain technology can address some of the issues arising from AI.

“Certainly, there are big questions, such as how society will distribute access to artificial general intelligence(AGI) systems and the benefits they offer, as well as how we will differentiate between tasks performed by people and those generated by machines. Currently, we do not have the answers to any of these questions, yet” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a meetup event held on Saturday in Seoul.

“Society will have to figure out more as we go along, and if something like Worldcoin can work, I think that's a quite interesting new tool for humanity,” he added.

While his leadership at OpenAI is widely recognized, but it is lesser known that he also co-founded other companies. One of these businesses is Worldcoin, which focuses on developing a system aimed at confirming a person’s identity and offering universal basic incomes, or UBIs, to people.

“One of the first things we thought we had to solve is every human being receive one identity and we started the project to launch a new currency and distribute it to all human beings,” said Alex, adding that they could not rely on the existing government identity systems, which can be vulnerable to manipulation.

The OpenAI CEO co-founded Worldcoin with Alex Blania in 2019 based on the belief that the emergence of highly performing AI could pose existential threats to humans.

Indeed, it is expected that humans will experience job losses as AI technology continues to evolve down the road. Some news reports have already highlighted job culling in certain areas, including marketing.

In its report in March, Goldman Sachs forecasted that 18 percent of work globally could be computerized, affecting approximately 300 million full-time jobs worldwide.

The Worldcoin co-founders believed that they could mitigate such threats with cryptocurrency and blockchain. They hope to utilize iris scanning technology to distinguish humans from AI as a form of 'proof of personhood' and store such data on a blockchain system to enable safe and transparent transactions.

In May, it was reported that the Worldcoin project was close to finalizing an investment deal to raise $100 million in funding, with a corporate value of $3 billion. Last year, they successfully completed the Series A round led by investment firm a16z. Among Worldcoin's investors are Khosla Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

This funding is expected to be used to mint the Worldcoin cryptocurrency and launch the World App, which will allow people to earn Worldcoin tokens by scanning their irises with a scanning device, called Orb. These tokens, stored on a distributed ledger, can be used to purchase goods and services on the Worldcoin platform.

Meanwhile, Altman, along with other OpenAI executives, has been on a month-long world tour to visit multiple cities across the globe, including Tokyo, London, Tel Aviv, and New Delhi.

On his first day in Seoul on Friday, Altman participated in a conference with around 100 local startups. Later that day, he had a meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Throughout a series of meetings with President Yoon and top government officials, he discussed future collaboration and measures to address challenges posed by the AI technology.

He said the world tour gave him an opportunity to gauge the level of excitement and the level of focus on artificial general intelligence(AGI), a term used to describe an AI solution that outperform humans in all aspects.

“The willingness of world leaders to come together and try to figure out how we address AGI safety is also more advanced than I realized,” said Altman, adding “And what we mostly observe is the energy and the optimism surrounding what we were already doing.”

The Saturday event was hosted by WorldCoin and co-organized by Silicon Valley news media firm The Miilk.