A visit to Ponce City Market offers many diversions. You can ride a three-story slide, mull over the magic of crystals, and sample a gummy-flavored sour ale. You can also, as of this May, scan your eyeball and use it to verify your humanity in the dawning age of supersmart robots.

Inside a spare, warehouse-like store wedged between Sweetgreen and City Winery, World invites you to join the 12 million other people globally who have stepped up to the Orb, proffered an eye, and had their iris scanned in exchange for a World ID proving they are human—plus access to a cryptocurrency called WorldCoin .

We are living through a monumental hinge point in history, in which the arrival of artificial intelligence as a dominant force is being measured in single-digit years, if not months. What w

See Full Page