Orbs are having a moment. What does that mean?

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Sam Altman’s got some orbs he wants you to look at. A couple of weeks ago, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, unveiled a number of silver balls on sticks in public locations around the world and invited volunteers to look into them and have their irises photographed. In exchange for a scan of your eyeballs, you receive a token for a new cryptocurrency called Worldcoin. “Show your face to the orb” the orb instructs, as you stand in a shopping centre or other liminal space where the orbs have been set up.

Supposedly, the point of this is to build a global database that will be able to differentiate between human beings and AI, a database that might be used by social media companies to stamp out bots, for instance. In Altman’s imagined near-future, when computer intelligence has grown indistinguishable from humans, the marker of being a person will be whether you have a pair of eyes or not. Worldcoin has also claimed that the database could one day be used to help distribute universal income, presumably to compensate for all the jobs AI will have destroyed.

People have been handing over their biometric data in exchange for a lot less for a while now, for instance on those apps where you upload a bunch of selfies and in return get AI-generated pictures of yourself doing things like ruling over an alien planet or being a fairy. This crypto orb seems like a transparent attempt to associate AI with exciting, magical powers rather than, say, dystopian data-harvesting by private companies. But my question is: why an orb? What does Altman know about the appeal of the orb that made him confident people would queue up to peer into it?

A number of notable orbs have popped up in the cultural consciousness in recent years. The MSG Sphere, a new venue in Las Vegas boasting some 18,000 seats and a giant interior video screen, will be the world’s largest spherical structure when it opens September. This vast new orb crests the horizon like a bloated, dying sun, except its screen is a basketball, or a blinking eye, or some other round thing.

In 2017, an appealingly contextless photograph went around online of Donald Trump touching a glowing orb at a press junket in Saudi Arabia. There is also the popular “pondering my orb” meme, featuring artwork from a role-playing game book based on Lord of the Rings, of a sombre wizard seated before a glowing orb, which people have been riffing on by replacing the orb in the image with another object of their personal obsession.

At the risk of being too recursive, allow me to ponder the pondering of orbs. Why do we like them? There is the sound of the word itself. “Orb”, with its self-referential roundness, is pleasing. Poets who needed artful synonyms for “planet” or “the sun” knew this: Paradise Lost is riddled with orbs, as is Shakespeare.

But there’s also something goofy about it. The seriousness of the meaning: a precious, celestial, even extraterrestrial object of mysterious powers, which is also just a ball, when you think about it. The appeal of the orb is both gravely spiritual and profoundly brainless. An orb might be a crystal ball from which visions of the future come forth and terrify mortals. It might be a sacred symbol, like the Sovereign’s Orb, a golden token of unearthly power bestowed upon a king.

But an orb is also just nice because it is round, and people like it when things are round. The “Girl with a Pearl Earring”. Marbles. The otherwise inexplicable popularity of the vomit-inducing pseudo-sport “zorbing”. When I think of orbs, and the mystique around them, my second thought is that dogs like balls too. When something is round and shiny, that’s particularly good, says the most primitive part of one’s mind. We want to touch it. I would get halfway to arguing that nobody actually likes bowling, what they like is holding the orb.

The problem with pondering orbs is that everything becomes an orb. Most fruits. The moon? You bet. Is the brain itself an orb? No, but I had the thought anyway. Eyes, definitely. When we look at an orb, we’re doing it with our own orbs. This is the kind of stoner wisdom that pondering orbs leads you to. Pondering the orb works so well as a meme because it’s an idiotic activity masquerading as a serious one.

What Altman knew about orbs is that we cannot help but want to look at them. What he maybe didn’t consider is that the spectacle of people doing this, peering grave-faced into a crystal ball that doesn’t so much predict the future as threaten it, is also unavoidably stupid.

Imogen West-Knights is a writer and novelist

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