The contemporary 'Technocratic Social Vision'

AI, centralised planning, material abundance and Universal Basic Income. OpenAI, Worldcoin, WorldBrain.

"Real humans are easy to verify using worldcoin orbs" reads a comment to a recent tweet by Worldcoin. People are excited for this. Why?

I became aware of WorldCoin back in 2022 when I found myself in their Berlin office with friends. Sitting on the tabletop of the empty office sat two of the company's retina-scanning orbs. One consisted of the electronics encased in clear and transparent plastic, making visible its contents of circuitry as if to say 'Look! We have nothing to hide'. The other was opaque and reflective, as if to say 'Look at yourself and your desire', the desire being 'free money'.

In a recent post by ( Worldcoin now renamed World Network but still using the same handle @worldcoin), World Network counts the total number of retinas scanned at almost 9 million.

World Network confers 'Proof of Humanity ' upon individuals who line up in front of one of its orbs to have their retina scanned. It is clear to see that World Network is positioned to service the envisaged problems created by the likes of OpenAI and a future internet flooded by AI agents in which it could be difficult to distinguishing humans from machines presenting as users.

Today, whilst reading Plurality; The Future of collaborative Technology and Democracy, I came across the section on 'Ideologies of the twenty-first century' through which learned that a key element of the technocratic social vision is material redistribution through universal basic income (UBI). UBI is deemed as a necessity for when AI is predicted to abolish material scarcity through efficiencies in production and distribution of material goods. This is the vision of OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who also founded WorldCoin / World Network which, in an age of AI, firstly positions itself to solve the 'proof of humanity' issue that OpenAI technology is creating.

I aim to write about this topic in more dept in an upcoming article.