Actually, it is not public art at all but rather an effort by an A.I. company to establish digital identities for the world’s citizens by scanning their eyeballs.
The company behind the project is Worldcoin, founded some three years ago by Alex Blania and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, withA Worldcoin Orb in Hong Kong. Photo courtesy of Worldcoin. The plan encompasses a privacy-ensuring digital identity it calls World ID and a digital currency, WLD—the former a global identity protocol enabling individuals to prove their personhood online in an era of rampant A.I. deepfakes, and the latter a tool to build toward an “A.I.-funded UBI [universal basic income].”. “The journey will be challenging and the outcome is uncertain. But finding new ways to broadly share the coming technological prosperity is a critical challenge of our time.