The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Universal Basic Incompetence Simplicius Last week a watershed study on UBI—Universal Basic Income—was published,  which you can find here . Particularly noteworthy is it was carried out by Sam Altman’s Open Research, a cutout of OpenAI, to test theories of UBI’s potential future impact on society, given that it’s OpenAI’s radical developments in the AI field which threaten to replace the human workforce with machines in the not-so-distant future. In essence, the study gave $1,000 dollars per month to 1,000 low-income Americans for three years, with another 2,000 people serving as control group with $50 a month. The money was given unconditionally, meaning they could spend it on anything they want, unlike various forms of Welfare with severe restrictions on its usage. It’s said to be the largest scale experiment of its type in America, though there have been others elsewhere, like a well-known  UBI pilot study in Finland in 2017 . The researchers aimed to answer a series...

  Worldcoin: Sam Altman’s Crypto Tool for Technocracy? More than a sketchy cash for biometrics scheme, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and friends’ Worldcoin project is positioning itself as a one-stop shop for identity and financial infrastructure that could upend traditional finance and governance structures as we know them. BY STAVROULA PABST “No one told me what they’ll do with my eye…I did this out of need.” Olga de León, Buenos Aires Resident, to  Rest of World Want $50 worth of cryptocurrency? Scan your irises with one of Worldcoin’s orbs and it’s yours. Such is Worldcoin’s (rather odd) elevator pitch to the public, which has subsequently rolled out its iris-scanning orbs to  38 countries  worldwide. Worldcoin Orbs ( Source ) Launched in mid-2023 and  described  by founder Sam Altman upon launch as “a global financial and identity network based on proof of personhood,” Worldcoin has made a big splash in its efforts to grow an identity and finance network using...