Humanness in the Age of AI

In what way is it a scam? For example, is it a pyramid-scheme, pump-and-dump, pretext to trick people into downloading malware, etc.?

[That story (2022-04-06)](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... ) did offer one major concern:

> Others took issue with the company’s purported focus on fairness given that 20% of the coins had already been allocated: 10% to Worldcoin’s full-time employees, and another 10% to investors, like Andreessen Horowitz.

20% of coins being in the hands of a few does sound potentially pretty corrupting -- at least, if it's a system like Bitcoin, where there's a cap on the total such that, if mass-adopted, that small group of people would end up controlling 20% of the total wealth. But does it work like that?

Beyond that, it sounds like the article's suggesting that it's a scam to get iris-scans:

> Meanwhile, those who fear that the whole thing may have been a scam want to know what they’ve lost. “50 KS is not enough to give an eyeball away,” says Okach, the university student in Nairobi that spent a weekend recruiting others to Worldcoin. “That’s manipulation, taking advantage of students without clear clarification about what it is they are doing or what they want.”

But the idea of a scam to get folks' iris-scans, especially iris-scans of people in less-developed areas, sounds a bit strange.

I mean, if someone has a database of folks' pictures, DNA, or fingerprints, then that database might help track folks without their knowledge or consent -- plus DNA might also reveal things about a person that they'd rather have kept private.

But what might scammers do with iris-scans that might potentially justify the trouble of collecting them like that?

So, I would expect them to have captured a seriously significant AND deduplicated (through the iris) database of faces as well.

Obviously, this is an extremely valuable database on its own merits, because it contains biometric data on a ton of people from "non-restricted" countries and may well solve some of the systemic biases current biometric systems show, due to lack of a representative dataset to train on.

These systemic biases are currently one of the major arguments _against_ the use of biometric systems at an even bigger scale and thus solving it will take away a big tool in the privacy-rights activists toolbox.

Are biases still systemic if at one point a significant amount of people from every geographical location on the planet has been included in the training set?

I can imagine arguing _for_ this position at the very least becomes a lot more complex.