From NewYorker.com [paywall]:
Three summers ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X a fifteen-second video of dozens of people—mostly young, veiled in face masks, and wearing super-hip, white-soled sneakers—waiting in a long, snaky line in the traffic-light-lit but otherwise dusky dark of an unnamed city that appears to have been Nagoya, Japan. “Crazy lines around the world,” Altman wrote. “One person getting verified every 8 seconds now.” In the video, the camera pans to the front of the line, where a woman is kneeling on the sidewalk as if in prayer, staring into a gleaming silver orb about the size of a volleyball that has been propped up on a stand about the height of an end table. It looks like the eyeball of a giant robot Cyclops. She stares into its aperture, a void. You may wonder why. Here’s why. She is bowing before an artificially intelligent machine, seeking a certification that she is human.
That eyeball, which is known as the Orb, was developed by Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco- and Munich-based tech company that Altman founded in 2019 with a twenty-five-year-old German physicist named Alex Blania, who is now its C.E.O. At the time, Altman had just stepped down as president of Y Combinator to head OpenAI; Blania had dropped out of graduate school at Caltech. (Last year, Blania and Altman co-founded another startup, Merge Labs, funded by OpenAI, which, like Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, aims to hook your brain up to a computer. I guess this is another tool for humanity.) If you get scanned by the Orb, which you can now do at sites on four continents, you get a credential called a Proof of Humanity—provided, that is, that you are not a robot.
Are you a robot? If you’re not, you’re going to be pretty sure you’re not. Still, online at least, you likely find it difficult to tell who else is and is not. Businesses find this difficult, too, and it’s getting harder all the time. If you were forced to guess, the odds would tell you to guess robot, because at this point there are more bots online than people. To deal with this problem, businesses retain bot-detection and bot-management firms, a specialty within the field of cybersecurity. Their task used to be to block bots, but, with the rise of agentic A.I., that has changed. Now the problem is how to let in the good bots (like the avatar you send to the Gap to buy you a new pair of pants) and keep out the bad bots (like the thief trying to scrape the data of every Gap customer). The rest of us have to be our own bot detectors. It’s been suggested to me that if you’re on the phone or in an online chat with a customer-service “person” and you aren’t sure whether you’re talking to a human or a chatbot, one good idea is to ask, “What color shoes are you wearing today?” Because chatbots don’t have feet. (Yet.) I once asked a customer-service representative calling herself Crystal S. if she could prove to me that she was human, and she told me that she lived in Texas and had three daughters and two French bulldogs named Benny and Smoltz. I forgot to ask her about her shoes.
This is not a drill. But it is a hassle, something between an inconvenience and a nightmare, depending on your degree of enthusiasm for the shiny, glimmering how-we-live-now Orb of it all. It is also a very long game of cat and mouse. We used to be the cats. Now we’re the mice.
A certificate verifying your humanity is in certain ways a newer version of some ancient technologies of identification used not for distinguishing between humans and machines but for sorting one group of people from another. Those technologies include tattooing, cutting, and branding—methods of identification that go back thousands of years. In Revelation (13:16-17), the Beast requires everyone “both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads.” The Greeks branded their slaves; the Romans tattooed their gladiators. In the twentieth century, the Nazis required Jews to wear badges, and then they tattooed them, “including newborn babies,” as Primo Levi once wrote. These techniques are still used for livestock, and for gang members.
We’re waltzing into a world that’s going to look more like Bladerunner than Star Trek. A future where your level of humanity will be decided by algorithms and credit reports and what kind of car you drive, and where your kids go to school, and whether or not you have been approved by anonymous systems deploying sinister technology like the Orb.
We are facing a future where there will be clear demarcations of who belongs and who does not. Who is allowed and who is not. The haves and the have nots. And it may be some Artificial Intelligence making those decisions.
We’re hurtling toward a blander, more homogeneous society, with slight tonal gradations in an innocuous non-offensive shades of beige and gray and off-white.
Oh wait. The future is now. Enjoy our diversity while there still some diversity left.
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