The Times Tech Podcast

Sometimes I look into your eyes

·42 min·4 clips
WorldCoin's orb scans your iris to verify you're human, but Kenya sued to stop it over privacy concerns.
The episode opens with a promo for a Life Sciences Summit on drug pricing, followed by a sponsor ad from ServiceNow. Hosts Danny Fortson and Katie Prescott introduce the topic of WorldCoin, a project by Sam Altman's Tools for Humanity, designed to verify humans using iris scans via orbs. They recap its growth from under a million to 12 million users and its recent US launch after regulatory shifts. Interview with Alex Blania delves into the technology: orbs scan irises, split data among universities for uniqueness checks, and issue anonymous World IDs. Blania explains partnerships with Match Group for dating app verification and Razer for gaming, citing AI's rise as a driver. He predicts super intelligence within 5-10 years and discusses WorldCoin's potential role in universal basic income. Regulatory issues in Kenya and Indonesia are addressed, with Blania expressing confidence in privacy safeguards. The hosts then pivot to other tech news: Tesla's robotaxi launch in Austin with supervised autonomy, Amazon's £40 billion UK investment including film studio upgrades, and a CBS story about a man emotionally attached to an AI chatbot. They reflect on AI's societal effects, referencing Instagram's founder on edge cases becoming norms. The episode closes with promos for other podcasts and a ServiceNow ad.

As heard by us

A brisk policy review of drug pricing, NHS budgets, and the stranger turn into crypto regulation.

Drug pricing gets a sharp, useful airing as the episode turns to the pressure point between industry innovation and NHS budgets. The debate is given a concrete frame: the NHS has secured extremely cheap drugs, while President Trump argues that the US is carrying too much of the…

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Why you'd press play

Want a brisk ride from NHS drug-pricing pressure to World ID's cautious US crypto launch?

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