Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball

https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/05/10/sam-altman-wants-your-eyeball/

by ChiptuneIsCool • 1 year ago

153 161 1 year ago

privacyguides.org

DonHopkins• 1 year ago

Speaking of Dickish dystopian "Minority Report style technology":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398910

DonHopkins on Nov 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Eyes Have It (1953)

"Lies, Inc." aka "The Unteleported Man" had an eye eater!

https://www.academia.edu/2360689/The_Missing_Pages_of_THE_UN...

Freya said, "Tell me. What is the 'eye-eater'? I have to know." Her breath caught in her throat; raggedly, she managed to breathe, but with difficulty.

"A fungiform," the taller of the THL agents said briefly. "One that resides here." He said nothing further. [...]

The eye-eater said pleasantly, "Mr. Ben Applebaum, reach inside me and you will find a slightly-different edition of Dr. Bloode's Text. A copy of the twentieth edition, which I ingested some time ago... but as far as I can determine, not already dissolved by my gastric juices." The idea seemed to amuse it; the lower portion of its face split apart in a peal of excrutiatingly-penetrating laughter.

"You're serious?" Rachmael said, feeling disorganized. And yet the eye-eater was correct; if it did possess a later edition of the text he most certainly had reason to seek it out -- wherever it lay, even within the body of the offensive eye-eater. "Look, look," the eye-eater exclaimed; it held in one of its longer [...]

https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/dick15-0.html

"A lie," the eye-eater rumbled ominously; again its pseudopodia whipped viciously, seeking out the agile creditor balloon, which dipped and bobbed barely beyond the flailing reach of the several sucker-impregnated arms. "As a matter of fact, this gentleman here-" It indicated Rachmael. "My understanding is that the lady and this individual are emotionally involved. Miss Holm is-was, whatever-a friend of mine, a very close friend. But hardly my mistress." The eye-eater looked embarrassed. [...]

https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=419...

Let me quote one of Dr. Bloode's quite singular Thingisms.

"'Thingisms'?" Rachmael felt baffled -- and wary. He had a deep intuition that the Thingism, whatever it was, would not be amusing. Not to him, anyhow, or to any human.

"I always enjoyed this one," the eye-eater intoned, its saliva spilling from its mouth as it writhed with glee. "Consider: since you are about to read the book, here is Thingism Number Twenty, dealing with books.

"Ahem. 'The book business is hidebound.'"

After a pause, Rachmael said, "That's it?"

"Perhaps you failed to understand. I'll give you another gem, one more particular favorite of mine. And if that fails to move you ... Oooohhh! That's a Thingism! Listen! 'The representative of the drayage firm failed to move me.' Oooohhh! How was that?" It waited hopefully.

Baffled, Rachmael said, "I don't get it."

"All right." The eye-eater's tone was now harsh. "Read the book purely for educational purposes, then. So be it. You want to know the origin of this form which I have taken. Well, everyone will take it, sooner or later. We all do; this is how we become after we die."

He stared at it.

"While you ponder," the eye-eater continued, "I'll delight you with a few more Thingisms of Dr. Bloode's. This one I always enjoy. 'The vidphone company let me off the hook.' How was that? Or this one: 'The highway construction truck tore up the street at forty miles an hour.' Or this: 'I am not in a position to enjoy sexual relations.' Or --"

-- "Lies, Inc.", by Phil Dick

92834092322• 1 year ago

Why are these rich assholes so obsessed with tracking everyone?

Tools for Humanity bragged about many large partnerships that should make any privacy advocates shiver in dread: the Match Group dating apps conglomerate (Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish), Stripe, and Visa are some of them.

Visa and Stripe being involved in this should indeed make everyone shiver and push back against this. Altman is not a good person and this company has already had its unethical practices exposed[0].

[0] https://icj-kenya.org/news/worldcoin-case-postponed-amid-con...

batch12• 1 year ago

Control. You have to have a good inventory to apply and audit controls.

grumbel2• 1 year ago

In the AI driven future we are heading into, telling the difference between AI-bot and human might become a valuable good.

nradov2• 1 year ago

Why? And how would that even work? Just because an online account is tied to a verified real human doesn't guarantee that the content isn't coming from an AI-bot.

add-sub-mul-div• 1 year ago

So they're going to get rich from introducing both the problem and its nightmare of a solution.

wil421• 1 year ago

Or they just want to sell us minority report style ads.

Analemma_• 1 year ago

Because they have to be able to sell you the cure to the disease they created: pretty soon nearly all content online will be AI-generated, and the only way you'll be able to tell if you're talking to a human is with cryptographically-sealed boot chains, verified with remote attestation, and with this eyeball device at the end to make sure there's a human there.

RandomBacon• 1 year ago

In the future:

Easy Remote Job Opportunity! Pay is $1/hr. Perfect for retirees, disabled, and even kids! Requirements: have an eye ball. Duties: whatever you want, except when this device beeps, look into the camera.

Is Amazon's Mechanical Turk or whatever paying people to solve captchas still a thing?

creata4• 1 year ago

the only way you'll be able to tell if you're talking to a human is with...

Or the tried-and-true method of trusting only friends, friends of friends, recommendations from friends, etc.

smj-edison• 1 year ago

It makes me think of the idea of legibility[1]: it's hard to understand incredibly large and complicated systems, so the solution is to simplify, and then enforce that simplification. From a high-level perspective, it seems reasonable to surveil everyone, to help them. I think someone really can delude themselves into thinking that it's necessary, utilitarian-style.

Now, if we designed technology for humans, we'd realize that most humans have local networks of trust. E.g. I talk to my friend in person, she tells me her discord handle, now we've established trust. In addition, trust is something that's gradually built, not given all at once in a EULA[2].

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

[2] https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2024/10/15/trust-takes-time/

_Algernon_2• 1 year ago

Information is a prerequisite for manipulating the masses. The writing has been on the wall on that front since at least Cambridge Analytica.

tuyguntn3• 1 year ago

This is the same guy who worked at OpenAI because he "loved" what he does and he wasn't doing it for money. ( Until this year obviously ;) )

tuyguntn3• 1 year ago

P.S. Not blaming him for this behavior, probably I would also change my mind immediately if someone offered me 7% of $300B

udev40962• 1 year ago

Do you really think everyone out there is willing to be a sell out?

preommr• 1 year ago

He already had enough wealth that he was in a threshold where it wouldn't matter if he got a few more billion if that the was the lifestyle he was willing to lead. There isn't a magical kind of sugar, or drug that's available to a multi-billionaire but not someone with 100s of millions.

If somebody is trying to get billions, they're doing it because they're the type of person that wants to be a part of politicis, and a power player. That kind of person was never going to just give up the opportunity to make more money and gather more power to do more things that they see as neccessary and as good.

n2d4• 1 year ago

What are you referring to with "until this year"? There was a report last year that Sam Altman would receive equity in the new for-profit, but he denied this, and the recent restructuring post makes no mention of it.

iamthejuan• 1 year ago

They did that here in the Phillipines and they exploit the poor. They give money for people to allow them to scan their eyes. These people do not know the consequences of what they are doing.

ChadNauseam• 1 year ago

What are the consequences?

andy_ppp3• 1 year ago

That you can be identified, cataloged and controlled, potentially. We have the technology to create heaven or hell depending on who controls it…

jbverschoor• 1 year ago

The consequence is that you can have an actual fair global economy and better wealth distribution

koakuma-chan• 1 year ago

Renders biometric auth pointless.

dheera2• 1 year ago

These people do not know the consequences of what they are doing.

They might have known the consequences, but money is money. I feel like for 99% of people there is a certain sum of money for which they will give into pretty much any kind of data collection. Even I'd give into it if they gave me enough. The bar is just higher, but there does exist a certain $X for which I would give in as well.

alwa4• 1 year ago

Most times I’ve been biometrically catalogued, I wasn’t paid for the privilege. The government just kind of said I had to, and I wasn’t in a position to argue.

I guess I am in some sense compensated by the data brokers who psychometrically profile my internet use and resell their conclusions—but “free ad-supported internet content” isn’t exactly fungible cash…

wellthisisgreat2• 1 year ago

How much would you want for your genome?

udev40962• 1 year ago

He can chortle my (eye)balls!

moffkalast• 1 year ago

Anton doesn't call me anything. He grimly does his work, then he sits motionless until it's time to work again. 4o could take a page from his book.

someothherguyy• 1 year ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chortle

MaxPock• 1 year ago

They did that in Kenya and now a judge has ordered that they deleted all that data https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/worldcoin-ord...

92834092322• 1 year ago

Which I'm sure he absolutely totally did. Trust him. Just like US judges telling Elon and DOGE to delete treasury data. I'm sure they did it, scouts honor!

roschdal• 1 year ago

Nein.

cube00• 1 year ago

Hopefully everyone who handed over their DNA to 23andMe will remember how that ended before they hand over their iris to Sam.

echelon• 1 year ago

They haven't seen any impact yet. Nobody is rejecting them from insurance or job offers yet.

It's worse with 23andme, too, because the blast radius is all of your relatives that didn't take the test at all.

blindriver• 1 year ago

Altman is evil to want everyone’s retina scan but he will probably get it because most people don’t care anymore.

ambicapter• 1 year ago

The article describes him targeting the most vulnerable to get his first 500k users. It's not that people don't care it's that they are powerless in the fact of a well-funded adversary.

wnevets2• 1 year ago

Even if you 100% believe in your heart that Altman would never do anything negative with these scans that doesn't mean someone else won't if/when they get access to them. People may trusted 23andMe with their genetic data but now no one knows who will end up owning it and why the buyer believes buying the data is profitable.

https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23an...

sssilver• 1 year ago

Every company is exactly one CEO away from doing anything none would ever expect.

Squeeeez• 1 year ago

Not only companies sadly.

usrnm• 1 year ago

Most companies are exactly 0 CEOs away from that

wing-_-nuts2• 1 year ago

When talking about government surveillance, people often ask some version of 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?'. My response is always, 'It's not that I don't trust our current government, I don't trust all future governments that come after this one'.

I hope given the recent events of having some hired thugs rifle through government databases (including the OPM, which supposedly has very sensitive data from security clearance applications), that maybe letting people collect and store data on you should be avoided at all cost.

The older I get, the more I understand the stereotype of the eccentric former techie who no longer wants anything to do with modern technology or society

the_snooze• 1 year ago

'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?'

I like to go with the simpler "I hold lots of sensitive data for people who trust me: my family, my friends, my employer. One would have to be a sociopath to disclose other people's secrets without their consent."

patrickmay• 1 year ago

I see no reason to trust the current government, nor any of the previous ones in my lifetime.

theyinwhy3• 1 year ago

Why would people distrust governments more than companies? I never understood that part.

andoando• 1 year ago

I mean, I dont want the private details of my life exposed, illegal or not. Who does

plastic3169• 1 year ago

It is insane to defend Sam Altman here, but it looks to me that World goes out of their way to not to link the biometric data to identity or even save it. Sure you need to trust the black box but if the company gets taken over there is no data to for the new evil owners to access.

qwertox3• 1 year ago

Same happened with Komoot, a popular German outdoors app. They have millions of tracks and user profiles, it's also a bit of a social network.

From one day to the next they sold to the Italian "developer company" Bending Spoons.

That company acquired Brightcove a few months earlier and several other services like Evernote, Meetup, companies which have nothing to do with "outdooring".

From one day to the next they got access to my 13.000 tracked km, 800 hours of data. My profile is set to private, but now I have to assume that all this data will be sold to advertisers. "Anonymized".

tim3338• 1 year ago

It's kind of different in that with 23andMe they know your name and genetic data. With Worldcoin you don't give your name and they just get a photo of your eyes.

wnevets2• 1 year ago

they just get a photo of your eyes.

this comes across as if you are attempting to downplay the importance of this biometric data which is weird considering Altman is paying to get access to just a photo of your eyes.

ipaddr• 1 year ago

So anyone who can scan your eyes can get into your bank account is very different compared to 23andme where you can give fake information as a name, buy a test with cash and they collect limited data that isn't worth much to advertisers. The first opens up many risks and surveillance opportunities that are different from the second where pooling of dna can link you to physical crimes or paternity confirmation where dna is found.

The first wants one data breach anywhere to last a lifetime and the second is a bigger media story because people believe what we can do with the dna 23andme collects is more than reality.

vizzah• 1 year ago

no, there shouldn't be a photo, only a hash, which is useless by itself.

an0malous• 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s the same, the eye scan isn’t linked to any other PII so all they know is “this is an eye scan of a human being.” What kind of abuse could be done with that data? I don’t think they even store the scan, they store a hash of it.

And on the other hand, I do wish there was a way to distinguish real humans from bots on the Internet. I think it’s only a matter of time until the web becomes useless thanks to AI. What’s a better solution?

amelius• 1 year ago

I would trust Apple, though.

mapcars2• 1 year ago

Something I don't understand is how is that so bad? Even today one can buy passport data, social security numbers etc on black markets leaked by government employees in most countries. Once they start using more biometric data I'm sure it will be leaked as well.

If we assume that all this information is permanently available in a public blockchain, how does it change anything for society really? I can think of security checks becoming better, what are the negative possibilities?

creata4• 1 year ago

Justifying what Worldcoin is doing by comparing them to black market leaks isn't helping their case.

mapcars2• 1 year ago

I'm not justifying Worldcoin and I don't know all the details about what they are doing.

My realistic assumption is that all this data will become public one way or another, so I'm trying to understand how we can make sure it can't be abused.

ethbr1• 1 year ago

Why would anyone want anything to do with Sam Altman to have control of it though?

At least if it's open, access is equal.

fnord77• 1 year ago

terrifying now, common place in 10 years.

like fingerprints or facial scans

voytec3• 1 year ago

Biometric data is valuable. Assuming that Musk's DOGE crew copied data obtained from US gov agencies, they may have also obtained biometric data of EU citizens. At least some countries have shared citizens' fingerprints with the US. Not just Visa Waiver Program applicants' but as I understand, previous government of Poland made a deal to share all citizens' fingerprints. And these are collected from anyone renewing their government ID card.

mzajc• 1 year ago

previous government of Poland made a deal to share all citizens' fingerprints

This piqued my interest, but I couldn't find anything. Do you know where I could find more information about it?

voytec3• 1 year ago

Sadly, I'm unable to find specific documents confirming it. AFAIK, Poland agreed to biometric data sharing with the US Office of Biometric Identity Management in exchange for loosening travel requirements. That said, US seems to be pushing[0] for more such agreements.

[0] https://www.statewatch.org/news/2023/august/eu-and-usa-ploug...

Waterluvian• 1 year ago

You got me thinking and I’m not sure my fingerprints or any other biometric data have ever formally been recorded by the federal, provincial, or local governments.

In most cases the most biometric data is your photo and I guess height?

So beginning to normalize the collection of eyeball data as a thing is a pretty significant escalation.

n_ary• 1 year ago

In EU, obtaining an identity card needs one’s recent biometric(important!) photo and certain finger prints. Not sure about US.

Also where I work, to enter certain facilities, I also need to not only scan my badge, but also my fingerprint or sometimes palm(may sound absurd but I am sure some of you work in same sector).

voytec3• 1 year ago

In most cases the most biometric data is your photo and I guess height?

As I mentioned - Polish id renewals require fingerprints scan and this data was likely shared with the US Office of Biometric Identity Management.

Where it comes to passports, fingerprint scans were required for years and in Poland (and I'd guess all EU passports) there's a low quality black and white photo printed inside, but the card/book has an embedded NFC with a higher resolution color photo. Whenever airport security takes one's passport, they swipe it over NFC reader and compare your face with a higher quality version than you see on the physical item, which usually is low quality photo crossed with anti-forgery Guilloché[0] lines. Feel free to read your passport and id with a raspi/arduino and NFC reader :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilloché

jt21902• 1 year ago

For e-commerce to continue, there has to be a way to confirm that the transfer of funds from a bank or credit account to the vendor’s account is approved by a human who controls the bank/credit account. As AI-powered scams become more sophisticated, this confirmation will get harder/more expensive, to the point where e-commerce might not work for most goods.

Perhaps generating “proof of humanity” digital signatures from retina scans isn’t the optimal solution, but I’ve yet to hear of any other privacy-preserving approaches. Perhaps transacting online will a require government-issued ID.

mcshicks• 1 year ago

In the US there is a bill that's been floating around Congress for a while called the improving digital identity act.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884...

hsuduebc23• 1 year ago

I'm always struck by how sci-fi writers, in a way, act like prophets. It's as if common sense or imagination keeps pointing us toward the same outcomes. As strange as it sounds, if we don't wipe ourselves out, we somehow already know what the future holds.

caseyy• 1 year ago

Meanwhile, in reality, banks have solved proof of humanity, identity (KYC), and financial services for a long time. Any account in the world can be proven human by making a debit/credit card transaction from a card with a matching name.

For the first time, you can now give your biometrics to OpenAI to do nothing more than you already can. This is just a pure cult of personality.

josh2600• 1 year ago

I can only assume that you don’t work in financial technology if you believe that KYC is a solved problem.

Proving authenticity in an increasingly diasporic society is difficult.

We should seek to either reduce or embrace entropy in the design of our systems. You either want systems which prove there are no Sybil attacks, or you manufacture halls of mirrors.

This is a continuous battle, there’s no panacea here, even the eye scan has threat vectors.

Calling KYC a solved problem is ludicrous.

lokar• 1 year ago

It depends what you mean by solved.

Banks tend not to over engineer things. KYC can be seen as a 3 sided trade off: cost of KYC infra/process/etc, lost revenue from denied business and fines from regulators.

They (the banks) don’t really care about the social goals of KYC, they just try to best optimize for expected value in the trade offs.

The regulators understand this, and are basically fine with it. They have their own trade offs they are balancing.

Both sides mostly find and equilibrium.

davedx• 1 year ago

I’ve been working on KYC recently, curious to hear what the problems with it are in your opinion?

tim3338• 1 year ago

Worldcoin is supposed to be anonymous - you don't give your name. A theory behind it was on things like HN you could show you were human without having to do a KYC id proof, though that never took off, at least in two years I haven't come across it. In practice it works as number go up crypto ponzi like most of that field.

rsync• 1 year ago

"Any account in the world can be proven human by making a debit/credit card transaction from a card with a matching name."

A reminder: neither the Visa nor Mastercard payment networks have any ability to match, or authenticate, cardholder name.

We pretend that they do and we're used to merchants and operators (and web forms) insisting on exact matches of cardholder name ... but it's all a fiction.

As long as you get the digits - and the supporting number/zip portions - correct, the transaction will run with "Mickey Mouse" ... or even "A B" (initials).

This is in contrast to AMEX whose network does have cardholder name verification.

GTP3• 1 year ago

Interesting, I didn't know about this. Do you know why web forms require the name as well then? Is it just to give some additional sense of security to the user or try to scare scammers? Do you have some resources explaining the inner workings more in detail?

tim3338• 1 year ago

I did the worldcoin scan thing a couple of years ago and it's all quite jolly. The article is a bit scaremongering. Re:

Simply put, the premise is this: scan your eyeball, get a biometric tag, verify yourself, buy our apps (and cryptocurrency). ... Minority Report style technology

it's not really like that. They take a photo of your eye to check you are a new person and not someone who has an account already, then give you an account which is like an anonymous crypto wallet with a private key. You never do an eye scan again in normal use. They give you free crypto/money rather than you needing to buy anything. I've been given ~$300 - it fluctuates a fair bit with crypto prices.

I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech.

qwertox3• 1 year ago

I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech.

What does this have to do with curiosity or new-tech positivity? Nothing.

Give biometric data, get fluctuating ~$300. You did nothing else than sell something you have. I'm not judging.

Jommi4• 1 year ago

how will we solve distinguishing real humans over bots online?

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 1 year ago

<< I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech.

I would ask that you elaborate a little more. I am an example of one. I like LLMs, but I cringe internally and externally at times at some of the things people seem to want to use them for ( and I just saw a presentation that basically said the equivalent of "add AI here, happy sunshine leaves there". And how? Magic. Nobody knows. ). I like crypto, but it is impossible to not see million rugpulls, scams and so on out there. I like technology, but I am very, very aware of the issues with basic human nature.

tim3338• 1 year ago

I guess so. It's pretty similar to getting a crypto wallet and some altcoin. I guess whether you find that interesting is down to the individual.

hsuduebc23• 1 year ago

So this is the future-billionaires won't just sell us services, they'll trap us in entire ecosystems they control. I'd be more surprised if X doesn't eventually turn into one of them in recent future.

__MatrixMan__5• 1 year ago

So where's the line? What as X not yet done to make you suggest that it is not already the kind of trap that you're describing?

hsuduebc23• 1 year ago

They are not wanting to scan my retinas. For now. They are approaching it more from the bottom.

justanotheratom• 1 year ago

hey atleast it is a for-profit, so no chance of that particular rug-pull.

"Tools for Humanity (TFH), a for-profit company co-founded by Sam Altman, Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern in 2019."

the_d3f4ult• 1 year ago

I'm an ophthalmologist. I look at irises all day. People's irises change over the course of their life. Sometimes dramatically if they have some kind of pathology. Are they updating their model periodically? What keeps someone from getting locked out of their crypto gains if they develop an iris nevus or have cataract surgery or start on flomax?

sillyfluke2• 1 year ago

Thanks for this interesting point of view. However, it may makes sense to consider whether the gap you point to can be reduced significantly with AI, by training it separately with aging eye data using existing medical data independent from the general iris pool. I have no idea how realistic that would be personally.

al_borland• 1 year ago

I wondered this with things like FaceID. In my head, every time it unlocks it’s tweaking and tuning the what it knows to be the user, so it can adapt as a person ages, goes through weight changes, etc. However, in practice this may not be the case, since there is an easy backup and a person can re-register pretty easily.

On the topic of eyes, my dad recently had surgery on his eyes and they did one at a time, for obvious reasons. That could be a way to transition. Register both, have surgery on one, let it heal, register the healed eye, have surgery on the other, then register that. Always using the good and registered eye to authenticate. But this isn’t realistic. It requires way too much forethought and planning, when people’s minds are elsewhere.

beAbU• 1 year ago

Are you willing to gatekeep you wealth behind an AI that might hallucinate that your iris has changed more than it actually has?

4b11b4• 1 year ago

lol

jt21902• 1 year ago

I presume that you would want your crypto gains to require “proof of identity” to access, not just “proof of humanity”, which is what World provides.

Also, once you have generated keys with your eyes, you use the keys, not your eyes, as tokens to validate your humanness.

tim3338• 1 year ago

The iris thing is only used to open an account to stop you getting multiple accounts. After that access is private key. Maybe I'll try going back for a second account!? My irises may be different enough 2 years on?

__MatrixMan__5• 1 year ago

Biometrics are not a viable solution to the sybil problem.

The more biometric tech converges on the ability to get a cryptographic hash of one's body, the further it retreats from the kind of thing that a layperson will trust. You end up with a root of trust that <1% of the population can verify and then you end up asking 100% of them to rely on systems built on that root. You're never going to be able to convince even a majority of people that some clever hacker hasn't cracked an iris scanner and associated millions of fake ID's with millions of AI's for scam purposes.

It needs to be the kind of thing that lets Alice assert that this key goes with Bob just after she shook Bob's hand in meatspace. Something where, in order for Bob to have two identities according to Alice, he'll have to meet her in meatspace twice and manage to have her not notice that she's already met him once before. PGP key signing parties were pretty much there, they just came too early (and not enough work was done to teach the masses about them).

The web becomes more of a dark forest with each passing day. Eventually the cost of maintaining your part of the trust graph will be lower than the cost of getting screwed by some root of trust that you can't influence or verify. I'm sad to say that I think the point where these lines cross is significantly down and to the right of where we are.

fc417fc8023• 1 year ago

PGP key signing parties were pretty much there, they just came too early (and not enough work was done to teach the masses about them).

I won't dispute that PGP key signing parties coupled with government ID work very well for certain very specific usecases such as validating distro maintainers.

However for more mainstream and widespread uses that never occurred, what about work on the tooling? I've yet to see a web of trust implementation that really felt like it was properly generalized, scalable, and intuitive to interact with.

Case in point, if you wanted to implement a distributed code auditing solution on top of git and signed commits, what library would you use for the web of trust graph calculations? And would key signing parties be a usable root of trust for that with the current state of the software ecosystem? My personal view is that both of those things are woefully lacking.

__MatrixMan__5• 1 year ago

I'd agree that they're both woefully lacking, but there's nothing fundamental preventing them from being successful, it just hasn't been done yet because our existing institutions are not yet degraded to the point where that juice is worth the squeeze.

Biometrics, on the other hand, are flawed for in a much more fundamental way.

Geee• 1 year ago

This whole idea doesn't make any sense. Someone with a world ID could still be running AI agents on their behalf with their private key, or use stolen / bought keys from other people. On the other hand, Sam Altman could be running millions of fake personas, because they can generate keys from thin air. Also, Sam Altman would have the power to invalidate your keys, or the keys of people he doesn't like. It would be an absolute catastrophe if this system was used for voting or something important.

water-data-dude• 1 year ago

Aside from the issue of biometrics not being covered by the 5th amendment (so I won’t use them for login purposes), I’m hesitant to arrange incentives such that melon baller based crime is lucrative.

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

No.

Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball

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