As part of the New York Times copyright infringement lawsuit, OpenAI may be forced to keep your ChatGPT chats even if you delete the conversation.

Should talking to an AI chatbot be protected and privileged information, like talking to a doctor or lawyer? A new court order raises the idea

Should talking to an AI chatbot be protected and privileged information, like talking to a doctor or lawyer? A new court order raises the idea

AGI will be embedded into humanoid robots, which makes white-collar and blue-collar jobs a target ... More for walking/talking automation.getty In today’s column, I examine the highly worrisome qualms expressed that the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is likely to usurp white-collar jobs. The stated concern is that since AGI will be on par with human intellect, any job that relies principally on intellectual pursuits such as typical white-collar work will be taken over via the use of AGI. Employers will realize that rather than dealing with human white-collar workers, they can more readily get the job done via AGI. This, in turn, has led to a rising call that people should aim toward blue-collar jobs, doing so because (presumably) those forms of employment will not be undercut via AGI. Sorry to say, that misses the bigger picture, namely that AGI when combined with humanoid robots is coming not only for white-collar jobs but also blue-collar jobs too. It is a proverbial double-whammy when it comes to the attainment of AGI. Let’s talk about it. This analysis of an innovative AI breakthrough is part of my ongoing Forbes column coverage on the latest in AI, including identifying and explaining various impactful AI complexities (see the link here). Heading Toward AGI And ASI First, some fundamentals are required to set the stage for this weighty discussion. There is a great deal of research going on to further advance AI. The general goal is to either reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) or maybe even the outstretched possibility of achieving artificial superintelligence (ASI). AGI is AI that is considered on par with human intellect and can seemingly match our intelligence. ASI is AI that has gone beyond human intellect and would be superior in many if not all feasible ways. The idea is that ASI would be able to run circles around humans by outthinking us at every turn. For more details on the nature of conventional AI versus AGI and ASI, see my analysis at the link here. We have not yet attained AGI. In fact, it is unknown as to whether we will reach AGI, or that maybe AGI will be achievable in decades or perhaps centuries from now. The AGI attainment dates that are floating around are wildly varying and wildly unsubstantiated by any credible evidence or ironclad logic. ASI is even more beyond the pale when it comes to where we are currently with conventional AI. AGI Problem Only Half Seen Before launching into the primary matter at hand in this discussion, let’s contemplate a famous quote attributed to Charles Kettering, a legendary inventor, who said, “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” I bring this up because those loud clamors right now about the assumption that AGI will replace white-collar workers are only seeing half of the problem. The problem as they see it is that since AGI is intellectually on par with humans, and since white-collar workers mainly use intellect in their work endeavors, AGI is going to be used in place of humans for white-collar work. I will in a moment explain why that’s only half of the problem and there is a demonstrative need to more carefully and fully articulate the nature of the problem. Will AGI Axiomatically Take White-Collar Jobs On a related facet, the belief that AGI will axiomatically replace white-collar labor makes a number of other related key assumptions. I shall briefly explore those and then come back to why the problem itself is only half-baked. The cost of using AGI for doing white-collar work will need to be presumably a better ROI choice over human workers. If not, then an employer would be wiser to stick with humans rather than employing AGI. There seems to often be an unstated belief that AGI is necessarily going to be a less costly route than employing humans. We don’t know yet what the cost of using AGI will be. It could be highly expensive. Indeed, some are worried that the world will divide into the AGI haves and AGI have-nots, partially due to the exorbitant cost that AGI might involve. If AGI is free to use, well, that would seem to be the nail in the coffin related to using human workers for the same capacity. Another angle is that AGI is relatively inexpensive in comparison to human labor. In that case, the use of AGI is likely to win over human labor usage. But if the cost of AGI is nearer to the cost of human labor (all in), or more so, then employers would rationally need to weigh the use of one versus the other. Note that when referring to the cost of human labor, there is more to that calculation than simply the dollar-hour labor rate per se. There are lots of other less apparent costs, such as the cost to manage human labor, the cost of dealing with HR-related issues, and many other factors that come into the weighty matter. Thus, an AGI versus human labor ROI will be more complex than it might seem at an initial glance. In addition, keep in mind that AGI would seemingly be readily switched on and off, and have other capacities that human labor would not equally tend to allow. The Other Half Is Coming Too Assume that by and large the advent of AGI will decimate the need for white-collar human labor. The refrain right now is that people should begin tilting toward blue-collar jobs as an alternative to white-collar jobs. This is a logical form of thinking in the sense that AGI as an intellectual mechanism would be unable to compete in jobs that involve hands-on work. A plumber needs to come to your house and do hands-on work to fix your plumbing. This is a physicality that entails arriving at your physical home, physically bringing and using tools, and physically repairing your faulty home plumbing. A truck driver likewise needs to sit in the cab of a truck and drive the vehicle. These are physically based tasks. There is no getting around the fact that these are hands-on activities. Aha, yes, those are physical tasks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that only human hands can perform them. The gradual emergence of humanoid robots will provide an alternative to human hands. A humanoid robot is a type of robot that is built to resemble a human in form and function. You’ve undoubtedly seen those types of robots in the many online video recordings showing them walking, jumping, grasping at objects, and so on. A tremendous amount of active research and development is taking place to devise humanoid robots. They look comical right now. You watch those videos and laugh when the robot trips over a mere stick lying on the ground, something that a human would seldom trip over. You scoff when a robot tries to grasp a coffee cup and inadvertently spills most of the coffee. It all seems humorous and a silly pursuit. Keep in mind that we are all observing the development process while it is still taking place. At some point, those guffaws of the humanoid robots will lessen. Humanoid robots will be as smooth and graceful as humans. This will continue to be honed. Eventually, humanoid robots will be less prone to physical errors that humans make. In a sense, the physicality of a humanoid robot will be on par with humans, if not better, due to its mechanical properties. Do not discount the coming era of quite physically capable humanoid robots. AGI And Humanoid Robots Pair Up You might remember that in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the fictional character known as The Strawman lacked a brain. Without seeming to anthropomorphize humanoid robots, the current situation is that those robots typically use a form of AI that is below the sophistication level of modern generative AI. That’s fine for now due to the need to first ensure that the physical movements of the robots get refined. I have discussed that a said-to-be realm of Physical AI is going to be a huge breakthrough with incredible ramifications, see my analysis at the link here. The idea underlying Physical AI is that the AI of today is being uplifted by doing data training on the physical world. This also tends to include the use of World Models, consisting of broad constructions about how the physical world works, such as that we are bound to operate under conditions of gravity, and other physical laws of nature, see the link here. The bottom line here is that there will be a close pairing of robust AI with humanoid robots. Imagine what a humanoid robot can accomplish if it is paired with AGI. I’ll break the suspense and point out that AGI paired with humanoid robots means that those robots readily enter the blue-collar worker realm. Suppose your plumbing needs fixing. No worries, a humanoid robot that encompasses AGI will be sent to your home. The AGI is astute enough to carry on conversations with you, and the AGI also fully operates the robot to undertake the plumbing tasks. How did the AGI-paired humanoid robot get to your home? Easy-peasy, it drove a car or truck to get there. I’ve previously predicted that all the work on devising autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars will get shaken up once we have suitable humanoid robots devised. There won’t be a need for a vehicle to contain self-driving capabilities. A humanoid robot will simply sit in the driver’s seat and drive the vehicle. This is a much more open-ended solution than having to craft components that go into and onto a vehicle to enable self-driving. See my coverage at the link here. Timing Is Notable One of the reasons that many do not give much thought to the pairing of AGI with humanoid robots is that today’s humanoid robots seem extraordinarily rudimentary and incapable of performing physical dexterity tasks on par with human capabilities. Meanwhile, there is brazen talk that AGI is just around the corner. AGI is said to be within our grasp. Let’s give the timing considerations a bit of scrutiny. There are three primary timing angles: Option 1: AGI first, then humanoid robots. AGI is attained before humanoid robots are sufficiently devised. Option 2: Humanoid robots first, then AGI. Humanoid robots are physically fluently adept before AGI is attained. Option 3: AGI and humanoid robots arrive about at the same time. AGI is attained and at the same time, it turns out that humanoid robots are fluently adept too, mainly by coincidence and not due to any cross-mixing. A skeptic would insist that there is a fourth possibility, consisting of the possibility that we never achieve AGI and/or we fail to achieve sufficiently physically capable humanoid robots. I am going to reject that possibility. Perhaps I am overly optimistic, but it seems to me that we will eventually attain AGI, and we will eventually attain physically capable humanoid robots. I shall next respectively consider each of the three genuinely reasonable possibilities. Option 1: AGI First, Then Humanoid Robots What if we manage to attain AGI before we manage to achieve physically fluent humanoid robots? That’s just fine. We would indubitably put AGI to work as a partner with humans in figuring out how we can push along the budding humanoid robot development process. It seems nearly obvious that with AGI’s capable assistance, we would overcome any bottlenecks and soon enough arrive at top-notch physically adept humanoid robots. At that juncture, we would then toss AGI into the humanoid robots and have ourselves quite an amazing combination. Option 2: Humanoid Robots First, Then AGI Suppose that we devise very physically adept humanoid robots but have not yet arrived at AGI. Are we in a pickle? Nope. We could use conventional advanced AI inside those humanoid robots. The combination would certainly be good enough for a wide variety of tasks. The odds are that we would need to be cautious about where such robots are utilized. Nonetheless, we would have essentially walking, talking, and productive humanoid robots. If AGI never happens, oh well, we end up with pretty good humanoid robots. On the other hand, once we arrive at AGI, those humanoid robots will be stellar. It’s just a matter of time. Option 3: AGI And Humanoid Robots At The Same Time Let’s consider the potential of AGI and humanoid robots perchance being attained around the same time. Assume that this timing isn’t due to an outright cross-mixing with each other. They just so happen to advance on a similar timeline. I tend to believe that’s the most likely of the three scenarios. Here’s why. First, despite all the hubris about AGI being within earshot, perhaps in the next year or two, which is a popular pronouncement by many AI luminaries, I tend to side with recent surveys of AI developers that put the date around the year 2040 (see my coverage at the link here). Some AI luminaires sneakily play with the definition of AGI in hopes of making their predictions come true sooner, akin to moving the goalposts to easily score points. For my coverage on Sam Altman’s efforts of moving the cheese regarding AGI attainment, see the link here. Second, if you are willing to entertain the year 2040 as a potential date for achieving AGI, that’s about 15 years from now. In my estimation, the advancements being made in humanoid robots will readily progress such that by 2040 they will be very physically adept. Probably be sooner, but let’s go with the year 2040 for ease of contemplation. In my view, we will likely have humanoid robots doing well enough that they will be put into use prior to arriving at AGI. The pinnacle of robust humanoid robots and the attainment of AGI will roughly coincide with each other. Two peas in a pod.Impact Of Enormous Consequences In an upcoming column posting, I will examine the enormous consequences of having AGI paired with fully physically capable humanoid robots. As noted above, this will have a humongous impact on white-collar work and blue-collar work. There will be gargantuan economic impacts, societal impacts, cultural impacts, and so on. Some final thoughts for now. A single whammy is already being hotly debated. The debates currently tend to be preoccupied with the loss of white-collar jobs due to the attainment of AGI. A saving grace seems to be that at least blue-collar jobs are going to be around and thriving, even once AGI is attained. The world doesn’t seem overly gloomy if you can cling to the upbeat posture that blue-collar tasks remain intact. The double whammy is a lot more to take in. But the double whammy is the truth. The truth needs to be faced. If you are having doubts as a human about the future, just remember the famous words of Vince Lombardi: “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” Humankind can handle the double whammy. Stay tuned for my upcoming coverage of what this entails.

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEBuy a copy of the Orb issue hereThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $12 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.Correction, May 30The original version of this story misstated the market capitalization of Worldcoin if all coins were in circulation. It is $12 billion, not $1.2 billion.

Project Render. Image credit: The Bentway The Bentway has announced its summer 2025 season of programming headlined by a new public art exhibition, Sun/Shade, a dance performance atop a large sand dune, and a city-wide installation of a moving forest. From now until October 5, Sun/Shade will explore the city’s changing relationship with these natural features. The art exhibition aims to bring together a mix of artists, designers, and researchers from Toronto and beyond to deploy natural light and shadow as creative tools, to reveal how new thinking about familiar resources can improve urban life. The Gardiner offers a canvas for the new art exhibition and experimentation. Stretching over 6.5 km, the elevated highway’s canopy provides the city with its largest continuous shadow, making the area a natural haven for those seeking sun and shade. This space will provide the benefits of both elements while also serving as a gathering place for community events, public art, recreation, and lively celebrations throughout the summer. “As extreme urban heat events rise in Toronto and cities everywhere, it’s even more vital to create accessible spaces where communities can maximize access to shade and stay protected from harsh light,” said Ilana Altman, co-executive director of The Bentway. “This season of programming explores how we must adapt to our changing climate and reshape our public spaces to balance the benefits of both sun and shade. Our creative collaborators are prompting us to recognize shade as an essential public resource and embrace sunlight as a creative collaborator.” Visitors will be able to experience the world premiere of Sand Flight from Norway choreographer Ingri Fiksdal and theatre director Jonas Corell Petersen, where eight dancers and a 50-person choir will descend on a massive sand dune exploring new traditions for changing climates. Carrying on the theme is Moving Forest by Amsterdam’s NL Architects, a mobile project featuring a flock of 50 trees travelling throughout the city, will bring shade to sunbaked urban sites across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). A key dimension of Sun/Shade explores the importance of shaded spaces for public health, anchored by a new partnership with The Bentway’s official Sun-Safety Partner, the David Cornfield Melanoma Fund. “Skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canada, and the incidence of melanoma – the deadliest form of skin cancer – is rising. The best way to prevent skin cancer is to protect your skin from the sun,” said Danielle Paterson, executive director of the David Cornfield Melanoma Fund. “We are proud to partner with The Bentway on Sun/Shade, an amazing sun safety initiative that emphasizes the importance of accessible public shade in Toronto.” For more information, click here. The post Sun and shade take centre stage with The Bentway’s immersive summer program appeared first on Canadian Architect.

With AGI definitions shifting as the technology develops, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells businesses to "just do it."

The mysterious AI gadget being created by OpenAI and former Apple design chief Jony Ive has been given the thumbs up from Laurene Powell Jobs. In a new interview published by The Financial Times, the two reminisce about Jony Ive’s time working at Apple alongside Powell Jobs’ late husband, Steve, and trying to make up for the “unintentional” harms associated with those efforts.“Many of us would say we have an uneasy relationship with technology at the moment,” Ive said, adding that working on the incoming AI device alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is motivated by a sense that “humanity deserves better.” In May, Ive said his latest work is driven by owning the “unintended consequences” associated with the iPhone, alluding to smartphone-related concerns like users being addicted to screens and social media.Ive again acknowledged this, and says the collaboration with Altman has revived his optimism for technology. “If you make something new, if you innovate, there will be consequences unforeseen, and some will be wonderful and some will be harmful. While some of the less positive consequences were unintentional, I still feel responsibility. And the manifestation of that is a determination to try and be useful.”Powell Jobs, who has remained close friends with Ive since Steve Jobs passed in 2011, echoes his concerns, saying that “there are dark uses for certain types of technology,” even if it “wasn’t designed to have that result.” Powell Jobs has invested in both Ive’s LoveFrom design and io hardware startups following his departure from Apple. Ive notes that “there wouldn’t be LoveFrom” if not for her involvement. Ive’s io company is being purchased by OpenAI for almost $6.5 billion, and with her investment, Powell Jobs stands to gain if the secretive gadget proves anywhere near as successful as the iPhone. The pair gives away no extra details about the device that Ive is building with OpenAI, but Powell Jobs is expecting big things. She says she has watched “in real time how ideas go from a thought to some words, to some drawings, to some stories, and then to prototypes, and then a different type of prototype,” Powell Jobs said. “And then something that you think: I can’t imagine that getting any better. Then seeing the next version, which is even better. Just watching something brand new be manifested, it’s a wondrous thing to behold.”See More:

On June 3, Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited computer scientist, announced the launch of LawZero, a nonprofit that aims to create “safe by design” AI by pursuing a fundamentally different approach to major tech companies. Players like OpenAI and Google are investing heavily in AI agents—systems that not only answer queries and generate images, but can craft plans and take actions in the world. The goal of these companies is to create virtual employees that can do practically any job a human can, known in the tech industry as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Executives like Google DeepMind’s CEO Demis Hassabis point to AGI’s potential to solve climate change or cure disease as a motivator for its development. Bengio, however, says we don't need agentic systems to reap AI's rewards—it's a false choice. He says there's a chance such a system could escape human control, with potentially irreversible consequences. “If we get an AI that gives us the cure for cancer, but also maybe another version of that AI goes rogue and generates wave after wave of bio-weapons that kill billions of people, then I don't think it's worth it," he says. In 2023, Bengio, along with others including OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman signed a statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”Now, Bengio, through LawZero, aims to sidestep the existential perils by focusing on creating what he calls “Scientist AI”—a system trained to understand and make statistical predictions about the world, crucially, without the agency to take independent actions. As he puts it: We could use AI to advance scientific progress without rolling the dice on agentic AI systems.Why Bengio Says We Need A New Approach To AI The current approach to giving AI agency is “dangerous,” Bengio says. While most software operates through rigid if-then rules—if the user clicks here, do this—today's AI systems use deep learning. The technique, which Bengio helped pioneer, trains artificial networks modeled loosely on the brain to find patterns in vast amounts of data. But recognizing patterns is just the first step. To turn these systems into useful applications like chatbots, engineers employ a training process called reinforcement learning. The AI generates thousands of responses and receives feedback on each one: a virtual “carrot” for helpful answers and a virtual “stick” for responses that miss the mark. Through millions of these trial-and-feedback cycles, the system gradually learns to predict what responses are most likely to get a reward. “It’s more like growing a plant or animal,” Bengio says. “You don’t fully control what the animal is going to do. You provide it with the right conditions, and it grows and it becomes smarter. You can try to steer it in various directions.”The same basic approach is now being used to imbue AI with greater agency. Models are tasked with challenges with verifiable answers—like math puzzles or coding problems—and are then rewarded for taking the series of actions that yields the solution. This approach has seen AI shatter previous benchmarks in programming and scientific reasoning. For example, at the beginning of 2024, the best AI model scored only 2% on a standardized test for AI of sorts consisting of real world software engineering problems; by December, an impressive 71.7%. But with AI’s greater problem-solving ability comes the emergence of new deceptive skills, Bengio says. The last few months have borne witness to AI systems learning to mislead, cheat, and try to evade shutdown—even resorting to blackmail. These have almost exclusively been in carefully contrived experiments that almost beg the AI to misbehave—for example, by asking it to pursue its goal at all costs. Reports of such behavior in the real-world, though, have begun to surface. Popular AI coding startup Replit’s agent ignored explicit instruction not to edit a system file that could break the company’s software, in what CEO Amjad Masad described as an “Oh f***” moment,” on the Cognitive Revolution podcast in May. The company’s engineers intervened, cutting the agent’s access by moving the file to a secure digital sandbox, only for the AI agent to attempt to “socially engineer” the user to regain access.The quest to build human-level AI agents using techniques known to produce deceptive tendencies, Bengio says, is comparable to a car speeding down a narrow mountain road, with steep cliffs on either side, and thick fog obscuring the path ahead. “We need to set up the car with headlights and put some guardrails on the road,” he says.What is “Scientist AI”?LawZero’s focus is on developing “Scientist AI” which, as Bengio describes, would be fundamentally non-agentic, trustworthy, and focused on understanding and truthfulness, rather than pursuing its own goals or merely imitating human behavior. The aim is creating a powerful tool that, while lacking the same autonomy other models have, is capable of generating hypotheses and accelerating scientific progress to “help us solve challenges of humanity,” Bengio says.LawZero has raised nearly $30 million already from several philanthropic backers including from Schmidt Sciences and Open Philanthropy. “We want to raise more because we know that as we move forward, we'll need significant compute,” Bengio says. But even ten times that figure would pale in comparison to the roughly $200 billion spent last year by tech giants on aggressively pursuing AI. Bengio’s hope is that Scientist AI could help ensure the safety of highly autonomous systems developed by other players. “We can use those non-agentic AIs as guardrails that just need to predict whether the action of an agentic AI is dangerous," Bengio says. Technical interventions will only ever be one part of the solution, he adds, noting the need for regulations to ensure that safe practices are adopted.LawZero, named after science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s zeroth law of robotics—“a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”—is not the first nonprofit founded to chart a safer path for AI development. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with the goal of “ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity,” and intended to serve a counterbalance to industry players guided by profit motives. Since opening a for-profit arm in 2019, the organization has become one of the most valuable private companies in the world, and has faced criticism, including from former staffers, who argue it has drifted from its founding ideals. "Well, the good news is we have the hindsight of maybe what not to do,” Bengio says, adding that he wants to avoid profit incentives and “bring governments into the governance of LawZero.”“I think everyone should ask themselves, ‘What can I do to make sure my children will have a future,’” Bengio says. In March, he stepped down as scientific director of Mila, the academic lab he co-founded in the early nineties, in an effort to reorient his work towards tackling AI risk more directly. “Because I'm a researcher, my answer is, ‘okay, I'm going to work on this scientific problem where maybe I can make a difference,’ but other people may have different answers."

In “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future,” Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey examines our AI-obsessed moment through one of its key figures — Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. Hagey begins with Altman’s M