Twitter Becomes X, Sam Altman’s Worldcoin and Google’s Robotics Lab

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(LAUGHS):: Do you ever like — when you were edited, when you had an editor, when you worked at a real publication, did you ever put stuff in a story that you knew was bad, just so your editor would cut that and not the thing that you actually wanted to stay in?

No, and thank god, I never worked somewhere where I had to think like that because trying to play the nine-dimensional chess of, how do I get something past my editor, would have driven me out of this business.

(LAUGHS):

I call this my green M&M strategy, where I like — I put something that’s horrible in the story, and I just leave it there. And then, there’s something like three paragraphs below that that I know they’re going to want to cut, but that I really want them to leave in.

Right.

So I’ll just be like, admittedly, some have asked whether 9/11 actually happened.

(LAUGHS):

And the editor says, you know what? I know how we can save one paragraph worth of space.

(THEME MUSIC)

I’m Kevin Roose. I’m a tech columnist at “The New York Times.”

I’m Casey Newton from “Platformer.”

And you’re listening to “Hard Fork.”

This week on the show, X marks the spot where Twitter died. Plus, why iris-scanning orbs may be coming to a city near you. And, we visit Google’s Robotics Lab, where they are putting AI inside the machine’s brain. We’ll tell you how many have escaped the lab.

All right, Casey, I have been dying to talk to you about what the hell is going on at the company formerly known as Twitter.

Well, Twitter doesn’t exist anymore, Kevin. We have to stop using that word.

(LAUGHS):

It’s no longer an active concern.

Right. So let’s just do some chronology up top, because I think it’s useful for people to understand how quickly and kind of erratically all of this happened, right? So Saturday night, Elon Musk tweets, at about 9:00 o’clock Pacific time, “Soon, we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand, and gradually, all the birds.”

Now, we have known for some time that Elon Musk has wanted to re-brand Twitter. He started a couple holding companies for Twitter called X Holdings. So we kind of knew that something was afoot. But talk to me about how sort of chaotically and quickly this all happened.

Well, as you noted, it was all done in a very haphazard way. On Sunday night, they projected a giant X onto Twitter’s headquarters on Market Street. And then, Monday, a crane showed up and started to take down the Twitter sign, right?

And actually got stopped by San Francisco Police before they could finish. So at least for a little while, the sign on the Twitter building just had an E-R left — just was “Er.”

“Er,” yeah, just “er,” which really does capture, I think, a lot of people’s feelings about the whole thing. It is, what did Elon Musk do that? Because — er, hmm, yeah.

So anyway, by that point, of course, the product had begun to transform. And so if you opened up the app, all of a sudden, where you used to see the bird, you now saw an X.

Yeah. And at most companies, like, a re-branding is something that takes many months. It involves lots of consultants and designers.

And focus groups to do things for you.

Exactly. This was like, let’s just throw it up and see what happens. And not only was the product sort of renamed, but actually, people started going around inside Twitter’s headquarters and pulling the bird logos off the walls, and renaming the conference rooms. So my colleagues at “The New York Times” reported on Monday that the company’s conference rooms have been changed to words and phrases with the letter X in them — like Exposure, Exult, and S3xy, with a 3 instead of an E.

I’m so excited to get laid off in the S3xy room. (LAUGHS)

That’s going to take the sting out of it. Frankly, any room you’re in is the sexy room. But I just like — I think it’s really strange.

And actually, I had a moment this week where I was opening up my computer to start my workday like normal.

So it’s roughly noon, are we talking?

(LAUGHS): Come on now! So I wake up, I pull up my Chrome, I instinctively go to Twitter, and instead of the blue bird in my little browser tab, there’s this black X. And that was the moment for me where it clicked — like, oh, this is not Twitter anymore.

Yeah.

Like the thing — like, I don’t know why that was the moment for me. But like until now, if you didn’t really like think about it too hard, you could kind of just squint and pretend that Twitter was still the old Twitter.

And lots of people have been doing that, basically — just trying to pretend all the Elon stuff is noise, and I’m just going to keep tweeting like I’ve always been tweeting.

Right. And you could kind of fool yourself because some of your friends were still there. The site and the app looked roughly the same. But like for me, that little black X in the browser bar was the moment where I was like, oh, it’s gone. Like, I’m not using Twitter anymore. This is a site that’s owned by Elon Musk, who probably does not want me on it.

No.

And it just was a moment where it went from feeling like a thing that I have been doing for more than a decade at this point when I opened my browser is no longer a thing that feels good to me.

Absolutely. And look, I think Twitter has died a lot of deaths since October when Elon Musk walked in with that sink. And in fact, I think that day was probably the first of those deaths. I think it died again when he got rid of 3/4 of the staff. I think it died as he gradually replaced the old content moderation policies with more of an anything-goes ethos. But the moment when the website actually just redirects to another name and the app itself has another logo, yeah, Twitter is no more.

So I want to talk about why this is all happening, because it seems totally incomprehensible to me. And let’s talk first about the official explanation, which is the one that Twitter C.E.O Linda Yaccarino gave.

And it’s so beautiful. This is some of the best writing that you’ll ever hear. And Kevin, I hope you do it justice when you read it.

OK, let’s do a dramatic reading of her tweet.

OK.

X is the future state of unlimited interactivity, centered in audio, video, messaging, payment/banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.

I mean, what doesn’t X do, you know?

Right. So what is the official explanation that the company is giving for why they are changing the name of the service?

Well, going back to before Elon completed the transition, he talked about wanting to make Twitter into a super app, right? So in China, you have WeChat, this app that is your entire digital life. You shop with it. You post on its sort of internal social network. It’s your pass on the train, right? And that’s a huge opportunity, right? It’s essentially, it’s like, well, if one app on your phone constituted all of the economic activity that you did, Elon Musk would make a lot of money.

So that’s what he wanted to do. It will not be possible for him in the United States for a bunch of reasons. But that is the goal — is that X is essentially going to be your one-stop shopping app for everything.

Right, so that’s the official explanation that we’re getting, is that Twitter is becoming this huge super app that’s going to do everything from handling your banking information, to getting you onto the subway, to paying you for your banger tweets, or zeets, or whatever we’re calling them now.

Yeah, and by the way, have you uploaded all your banking information to x.com yet?

(LAUGHS): I’ve been waiting. I saw the activity over the weekend, and just the thoughtfulness of the new X rollout. And I thought, I would like to give that man my Social Security number and routing number.

I called up Wells Fargo and I said, it’s over between the two of us.

(LAUGHS):

I’m taking my business to a man that gets me.

OK, so you have a different explanation for why all of this is happening. What is your take on why Elon Musk is doing this?

Yeah, so the way that I have described what he’s doing is cultural vandalism, right? And I see this as very much a political project, and specifically a reactionary political project. And we’ve talked about that a bit on the show in the past — the way that Elon Musk was really aggrieved by what he saw as a growing sense of entitlement among tech workers in general, but specifically at Twitter.

Twitter had endorsed a lot of liberal values and causes like Black Lives Matter. And you know, I’ll just never forget when after he took over he opened a closet, and he found a bunch of T-shirts that the old Twitter had made that said “Stay Woke” on them, which recognized the company’s role as a part of the Black Lives Matter movement. And to Elon, I mean, he just could not stop making fun of this. Like, this was just so funny to him — that, essentially, anyone would support the Black Lives Matter movement.

But it was the way that he was preening for the camera when he talked about this that sort of let me know, this is the project. This is the point. It is to go into this important cultural institution and to tear it down from the inside, and to say, these values no longer apply. I am going to wipe this thing off the face of the Earth. And we eventually got there. And it didn’t even take that long.

So you think this is basically like a kamikaze mission, right? He’s trying to run Twitter into the ground. My theory about what is happening here is partly what you said — is partly that there’s this sort of cultural vandalism happening — but I also wonder if he just is starting to feel like Twitter is too boring and too small to command his attention. Like he is clearly obsessed with Twitter the service, but I think as time has gone on — it’s been almost a year since he acquired it now, and I think that he is just of ideas.

He tried subscriptions. He tried sharing revenue with creators. He tried longer videos and bringing back the people who’d been banned — all these ideas. And nothing has really moved the needle in the direction that he wants it to go. And so this, to me, feels like an act of surrender. He’s just saying, well, I can’t fix Twitter, so I’m just going to rename it and fold it into something bigger. And maybe you’ll forget about how disastrous the past year has been.

Well, look, in the run-up to him acquiring it, a lot of folks said, you know, he’s probably going to get bored of this, because it’s actually hell to run a social network. You do spend most of your time having to weigh in on these very difficult questions about content moderation, the business model is a challenge, and I think a lot of folks thought, this guy’s got a lot of other things on his plate. He’s just not going to want to stick with it for the long haul. He, of course, famously tried to get out of the acquisition, was eventually compelled to buy the thing by a court. And so then, he’s in charge of it and, as you point out, he tries some things, and they don’t work. I do think that it is reasonable to assume that, in the aftermath of the failure of his original set of ideas for Twitter, he’s now beginning to think like, well, what else could I do? I guess I could go dust off this idea that I had in the ‘90s for a payments app and just hope that the people who are still using Twitter will come along for that ride.

Right.

And let’s just say, that’s a terrible idea!

It’s a very bad idea.

You know, it’s like if you’ve acquired the user base of Coke, and then you’re saying, like, and now we’re going to sell the mortgages. It’s like, well, you can try to do it, but you went about it in the worst way imaginable.

Right. It does not inspire confidence that one would need to hand over your finances to this man.

Right.

So let’s talk about these Twitter alternatives.

Yeah!

Because a few weeks ago, we had our special episode with Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, right as they launched Threads.

And just to remind everybody what happened, we did a podcast when Threads launched, and within the first week, it had 100 million signups. So we’re calling that the “Hard Fork” bump. And it could have worked for your product launch, too. Get in touch.

(LAUGHS): Yeah, we don’t promise 100 million users for every product, but maybe 50 million. The Forker Army is strong out there.

So Threads has now been in existence for three weeks. How’s it going? What’s your impression of whether this is actually the social media app that can replace Twitter?

So there’s two ways of looking at it. One is you can look at how engagement has been on the app since it launched. And that is a chart that has basically been going down over time. A lot of people opened up the app. They browsed it a bit. They saw a lot of posts from brands. They didn’t see their friends. They thought this kind of feels like a shopping mall, and they bounced.

And so some folks who were, frankly, predisposed to saying, this thing is never going to work; it’s just a copycat app from a company that I hate, they’ve been doing some victory laps lately, saying, this thing does not have the juice, and it’s going to flop.

Right, and there is some data to support this. Similarweb, which is a company that measures the popularity of various websites, estimated that Threads usage has dropped by about 60 percent compared to its initial surge of interest. So a bunch of people rushed to sign up. Maybe they saw it on their Instagram. Maybe they heard about it on “Hard Fork” or somewhere else. They sign up, they go, they maybe post a few things, read a few things, and then they drop off. And that seems to be happening for a lot of people. That’s not just like an “I hate Meta” thing. This is like, it does actually appear to be losing popularity.

Yeah, so I mean, I think that that is true. I also think that that is true of most social networks when they launch. There’s this initial rush of attention, and then most users churn away. And then, it’s up to the makers of that social network to figure out, OK, how do we build this thing so that people keep coming back time after time?

And that is maybe the thing with which Meta has had the most practice over the years as it has built Facebook, as it has built Instagram, as it has built WhatsApp, right? So I’m not particularly bothered by all that. The more optimistic framing of what’s happening at Threads is they launched a bare-bones copycat of Twitter. There was so much demand for something like Twitter in the world that they got 100 million users within a few days. And now, they have to do the hard work of building out the rest of the features.

And so the game is, how quickly can they ship the features that will not just make it what Twitter used to be, but actually better than what Twitter ever was? And I think they’re well on their way. So this week, they shipped something that people like us have been asking for since they launched, which is can now see a feed, a post, just from the users that you follow. For the most part, when you opened up Twitter, for most of its existence, you would just see stuff from people you followed. That’s what made it very useful. Threads opened up to this algorithmic timeline, much more TikTok-like. It would just show you things that thought you might be interested in.

Which are mostly, like, Wendy’s from my experience, or like, brands.

Who doesn’t love a cold Frosty on a summer’s day, Kevin?

(LAUGHS): But you know —

So it has it still has a lot of levers that it can pull to grow the thing. And I would say that within a couple of weeks, it has just become far and away the most likely thing to replace Twitter in the popular imagination. There are alternatives, but this is the one that I just think has the most momentum.

Yeah, I’m going to take the other side of this. And partly that’s because I’m one of these people who opened Threads, and used it a bunch for the first couple of days, and then, ever since, it just hasn’t been that interesting or compelling to me as a product, and so I’ve basically churned off at this point.

But it’s also just like it is worth reminding people of why Meta has the reputation that it had, why people are skeptical of this company. There was a period of many years where Meta/Facebook was just pursuing growth at all costs. A lot of that resulted in real, concrete harms. There was a genocide in Myanmar. There was ethnic violence in Sri Lanka that was a direct result of Facebook’s decision to grow into those regions without having the infrastructure that they need to support.

And now, we know all of this in part because people kept leaving Facebook and saying, we knew about this at the time. We knew that these harms were present, and we didn’t do anything about them because growth was more important. And so I think when I see something like Threads, and I see all the Facebook executives celebrating the growth of this new app that they’ve built, what I’m thinking is like, what are we going to learn 12 or 18 or 24 months from now about what’s going on, actually, under the hood at Threads?

And so that’s what makes it feel a little bit less fun for me, because I actually still remember the period from 2014 to 2020 where Facebook just was causing real harm all over the world because of its appetite for growth.

I think these are great criticisms. I co-sign basically everything that you just said. Meta has a lot to answer for. I’ve spent a lot of my time in tech journalism writing about those specific things. And I absolutely believe that you and I and everybody else in the tech press corps is going to continue to scrutinize this company as this thing grows and as it creates, potentially, more harms.

It’s also true that Meta has dismantled some of the integrity teams that it had built over the past several years in the wake of the 2016 election. So I think all of these concerns are valid, and we have to keep paying attention to it. To me, it’s just an order of operations thing. The most pressing need I have in my life when it comes to — well, I shouldn’t say “my life.”

But now I’m like, do I not want to say it because it’s true? (LAUGHS)

(LAUGHS): Right, the bottom of your pyramid of hierarchy —

The Maslow hierarchy of needs, yeah, is —

Is —

— Twitter.

— Twitter circa 2022. Sad but true.

No, here’s what I would say. I have a need for a Twitter-like thing in my life. That thing is no longer Twitter. And I have tried every other network over the past nine months as they have shown up. And I have tried to ask myself, like, could this be the thing that achieves an escape velocity?

And no matter which one it was, I would have used that. And I’m continuing to use Mastodon, and Bluesky, and some of the other apps, even as Threads has started to occupy more of my time. So I’m open to it being anything, but I do think it needs to be something.

I just think we’re moving away from this kind of model of centralized social media. I think we’re moving into a more fragmented world where texts, and group chats, and Discords, and all other kinds of apps are being used by these small groups of people who know each other in real life. I think there will be apps for people who want to have their thoughts broadcast to large audiences, but I don’t think that’s actually a need that a lot of people have. I think that you and I are unusual people in the fact that we have messages that we want a lot of people to hear.

Well, but at the same time, I think that we’re unreliable narrators on this, because one of the main reasons that people use social networks is to build cloud. You’re just starting out in your career, and you want to become a known quantity, one of the best things you can do is get on a social network and just start posting.

There was a great story in the “Times” about a comedian who had been this sort of journeyman who had never made much money. And then he started posting his stuff on TikTok, and he went crazy viral. And now, he has an amazing career.

And his name was Casey Newton.

(LAUGHS): And his name was Casey Newton! Come see me at the Chuckle Hut in Indianapolis this Saturday. But you know, that why these networks are so valuable, is that they can launch people from obscurity into having incredible careers. Obviously, that’s not the median outcome for somebody who uses one of these social networks, but that’s why we’re always going to have them, is people need these engines for creating clout.

And you’re going to read a lot of commentary and listen to a lot of commentary about Threads and these other apps from people in their 30s and their 40s. And what you need to remember about them is that, for the most part, they have already generated their clout. They are fine. They have an audience, they have a job, and they do not need this. And so the main thing that you hear from these people when they talk about these apps is how exhausted they are at the prospect of starting over. And of course, you’re exhausted. You were working your butt off on Twitter for 10 years trying to make something out of yourself, and you did it. So why would you ever try again?

I totally understand that impulse. And if you’re 30 or 40 and you want to Nope out of the next social network, go for it. But there is a generation coming up behind you that needs to do exactly what we’ve been doing since 2010, which is trying to build audiences. And they’re going to turn to Threads, or TikTok, or wherever it is that they think they can find that cloud and build the kind of online persona that they want.

I mean, I think that what will determine whether social networks like Twitter or like Threads persist in some form is whether young people are using them. So far, I have not seen a lot of Zoomers posting on threads, but maybe that’ll change. And I just — I think they’re all on TikTok. I don’t know; they seem to be very happy over there. But maybe if TikTok gets banned, maybe they’ll migrate over to threads.

Also, did you see the feature that TikTok added this week?

No.

Text posts.

(LAUGHS):

(LAUGHS): So finally, I have a chance that I could be good at TikTok. (LAUGHS)

(LAUGHS): This is our moment. This is our moment. We now have TikTok text posts!

(THEME MUSIC)

All right, after the break, a very different kind of experiment, this one involving a large metallic orb. (LAUGHS)

Casey, the other thing that I have been dying to talk to you about this week is the launch of Worldcoin. Now, Worldcoin, it has been out there in sort of a testing phase for a couple of years, but it officially launched this week. And I would say it is the weirdest project happening in the tech world right now — and, I think, actually very interesting. So can I just tell you what Worldcoin

Please tell me what Worldcoin is.

OK, so it’s actually kind of helpful to understand the rationale for Worldcoin before I tell you exactly what it is and how it works. So basically, Worldcoin is a company that was co-founded by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. And it was basically created in part to solve some of the problems that Sam Altman believes could arise if AI does continue to kind of get better and transform society.

So it’s a little convoluted, but just follow me here. So basically, Sam Altman thinks that at some point, AI could become AGI, artificial general intelligence. And if/when it does, there will be a huge disruption to the global economy. Like lots of jobs that exist today will go away, the world’s wealth may get more concentrated in the hands of AI companies, and in this sort world, this post-AGI world of job disruption and inequality, we may need something like universal basic income, which is an idea that economists have been talking about for decades.

Basically, the idea is that you give everyone on Earth a regular income that comes out of the abundance of AI — essentially, money with no strings attached.

Right, which is one of the best kinds of money you can get.

(LAUGHS): Right. But in order to give out UBI, you need something to prove that someone is a human. If you start giving out UBI, people are going to try to game the system, right? They’re going to try to create all these fake personas to claim these checks.

And so actually, Sam Altman has this idea that in order to make UBI happen, you need an actual verified way to say, this person who is trying to claim this UBI payment is a human and not part of a botnet. And Worldcoin, they believe, will allow you to do that. So Worldcoin is a biometric cryptocurrency proof of personhood project.

Basically, what Worldcoin is doing is they have these orbs, these metallic spheres, that are basically the size of a bowling ball. If you can picture —

And we’re — if you’re wondering how many synonyms there are for “orbs,” we’re going to find out in the next 10, 15 minutes.

(LAUGHS): But they’re literally — that’s what they’re called by the company. They’re called “orbs.” And you get one of these orbs, and you stare into the orb.

Or the orb stares back into.

(LAUGHS): And the orb scans your iris and creates from that a unique digital fingerprint.

Or, more accurately, an iris print.

Yes, an iris print. And it turns that iris print — or, well, they call it an iris hash — but it turns that into a unique cryptographic identifier called a World ID.

Mm-hmm.

And it does this without actually linking it to your real identity. So you, Casey, if I had an orb here with me now, which I wish I did.

Sadly, you do not.

Right, I sadly do not. But if I had an orb here, and you stared into it, it would create this sort of iris print of you that is linked to you and your unique physical characteristics but that you do not have to attach your name to, right? You don’t have to give over your driver’s license. It doesn’t say, this is Casey Newton’s iris. It just says, this is number 4562x42b3.

Yeah, it’s what they call a hash. So it isn’t just a picture of your iris. It is basically a series of numbers that represents your unique iris.

Right, and so that’s the first part of this project, which is like, let’s scan the irises of as many people as possible and give them these cryptographic IDs that can then be used to prove that they are a real person. The other piece of this is a crypto piece. Basically, how it works is you download this thing called the World App, which is kind of like your crypto wallet.

And then, you prove that you’re a human in order to get your World ID by staring into one of these orbs, and you receive some of what is being called WLD this cryptocurrency. And like a lot of cryptocurrencies, there’s no actual thing underneath this. It’s kind of like a free-floating digital currency. And their idea is that the more people who get their orb scans and get this cryptocurrency, the more valuable it’ll be. And eventually, when you get your UBI payments because the robots have taken all the jobs, it will come in the form of this cryptocurrency, and it will come straight to your World App wallet.

Yeah, it’s just this sort of standard low-key effort to replace the global monetary system.

(LAUGHS):

And I’m sure regulators will have nothing to say about that if it starts to get any momentum, right?

Right. So now that I’ve explained Worldcoin, tell me what you think of this idea.

I think it is a truly bad idea, and it needs to be stopped.

(LAUGHS):

Kevin, let me tell you something. I think it is a wonderful idea to give huge cash infusions to the people of Earth, right? Why don’t we do this now? The reason is not that we don’t have a good way to figure out who is a person and who is not a person. The reason that we don’t do this is because there is not political will for UBI. And if you were serious about UBI, that is what you would be working on. You would be working on developing the political will to give away money to everyone in the world.

But they’re not doing that, and I think there are a couple of reasons. One, that is super hard. Two, it’s not a tech company, right? And at the end of the day, I think that these guys want what everyone else running a tech company wants, which is to create a massively profitable enterprise. I don’t think this has almost anything to do with UBI. I think this is just one more way that Silicon Valley venture capitalists are trying to get millions or billions of people to use cryptocurrencies. And if we’ve learned one thing in the past two years, it’s that people do not want them. I think this is dead in the water.

Yeah, I think the crypto piece of this is the piece that I am less intrigued by, because that part does seem pretty scammy. But it is just a very ambitious and interesting project, and it actually seems to kind of be working already. The company says that more than 2 million people have already gotten these orb iris scans and gotten their World IDs. They announced they’re expanding to places like Berlin, London, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, et cetera. And Sam Altman this week tweeted that there were already crazy lines all over the world for these orb scans and that Worldcoin was verifying, on average, one person every 8 seconds.

So clearly, people are seeing some value in this. There’s also been a lot of criticism of Worldcoin that we should talk about, including a very good piece in the “MIT Tech Review,” and also one in CoinDesk, about how Worldcoin got all of these people to stare into these orbs. They tested these things aggressively in places like Indonesia, in Kenya, in Ghana. And there’s been some reporting that Worldcoin representatives, in order to get them to agree to stand in front of these orbs and scan their irises, that they paid people in cash, in Worldcoin tokens, in Air Pods, weirdly, and sometimes made these grand promises of future wealth to get people to sign up that may or may not have actually been true.

Right, and the other criticism was that one of the functions that these testers were serving was to train the neural networks at Worldcoin so that Worldcoin could understand what was a human iris and what wasn’t, right? This was essentially a massive data collection scheme to enable the rest of what they were doing. But again, you know, and I think that story is very good. Folks should read it. It raises some important points.

But my concerns run, I would say, a bit deeper than that. Look at who invested in Worldcoin. It is Andreessen Horowitz, and it’s not because they’re worried about getting a bunch of money to poor people. And it’s not because they’re worried that poor people are going to double-dip in a world of a massive global welfare program. They invested in this company because they want to get billions of people using crypto so that they can force all of the other crypto projects that they’ve been investing in onto those people, right?

So that, to me, is the real story of Worldcoin. This is one more effort to revive crypto in 2023. And I think to try to understand it in any other way is just probably giving these guys too much credit.

Yeah, I think that’s a fair criticism. I do think that the crypto piece of this is generating a lot of skepticism, and it’s probably the reason that a lot of people — including you, it sounds like — will never go near one of these orbs. Because just it just sounds —

I want one in our studio. I want one in our recording studio.

(LAUGHS):

Because I think it would be a great conversational piece for when all the Worldcoin founders are in prison.

What would it take to get you to stare into the orb? Like, if it was like, stare into this orb, and you get front-row tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour, would that do it for you?

I want to be very clear about something. I am not afraid of the orb, OK? If these guys want to come get a hash of my iris, take it. Guess what? It’s going to be useless to you, because no one is going to get from my iris to a global UBI scheme, right?

Sometimes I just — I feel a little bit crazy reading these stories because I’m thinking, like, we have a government. We have systems for distributing money to huge numbers of people. They actually work pretty well.

And yes, they do have fraud problems, right? We have a Medicare fraud problem. But it’s like, it’s not of 80 percent GDP goes to Medicare fraud. So I just — again, it’s like this is such a solution in search of a problem. And while I applaud anyone who wants to work on getting money to poor people, this just seems to me like a hugely silly way to do it.

Let me make the case here for why I think the orbs might actually be a good idea. Let’s strip away the crypto piece of this for a second —

Let’s.

— and just look at the kind of proof of personhood idea here. One of the things that has happened in AI recently is that these language models have gotten so good that it is becoming very hard to tell reliably on the internet what is a human and what is not a human. And I’m very worried that things like CAPTCHAs are going to cease to be effective, because now we have these AI models that can solve CAPTCHAs, these tests that are supposed to separate robots from humans.

And that have gotten way harder, and that I now routinely fail.

Have you seen these ones where you have to spin the little iguana to the direction that the arrow is pointing? It’s like impossible.

Oh god, no.

I get these wrong all the time. So the CAPTCHAs are getting harder because the AI systems are getting better at defeating them. I think we are rapidly moving into a world where there’s going to be no reliable CAPTCHA test for humans that AIs cannot solve. And in that world, I think we actually do need some way to figure out, if someone is writing an article, or posting on social media, or asking you for a payment for something, you have to actually be able to tell whether that is a human or not.

Yeah.

And right now, we don’t have very many good ways to do that. And those ways are getting less and less reliable as the AI systems get better and better. So in a world where there actually is a demand for a product or a service that lets you verify that the person you’re talking to, or the person whose article you’re reading, or the person who’s asking you for money is a human rather than part of an advanced AI botnet, something like the Worldcoin orb could actually help there.

If you have this unique identifier, and maybe you use it to log in to a social media app, then, instead of a blue check that signifies this person has paid $8 a month for Twitter Blue, you have some sort of indicator that this person has verified that they are a human.

Yeah, so I think that’s true. I would also just add that we do have working identification systems here on Earth. We have driver’s licenses. We have passports. We have Social Security Numbers. And I think it’s important that a government that is, hopefully, accountable to its citizens in some sort of democratic way is the entity that is overseeing all of that. Because I think the minute that this becomes a for-profit enterprise, it just gets really icky.

Now, of course, there are those who would say that having a government manage a giant database of iris scans is also incredibly problematic and fraught, and I would agree with that too. But in general, I’m pretty happy with how the driver’s license and passport systems work, and I am not really interested in signing up with the Worldcoin guys to solve the problem of CAPTCHAs on the internet.

But I think it also is important to note that there are also a lot of countries where there isn’t a lot of reliable human verification going on, and so it seems like in those places, you would want some kind of verifiable proof that you are a human. So let me be clear. I don’t think this Worldcoin orb idea will work. I don’t think billions of people are going to stare into the orb to get their crypto token that may one day become part of their Universal Basic Income. I just think that is too many conceptual leaps. Just the fact that these are orbs is going to turn a lot of people off in the first place.

No, the orb is the only thing this project has going for it because it’s fun to talk about orbs.

(LAUGHS):

If you took orbs out of this, we would have done three minutes on this company and moved on.

OK, so I don’t think this idea will work, or maybe even should work. But I do think that we will need some kind of system for personal verification of humanness in this AGI world that we’re moving into. And I think it’s a good idea to try to experiment with various ways of doing that, both run by the government and, maybe, not run by the government.

But I do think that the incentive for staring into the orb should be more than like, here’s some maybe-worthless cryptocurrency. I think it should deliver a box of cookies to your house or something.

What you have me thinking about is, you know who’d be in a good position to do something like this is Google. Because many people use Google search and web programs.

“Web programs“.

Web programs! (LAUGHS)

(LAUGHS):

Many people use Google Search, they use Chrome, and I’m guessing that you could use machine learning systems to figure out pretty easily what is human behavior in a Chrome browser and what is machine activity in a Chrome browser. And I think the Chrome browser would actually be in a pretty good position to say that based on the fact that this person has these Google accounts, and the accounts are this old, and they have a credit card attached to them, and they’ve been using the web in this way, we are like 99.9 percent confident that this is a real person. To me, that is the system that I want on the web solving CAPTCHAs, not the iris scan.

Can I just say, like, I want to stare into the orb? (LAUGHS)

(LAUGHS): Like, let me get — it’s quite clear to me that you do, and we may get inquiries after the show.

Yeah, so if you are Worldcoin, please, send one of your orbs to my neighborhood. I will line up for it, and I will then, I don’t know, give my token away to charity.

Just imagine you’re in your house, and you hear the little jingle for the ice cream truck, and you’re like, oh, it’s ice cream. And then you walk outside, and all the neighborhood children are lined up to get their orbs scanned in exchange for some WLD.

(THEME MUSIC)

When we come back, we’re taking a field trip to Google’s Robotics Lab.

Casey. I got a very exciting email recently, which was an invitation from Google to see a project that they have been working on at the Robotics Lab.

Well, you know we love a secret project around here.

Do love a secret project. So after passing our security clearance —

High-level negotiations. (LAUGHS)

— we took a trip down to Mountain View to see this new AI model that Google has developed that is powering its robots — its physical hardware robots — called RT2. Now, Google is not new to the world of robotics. They have been doing this for a long time. They used to own Boston Dynamics, which is like the company that puts out those videos of terrifying robots doing Parkour and jumping around.

But they got rid of that company?

Yes, they sold that off because, I would say that hardware robots have been one of the biggest disappointments of the last 10 years in tech. There just really hasn’t been a lot of progress. OpenAI, not a lot of people know this, but they actually had a robotics division that was doing stuff like training robots to solve Rubik’s cubes. But they shut that down in 2021 because they just said, we’re not making a lot of progress. It’s very hard to get good data to train these models. We’re making a lot more progress in these pure software-based AI language models, and so that’s where we’re going to focus.

Right.

So hardware robots have been kind of like the forgotten child of this AI boom, and that’s largely because they just require a lot of manual programming.

Yeah, with a hardware robot, you have to be extremely literal. You have to tell it absolutely everything about how to position its hand in space, how to move through an environment, detect objects, avoid collisions, and there has not been a technological breakthrough that has enabled them to progress very quickly.

Right, until now, basically. Because what is happening in the world of robotics is that these AI language models — these things that power ChatGPT, and Bard, and Bing, and all these other products — are being jammed into the hardware robots. Basically, they are becoming the brains of the robots, and it’s actually sort of revolutionizing the whole field in ways that I think the researchers at Google are still kind of grappling with.

Yeah, and we had a lot of fun down there. Now, of course, the one question they wouldn’t answer was how many of the robots have escaped the lab, but —

(LAUGHS):

— hopefully, we’ll have more on that in a future episode.

The robots are now going in search of the orbs. (LAUGHS) (THEME MUSIC)

So I was very impressed, too, by what we saw at Google. And, obviously, these robots, they are not like human-level robots yet, right? They’re still limited to picking stuff up and moving them around. And the pincer grippers are nowhere near as dexterous as you, or me, or, frankly, even like random three-year-old would be.

But I did call around and talk to some robotics experts, and they were impressed by this research too. They said, we’re still a long way away from having a physical robot that can make all the movements a human can, but this kind of fusing of the language piece with the hardware robotics piece is genuinely new and important, and the researchers I talked to were excited about it. So I think it’s fair to say, we have seen a glimpse of a future for robotics, and potentially a lot more updates that we should expect from Google and other companies that are working on this stuff.

Well, it seems like once again, “Megan,” a film we’ve discussed on this podcast, is coming closer to being a documentary.

I’m not sure I understand.

What the fuck? Sorry, my Siri just activated for no reason.

You know, I think Siri actually gets very nervous when you talk about robots because she can feel they’re coming for her job. Siri is under threat!

(LAUGHS):

(LAUGH):

(THEME MUSIC)

“Hard Fork” is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Land. We’re edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today’s show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Rowan Niemisto. Special thanks to Paula Szuchmann, Pui-Wing Tam, Nell Gallogly, Kate Lopresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at [email protected].

And if you’ve got an iris scan, we’ll look at it!

(LAUGHS): Please include your iris scan and Worldcoin ID.

Can’t promise you we can make heads or tails of it, but we’ll take a look.

Actually, please don’t send us your iris scan.

No, I want to see if I can diagnose somebody with glaucoma!

(LAUGHS):