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On June 24th OpenAI CEO Sam Altman officially launched Worldcoin, a controversial cryptocurrency project that aims to create a global identification system by scanning users’ eyeballs to help distinguish them from robots and provide the infrastructure to distribute a whole range of financial services including universal basic income. By day three Altman reported on Twitter: “Crazy lines around the world. One person getting verified every 8 seconds now.”

The project has 2 million users from its beta period and is now scaling up operations to 35 cities in 20 countries. The new venture has been accused of deceptive practices during its beta launch. Those accustions and its bid to collect biometric data and provide global financial services have prompted pundits to predict an inevitable clash with regulators.
“Risks include unavoidable privacy leaks, further erosion of people's ability to navigate the Internet anonymously, coercion by authoritarian governments, and the potential impossibility of being secure at the same time as being decentralized,” Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum, a blockchain platform for decentralized financial applications, said in a July 24th blog posting.
Worldcoin is not the first Silicon Valley tech company to try and launch a global digital currency Facebook’s Libra project (later renamed Diem) had the same goal but regulators and politicians ultimately killed it, due in large part to a lack of trust in tech and the companies who develop it. Critics point to the propensity of not just Facebook (now called Meta)-but all powerful tech companies-to move fast without considering unintended consequences and to sometimes cynically use non-tech savvy members of the public as dupes.

The MIT Technology Review accuses Worldcoin of using such deceptive practices. “The startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it's done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor,” the magazine wrote in a 2022 article about Worldcoin's beta testing.
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

Imagine if the samples stored in biobanks the size of football fields could be stored in someone’s desk and medicine could be mapped to a person’s unique molecular and genetic profile.

These are just some of the ways that using DNA as the next medium of storage is expected to change the world in the coming years. By 2040 DNA will likely be used to store specific biological information about the entire human race, offering unprecedented insights into the health of the world’s population, helping usher in the age of truly personalized medicine, says James Banal, co-founder of Silicon Valley startup Cache DNA, a spin-out from Mark Bathe’s lab at MIT and a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant recipient. “The vision is clear to me,” says Banal. “We are going to be able to understand everything about the human body as well as every living organism, unlocking the keys to life.”

Inspired by nature's information storage medium, Cache DNA, is using a proprietary molecular barcoding and encapsulation technology that allows DNA to be used as a scalable platform for handling nucleic acids critical to areas like biobanking, biopharmaceutical library assets and personalized medicine. It is one of the companies scheduled to speak on a panel about DNA storage at Puzzle X, a global event about frontier tech that will take place in Barcelona November 15-17.
The idea of using DNA as a medium for storing digital information was first suggested in 1959 by the American physicist Richard Feynman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. Breakthroughs announced in the last few months underscore the progress being made to turn the vision into reality.

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Quantum computing taps into the unusual behavior of atomic and sub-atomic particles to perform far more complex calculations at a massively increased speed compared to today’s computers. Errors are the main barrier. Alice and Bob’s unique technology of self-correcting superconducting quantum bit, the cat qubit, promises a much simpler path to fault-tolerant and universal gate-based quantum computing. The company has already demonstrated experimental results surpassing those of technological giants like Google and Amazon.
The French scale-up specializes in cat qubits, superconducting qubits with built-in error correction that drastically lower the hardware requirements in quantum computers. Its researchers have demonstrated that using cat qubits may reduce the number of qubits required to run landmark quantum algorithms by up to 60 times.

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Percentage of chief risk officers who believe the use of AI technologies poses reputational risks to their organization, according to a survey of the World Economic Forum’s Chief Risks Officers (CRO) community released on July 27. CROs broadly agree that risk management is not keeping up with the rapid development and deployment of AI technologies, with 90% calling for an acceleration of regulation. Almost half of respondents agree with slowing or pausing development of these technologies until the associated risks are better understood.The community comprises 40 risk professionals from a wide range of multinational companies, covering technology, financial services, healthcare, professional services and industrial manufacturing. Respondents to the survey also identified macroeconomic indicators, pricing and supply disruptions of key raw materials, armed conflicts and regulatory changes as top concerns for organizations.