Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball

Dystopian framing & sci‑fi parallels

• Many see Worldcoin / eyeball scanning as “Minority Report”–style tech and cite classic sci‑fi (“eye-eaters”, Philip K. Dick) as prescient warnings.
• There’s broad unease that sci‑fi “prophecies” about surveillance and control are converging with reality.

Motives: control, ads, and “selling the cure”

• Core suspicion: rich actors want granular tracking to control populations and sell more targeted ads.
• Several argue they’re creating the AI‑spam problem (flooding the web with bots/content) and then selling “proof of humanity” as the cure.
• Some frame this as classic “legibility”: making people machine‑readable so large institutions can manage and manipulate them.

Proof of humanity, AI, and advertisers

• Some claim in an AI‑saturated future, human verification will be crucial; eyeball scans plus crypto attestations are pitched as that layer.
• Others counter that this doesn’t prove content is human‑generated—just that a human owns the key, who can still paste AI output.
• Point raised that the real customer is advertisers, who want guarantees that ad impressions come from humans, not bots.

Exploitation of the poor & agency debate

• Strong criticism of targeting impoverished populations (Philippines, Kenya) for a few dollars per scan; called predatory and despicable.
• Debate over whether participants “don’t know” the consequences vs. are making desperate but informed tradeoffs.
• Many argue poverty sharply reduces agency, so “choice” here is coerced by circumstance. Others warn against paternalism that equates poverty with ignorance.

Biometric and privacy risks

• Comparisons to 23andMe: people trusted one company; later ownership and use of sensitive data changed.
• Concern that any dataset is one CEO or acquisition away from abuse, and that future regimes (corporate or governmental) are untrustworthy.
• Worries about irrevocability: biometrics can’t be changed, and aren’t protected like passwords (or even by some legal rights).
• Commenters note existing government fingerprint/face databases, but stress that normalizing iris collection is a new escalation.
• An ophthalmologist notes irises can change with age or disease, raising lockout and reliability issues.

Trust, anonymity claims, and legal pushback

• Defenders say Worldcoin stores only hashes, not raw images or names, and uses the scan only once to prevent multiple accounts.
• Critics doubt this “trust the black box” model and point out Kenya’s order to delete data, with skepticism it was truly erased.
• Some highlight that even if Altman’s intentions were benign, future owners or breaches could weaponize the data.

Technical critiques: Sybil, KYC, and alternatives

• Many argue biometrics are a poor solution to the Sybil/bot problem: they’re hard for the public to audit and easy to doubt at scale.
• Banks and KYC are cited as existing, imperfect but working systems; some in fintech insist KYC is far from “solved,” others say it’s “good enough” as a tradeoff.
• Web‑of‑trust / PGP‑style, locally built trust networks are suggested as more human‑centric alternatives, though tooling and adoption are lacking.

Normalization and inevitability

• Some fear eye scans will join fingerprints and face recognition as “terrifying now, commonplace in 10 years.”
• Others respond that we’re already heavily surveilled, so the fight must be political and legal rather than purely technical.