Could Eye-Scanning Crypto Orbs Save Us From a Bot Apocalypse?

Spend enough time in San Francisco, peering into the cyberpunk future, and you may find that weird things start seeming olağan. Fleets of self-driving cars? Yawn. A start-up trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth? Müddet, why not. Summoning a godlike artificial intelligence that could wipe out humanity? Ho-hum.

You may even find yourself, as I did on Wednesday night, standing in a crowded room in the Marina district, gazing into a glowing white sphere known as the Orb, having your eyeballs scanned in exchange for cryptocurrency and something called a World ID.

The event was hosted by World, a San Francisco start-up co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI that has come up with one of the more ambitious (or creepy, depending on your view) tech projects in recent memory.

Alex Blania, the chief executive of World, and Sam Altman, its co-founder, announced the launch of the company in the United States on Wednesday.

World has created a program called World ID that will allow users to verify their humanity online. To enroll, users stare into an Orb, which collects a scan of their irises.

The company’s basic pitch is this: The internet is about to be overrun with swarms of realistic A.I. bots that will make it nearly impossible to tell whether we’re interacting with real humans on social networks, dating sites, gaming platforms and other online spaces.