For Cherise Irons, chocolate, red wine, and aged cheeses are dangerous. So are certain sounds, perfumes and other strong scents, cold weather, and thunderstorms. Stress and lack of sleep, too.
She suspects all of these things can trigger her migraine attacks, which manifest in a variety of ways: pounding pain in the back of her head, exquisite sensitivity to the slightest sound, even blackouts and partial paralysis.
Irons, 48, of Coral Springs, Florida, once worked as a school assistant principal. Now, she’s on disability due to her migraine. Irons has tried so many migraine medications she’s lost count—but none has helped for long. Even a few of the much-touted new drugs that have quelled episodes for many people with migraine have failed for Irons.
Though not all are as impaired as Irons, migraine is a surprisingly common problem, affecting 14 percent to 15 percent of people. Yet scientists and physicians remain largely in the dark about how triggers like Irons’ lead to attacks. They have made progress nonetheless: The latest drugs, inhibitors of a body signaling molecule called CGRP, have been a blessing for many. For others, not so much. And it’s not clear why.
The complexity of migraine probably has something to do with it. “It’s a very diverse condition,” says Debbie Hay, a pharmacologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. “There’s still huge debate as to what the causes are, what the consequences are.”
That’s true despite decades of research and the remarkable ability of scientists to trigger migraine attacks in the lab: Giving CGRP intravenously to people who get migraines gives some of them attacks. So do nitric oxide, a natural body molecule that relaxes blood vessels, and another signaling molecule called PACAP. In mice, too, CGRP and PACAP molecules can bring on migraine-like effects.
All these molecules act as “on” switches for migraine attacks, which suggests that there must be “off” switches out there, too, says Amynah Pradhan, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis. Scientists have been actively seeking those “off” switches; the CGRP-blocking drugs were a major win in this line of research.
Despite the insights gleaned, migraine remains a tricky disease to understand and treat. For example, the steps between the molecular action of CGRP and a person experiencing a headache or other symptoms are still murky. But scientists have lots of other ideas for new drugs that might stave off migraine attacks, or stop ongoing ones.
“It’s important to have an expanded toolbox,” says Pradhan.
Complicating the picture further, there’s not just one kind of migraine attack. Migraine can cause headache; nausea; sensitivity to light, sound or smell; or a panoply of other symptoms. Some people get visual auras; some don’t. Some women have migraine attacks associated with menstruation. Some people, particularly kids, have “abdominal migraine,” characterized not so much by headaches as by nausea, stomach pain, and vomiting.
Initially, the throbbing nature of the head pain led researchers to suspect that the root problem was expansion of the blood vessels within the membranes surrounding the brain, with these vessels pulsing in time with the heartbeat. But, as it turns out, the throbbing doesn’t really match up with heart rate.
Today, scientists wonder if both in-brain and beyond-brain factors, including blood vessels releasing pain-causing molecules, play a role, as may other contributors such as immune cells.
What all these proposed mechanisms ultimately point to, though, is pain created not in the brain itself but in the meninges—a multilayered “plastic bag around your brain,” as described by Messoud Ashina, a neurologist at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Human Migraine Research Unit at Rigshospitalet Glostrup in Denmark. These membranes contain cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain and holds it in place. They also support blood vessels and nerves that feed into the brain. The brain itself cannot feel pain, but nerves in the meninges, especially the trigeminal nerve between the face and brain, can. If they’re activated, they send the brain a major “ouch” message.
Physicians and pharmacists already possess a number of anti-migraine tools — some to prevent future attacks, others to treat an attack once it’s started. Options to stop a current migraine attack in its tracks include over-the-counter painkillers, such as aspirin and ibuprofen, or prescription opioids. Triptans, developed specifically to counter migraine attacks once they’ve begun, are drugs that tighten up blood vessels via interactions with serotonin receptors.
However, scientists later recognized that constricting blood vessels is not the main way triptans relieve migraine; their action to quiet nerve signals or inflammation may be more relevant. Ditans, a newer class of migraine drugs, also act on serotonin receptors but affect only nerves, not blood vessels, and they still work.
For migraine attack prevention, pre-CGRP-era tools still in use today include antidepressants, blood pressure medications, epilepsy drugs, and injections of botulinum toxin that numb the pain-sensing nerves in the head and neck.
Most of these medicines, except triptans and ditans, weren’t designed specifically for migraine, and they often come with unpleasant side effects. It can take months for some preventive medicines to start working, and frequent use of triptans or painkillers can lead to another problem, the poorly understood “medication overuse headache.”
A powerful new player
The CGRP drugs provided a major expansion to the migraine pharmacopoeia, as they can both prevent attacks from happening and stop ones that have already started. They also mark the first time that clues from basic migraine research led to an “off” switch that prevents migraine attacks from even starting.
CGRP is a small snippet of protein made in various places in the body. A messenger molecule that normally clicks into another molecule, called a receptor, on a cell’s surface, CGRP can turn on activity in the receiving cell. It’s found in pain-sensing nerve fibers that run alongside meningeal blood vessels and in the trigeminal ganglia near the base of the skull where many nerves are rooted. The molecule is a powerful blood vessel dilator. It also acts on immune cells, nerve cells, and the nerve-supporting cells called glia.
All of these features—a location in the meningeal nerve fibers with several actions that might be linked to migraine, like expanding blood vessels—pointed to CGRP being a migraine “on” switch. Further research also showed that CGRP is often found at higher levels in the body fluids of people who get migraines.
In a small 2010 study, 12 out of 14 people with migraine did report a headache after receiving intravenous CGRP; four of them also experienced aura symptoms such as vision changes. Only two out of 11 people who don’t normally get migraine attacks also developed a headache after CGRP infusion.
CGRP also caused mice to be extra sensitive to light, suggesting it could have something to do with the light sensitivity in humans, too.
The steps between CGRP in the bloodstream or meninges as a trigger and migraine symptoms like light sensitivity aren’t fully understood, though scientists do have theories. Ashina is pursuing how CGRP, PACAP, and other substances might trigger migraine attacks. These molecules all stick to receptors on the surface of cells, such as the ones in blood vessel walls. That binding kicks off a series of events inside the cell that includes generation of a substance called cyclic AMP and, ultimately, opening of channels that let potassium ions out of the cell. All that external potassium causes blood vessels to dilate—but it might also trigger nearby pain-sensing nerves, such as the trigeminal cluster, Ashina hypothesizes.
It’s a neat story, but far from proven. “We still don’t really know what CGRP does in the context of migraine,” says Greg Dussor, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas.
In one possible model for migraine, various molecules can activate blood vessel cells to release potassium, which activates nearby neurons that send a pain signal to the brain. Various strategies that seek to interfere with this pathway, including the anti-CGRP drugs, are of great interest to migraine researchers.
“It’s a good drug,” says Dan Levy, a neurophysiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who recently described the role of the meninges in migraine for the Annual Review of Neuroscience.
Questions remain, though. One is whether, and how well, CGRP blockers work in men. Since three to four times as many women as men have migraine, the medicines were mostly tested in women. A recent review found that while CGRP blockers seem to prevent future headaches in both sexes, they haven’t been shown to stop acute migraine attacks in men as currently prescribed. (Notably, men made up less than a fifth of those included in the studies as a whole, making it more difficult to detect any low-level effects.)
More data may settle the question. Hsiangkuo Yuan, neurologist and director of clinical research at Thomas Jefferson University’s headache center in Philadelphia, says he’s been tracking the effects of CGRP blockers in his patients and hasn’t seen much difference between the sexes so far in terms of CGRP-blocking antibodies, though there may be a difference in how people respond to small molecules that block CGRP.
Access to CGRP inhibitors has also become an issue. Many insurers won’t pay for the new drugs until patients have tried and failed with a couple of other treatments first — which can take several months. This led Irons, the Florida patient, to try multiple medications that didn’t help her before she tried several CGRP blockers. In her case, one CGRP drug didn’t work at all; others worked for a time. But eventually they all failed.
Searching for new “off” switches
Her case illustrates the need for still more options to prevent or treat migraine attacks, even as the CGRP success story showed there’s hope for new medicines.
“CGRP has really paved the way,” says Andrew Russo, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who described CGRP as a new migraine target for the Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology in 2015. “It’s a very exciting time for the field.”
Physicians have a number of therapies that can treat migraine — from familiar painkillers such as acetaminophen to the newer ditans and CGRP blockers. Yet, many patients still struggle to find consistent symptom relief, motivating scientists to continue to search for new medications.
Russo and Hay, of New Zealand, are interested in building on CGRP action with a potential novel therapy. It turns out CGRP doesn’t hit just one receptor on the surface of cells, like a key that matches only one lock. In addition to the traditional CGRP receptor, it also binds and activates the AMY1 receptor—which itself can be activated by another molecule, amylin.
AMY1 receptors are found at key sites for migraine pain, such as the trigeminal nerves. In a small study, Russo and Hay found that injecting a synthetic version of amylin creates migraine-like attacks in about 40 percent of people with migraine. The researchers also discovered that in mice, activating AMY1 causes sensitivity to touch and light.
Again, that sounds like a migraine attack “on” switch, and Russo believes there’s a good chance that researchers can develop a drug that acts as an “off” switch.
Another promising “on” switch contender is PACAP. Like CGRP, it’s a small protein and signaling molecule. PACAP also appears in the trigeminal nerves that transmit migraine pain and seems to be elevated in some people experiencing a migraine attack. In rodents, PACAP causes expansion of blood vessels, inflammation in the nervous system, and hypersensitivity to touch and light. In a little over half of people with migraine, intravenous PACAP kicked off a fresh, migraine-like attack.
But, Russo says, “PACAP is more than just a CGRP wannabe.” It appears to work at least somewhat differently. In mice, antibodies that block PACAP do nothing against the light aversion activated by CGRP, and vice versa. That suggests that PACAP and CGRP could instigate two alternate pathways to a migraine attack, and some people might be prone to one or the other route. Thus, PACAP-blocking drugs might help people who don’t get relief from CGRP blockers.
Clinical research so far hints that anti-PACAP treatments indeed might help. In 2023, the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck announced results of a trial in which they dosed 237 people with an antibody to PACAP. Those who received the highest dose had, on average, six fewer migraine days in the four weeks following the treatment than they did before receiving the medication, compared to a drop by only four days in people who received a placebo.
Then there’s Ashina’s work, which unites many of the “on”-switch clues to suggest that PACAP, CGRP and other molecules all act by triggering cyclic AMP, causing blood vessel cells to spew potassium. If that’s so, then drugs that act on cyclic AMP or potassium channels might serve as “on” or “off” switches for migraine attacks.
Ashina has tested that hypothesis with cilostazol, a blood vessel dilator used in people who have poor circulation in their legs. Cilostazol boosts production of cyclic AMP and, Ashina found, it caused attacks in a majority of people with migraine.
He also tried levcromakalim, another blood vessel opener that lowers blood pressure. It’s a potassium-channel opener, and this, too, caused migraine attacks for all 16 people in the study.
To Ashina, these experiments suggest that medicines that turn off migraine-inducing pathways at or before the point of potassium release could be of benefit. There might be side effects, such as changes in blood pressure, but Ashina notes there are potassium-channel subtypes that may be limited to blood vessels in the brain. Targeting those specific channels would be safer.
“I personally really like the potassium-channel track,” says Russo. “I think if we can find drugs targeting the ion channels, the potassium channels, that will be fruitful.”
Hopeful for opioids
Russo is also upbeat about work on a new kind of opioid. Traditional opioids, whether from poppies or pharmacies, work on a receptor called mu. Along with their remarkable pain-dulling abilities, they often create side effects including constipation and itching, plus euphoria and risk for addiction.
But there’s another class of opioid receptors, called delta receptors, that don’t cause euphoria, says Pradhan, who’s investigating them. When delta-targeting opioid molecules are offered to animals, the animals won’t self-administer the drugs as they do with mu-acting opioids such as morphine, suggesting that the drugs are less pleasurable and less likely to be habit-forming.
Delta receptors appear in parts of the nervous system linked to migraine, including the trigeminal ganglia. Pradhan has found that in mice, compounds acting on the delta opioid receptor seem to relieve hypersensitivity to touch, a marker for migraine-like symptoms, as well as brain activity associated with migraine aura.
Encouraged by early evidence that these receptors can be safely targeted in people, two companies—PharmNovo in Sweden and Pennsylvania-based Trevena—are pursuing alternative opioid treatments. Migraine is one potential use for such drugs.
Thus, the evolving story of migraine is one of many types of triggers, many types of attacks, many targets, and, with time, more potential treatments.
“I don’t think there’s one molecule that fits all,” says Levy. “Hopefully, in 10, 15 years, we’ll know, for a given person, what triggers it and what can target that.”
It’s the era of the hybrid, with everything from the Ford F-150 to the Kia Sportage offering electrified power without the need to plug in as a way to boost fuel economy. Now that the tech is cheap, it just makes sense, and the time feels right for automakers currently out of the hybrid game in America to try again. Case in point: A brand new Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid will soon go on sale in Japan, and while it isn’t yet confirmed for America, it has some precedent.
Subaru has actually offered several electrified Crosstrek variants in the past, but each previous one had its own quirks that may have limited mass appeal. This latest electrified Crosstrek, on the other hand, seems like it could tick the right boxes.
The first-generation Crosstrek Hybrid used a minuscule 0.6-kWh battery pack and an electric motor integrated into a conventional CVT. The result? A not entirely impressive 30 mpg city, 34 mpg highway, and 31 mpg combined using the EPA testing procedures of the time. Considering a regular first-generation Crosstrek with the CVT was rated at 26 mpg city, 34 mpg highway, and 29 mpg combined, an increase of four city MPG is an improvement, but definitely isn’t world-changing on its own.
Sold in America for model years 2014 through 2016, the original Crosstrek Hybrid is a rare sight in the wild, but you can tell it apart from the regular Crosstrek thanks to clear-lens taillights. Get lucky, and you might even be able to spot one in the launch color of Plasma Green Pearl. Very nice.
Fast forward to 2018, and not only was a brand new generation of Crosstrek in showrooms, Subaru needed a compliance car for North American electrification initiatives, specifically in states that follow California’s emissions standards. The solution? A plug-in hybrid called, somewhat confusingly, the Crosstrek Hybrid. It didn’t quite work like the previous Crosstrek Hybrid. Instead of cramming an electric motor inside a regular CVT, Subaru developed a substantially more conventional hybrid transmission with two motor/generator units, then fed it with both a detuned two-liter flat-four engine and an 8.8 kWh battery pack. The result? If you plugged this PHEV in, it could theoretically travel 17 miles before the gasoline motor kicked in. Not brilliant range, but not nothing either.
However, between only being sold in CARB states and carrying an MSRP of nearly $36,000, the second-generation Crosstrek Hybrid also didn’t move in huge numbers. However, maybe the third time would be the charm, because although the incoming third-generation Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid isn’t confirmed for America just yet, it seems like it might be just the ticket.
Instead of a two-liter flat-four engine, the new Crosstrek Hybrid features a more powerful 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine making 160 horsepower and 154 lb.-ft. of torque on its own. Then Subaru added a planetary CVT with two motor/generator units, with the traction motor pumping out 118 horsepower on its own. That electric motor gets fed by a 1.1 kWh battery pack, and the result is a conventional hybrid with a bit of a twist. While some automakers like Toyota like to put an electric motor on the rear axle to create an all-wheel-drive hybrid, the new Crosstrek Hybrid uses a conventional coupling in its transaxle so it has a conventional all-wheel-drive system — part of Subaru’s DNA.
As for efficiency, Subaru claims the new Crosstrek Hybrid can travel more than 621 miles on a single tank of gas on the admittedly lenient WLTP cycle. Oh, and that 16.6-gallon tank comes courtesy of some repackaging, taking advantage of the low profile of a flat-four engine to put the high-voltage controller under the hood.
Add it all up, and the third-generation Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid finally looks like the right package for America. People love their Subarus (except Matt), people love their hybrids, so it would only take the right product to make people love Subaru hybrids. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, shall we?
“AI” models are suffused with US values and, occasionally, those are quite shocking to us non-Americans
An Icelandic police force used a generated image to promote a public notice
People were absolutely horrified
Why?
Because the cop in the image had a gun, in a holster, AROUND CHILDREN 😱
The uniform was also not accurate for an Icelandic cop but what people found obscene was the idea that anybody would carry a gun around children, even holstered
Quite a few of the replies were along the lines of “quite a few police forces carry guns, it’s not because the AI has a US bias.”
This is nonsense. Does anybody really think that model-generated images of police officers are biased towards being armed because of the massive glut of photos of Finnish police officers in the training data set?
Does anybody seriously believe that image generation models made by US companies using mostly US data show a cop with a gun because, “hey, let’s make sure German police are represented fairly by our model”?
Don’t be ridiculous.
Most of the responses were people thankfully agreeing with the notion that police carrying weapons is bad, but I also got quite a few comments from people absolutely not seeing the issue. “Why? You think the cop’s going to go on a rampage?”
So, for those from countries where, paradoxically, routinely arming police makes people feel safe, a short history of Iceland’s path from being one of the more brutal and violent nations in Europe to being a largely pacifist one.
Iceland was settled in the late eight hundreds by Vikings. Written records, as well as archaeological and genetic evidence shows that many of these settlers were second generation Viking settlers from the British Islands, which technically made many of them Viking-Celts. Many of the original settling population were also Celtic slaves, though they had all been freed by the year 1000 when chattel slavery was banned by law in Iceland. Today, modern gene sequencing seems to indicate that your average Icelander is 30-40% of Celtic descent. As a nation, contrary to the other Nordic countries, modern Icelanders are descended from both the Vikings and their victims.
(Also, last I checked, 1-4% of our genes seem to possibly be of Sámi descent, which was a surprising discovery, though I haven’t followed up to see if that was born out in later studies.)
The Vikings were not known for their pacifism. The voting system for Iceland’s Althing, for example, was proxy combat. Effectively, you assessed which side, for or against a proposal, was likelier to win in combat. Recounts or challenges to that assessment meant doing the actual combat and seeing which side won. And, yeah, that could mean that having a noted sociopath and former mercenary like Egill Skallagrímsson on your side could result in it winning even though it had fewer numbers.
Our predilection towards violence continued until internecine violence escalated to such a point where the country became completely dysfunctional, our resources depleted, and we lost our independence to Norway in 1262-4.
Then Norway lost their independence to the Danish and once the Danish took over things steadily got worse. The Danish ran monopoly and starvation policies in Iceland, where each part of Iceland was controlled by a regional governor (sýslumaður), who operated on behalf of the Danish crown, and who had legislative, executive, and judicial powers. The authorities were effectively free to loot their region at will. Most of the violent massacres in Iceland’s history after we lost our independence were done at the direction of these regional governors.
The massive powers of the regional sýslumaður were not fully removed until Iceland lost a case at the European Court of Human Rights in the 1980s because, and I paraphrase loosely: “you have regional governors who both hold executive and judicial powers with no checks or balances? WTF is wrong with you?”
(Modern Iceland may be a mostly pacifist country but we have never in our history voluntarily relinquished corrupt practices.)
In addition to the looting – regional monopolies set the price that farmers could sell their goods for and the price they could buy goods at and they were fine with the difference between the two resulting in starvation – a good chunk of the Icelandic population were outright slaves. Over 25% of Icelanders were in a form of serfdom, vistarband, whose conditions and rights are, in both modern terms, a form of slavery. That proportion of serfdom was, for a time, the highest in Europe.
Combined with Iceland’s tendency towards natural disasters—weather, volcanos, and earthquakes—and the ruling authority’s refusal to build any infrastructure to deal with any of it, meant that Icelanders died a lot. Like, a lot.
Most children died before they reached the age of five. Most of the rest died before they became adults. If parents had a male name, for example, they wanted carried on into the next generation, they gave all their sons the same name hoping at least one of them would survive to become an adult.
You know how people who study historical life expectancy statistics love to point out that the distribution of life expectancy is usually bimodal? That in most cultures you have high infant and child mortality, but life expectancy wasn’t that awful if you survived that gauntlet into adulthood?
Not so in Iceland. People died as children and those who survived mostly died before middle age. If you go to Iceland’s national library and read through some of the diaries preserved from that time, you’ll find people just over forty writing about how they expected to die soon.
A couple of times in recent history, we had to move cemeteries here in Iceland due to construction and, because we’re quite obsessed with history as a nation, archaeologists and historians were brought in to carefully dig them up and move the remains, inspecting them in the process.
What they discovered were numerous skeletal remains of children. Every adult bone showed signs of malnutrition. Even the ones belonging to Icelanders who were ostensibly “richer” than the rest. Conditions that archaeologists normally only see in remains from post-war or post-plague famines were the norm in Iceland, even among those who were supposedly of the Icelandic upper class (that is, collaborators).
It should not surprise anybody then that the Icelandic independence movement was largely pacifist and non-violent. If the Danes threatened violence, like by sending a representative of the crown with an armed guard to demand that you ceded your demands of independence, you stood your ground but didn’t raise your fist. “We all protest.”
We attained self-rule in 1918 and from the start our constitution called for both pacifism and neutrality, though we were force to abandon the latter at gunpoint by the US after World War 2 (a long story full of typical US bullying, you can probably guess quite accurately what happened).
Despite being pacifist and having no standing army, proportionally more Icelanders died in WW2 than Americans, because of our heavy involvement in the merchant navy that was shipping food through the Nazi blockade of Britain. My granddad lost two brothers to German submarines – he never forgave Germans as long as he lived.
—But, if you don’t have an army, what do you do if somebody invades you?
Well, I expect we would do the same thing we did the last time we got invaded. We protested, loudly, but did not take up arms because that would have just gotten more people killed.
Though, that didn’t mean Icelanders at the time were entirely passive:
One Icelander snatched a rifle from a marine and stuffed a cigarette in it. He then threw it back to the marine and told him to be careful with it.
Iceland has a lot of problems. Our institutions are starved of funding after decades of near-continuous right wing rule. (The post-2008-collapse ostensibly left-wing government was only allowed to follow the thoroughly right-wing International Monetary Fund economic program.) Corruption is pervasive, to a degree that most foreigners simply aren’t capable of appreciating. So much so that building codes, for example, are effectively meaningless. There’s no guarantee that a new residential building here will be even close to code and it’s unlikely the builder would face any meaningful consequences if their non-compliance is discovered. The police in many regions are effectively direct servants of the fishing industry oligarchs – who also run big chunks of our private media as their personal propaganda outlets. We are a thoroughly xenophobic nation whose racism can be genuinely shocking if you’re unlucky enough to encounter it. Naziism and fascist ideas – such as eugenics – had popular support here and you still hear echoes of it in our modern healthcare practices. One of my all-time favourite Icelandic writers, Þórbergur Þórðarson, was fined by Iceland’s supreme court for writing an article in 1934 called “Nazi Sadism” that did nothing more than outline what was then already known about Nazi violence and torture.
Even though Iceland, as a society, has an extremely low tolerance for violence, many people here are fine with others committing violence. It’s fine as long as it doesn’t happen here.
But, overall, we find violence shocking. The whole point of a modern society is to prevent violence and save lives. That’s what it’s for.
Our police do not carry firearms, because a firearm is an explicit threat of lethal force. If our police routinely carried firearms, then that would be telling both them and the citizens they encounter that the job of a police officer is to kill people. It makes them soldiers, not law enforcement.
Icelandic police are trained to use firearms and have controlled access to them as needed. But they are also trained to believe that it’s their job to risk their lives for others – like firefighters – so they should always prioritise saving the lives of others. Even the perpetrators. Unlike US police who are, I’m told, trained to “shoot to kill”, Icelandic police are trained to try to shoot to disable if they’re forced to return fire.
When knife violence is on the rise, our response is “how did we let these people down so much that they resort to violence?”
A few years ago, when woman was horrifically murdered going home alone after partying, our response wasn’t to try to prevent young women from enjoying their lives but to ask ourselves “what can we do to make the nights safer for women?”
We are a society with many systemic problems, prejudices, rampant corruption (seriously, most non-Icelanders have no idea easy how it is for some people here to completely disregard the law), and a thoroughly ingrained xenophobia.
But our saving grace is our low tolerance for violence.
And what I’d like you to ask yourself is this:
What has gone wrong in the many so-called “free” and democratic societies around the world where killing civilians is explicitly a part of a police officer’s job description?
The Wall Street Journalhas an incredible story today. The National Archives museum, under Biden-appointed U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan, has been working to reshape its narrative of American history in order to make white conservatives more comfortable. The Journal describes a pattern of efforts to shape its newest upcoming exhibits to better fit right-wing narratives of U.S. history. The museum has removed references to Martin Luther King Jr., Japanese internment, Native Americans, union organizers, and birth control, because presenting American history honestly would make Republicans upset.
You might think that, come the artificial general intelligence, humanity will enjoy a world of unlimited abundance and prosperity for all, beyond money, under the watchful sensors of the superintelligent AI.
But Silicon Valley bros talking up the Singularity still want to win at capitalism. So alongside OpenAI, Sam Altman’s other big project is a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin — which just rebranded to World Network, or World for short, to slightly reduce the coiner stench. [Reuters; YouTube]
Sam “partnered” Worldcoin with OpenAI earlier this year. [Bloomberg,archive]
Worldcoin investors — which include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman — have put in $244 million. Investors own 13.5% of all the 10 billion worldcoins. The developers get 9.8%. [Crunchbase; white paper]
Altman gives away worldcoins free! He’s just nice like that, see. He makes sure coins only go to individuals by … collecting scans of their eyeballs.
Now, you might think Worldcoin was some sort of crypto pump-and-dump with a sideline in exploitable personal data.
What a Worldcoin is for
Altman promotes Worldcoin as a way to end poverty — and not just a way for him to collect huge amounts of biometric data. He posits a universal basic income, paid in worldcoins.
His project aims to solve a problem that doesn’t exist — “verifying your humanness” in a world dominated by AI agents. Note that this is a problem that Altman is also attempting to cause. Altman imagines AI becoming so powerful you won’t be able to tell humans from chatbots. So you can use your eyeball for sign-in. [CNN]
Worldcoin is telling the press that companies such as Reddit and Discord are working with them on iris-based sign-in. This is false — Worldcoin is just working on using those sites’ public APIs. Reddit has had to make it clear that they have no official Worldcoin integration. [Business Insider, archive; TechCrunch]
Altman and Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania had been “noodling” on the idea of a cryptocurrency since 2019. Altman unveiled the iris-scanning “Orb” in October 2021. [Twitter, archive]
The Worldcoin crypto, WLD, launched in July 2023. In exchange for an iris scan from an orb, you get 25 worldcoins! [CoinDesk, 2023]
Once your eyeball is scanned, the system creates a cryptographic key pair. The public key gets stored with your iris on the Worldcoin blockchain and the private key is stored in the WorldApp application on your phone. If you drop your phone in a puddle, all your worldcoins are gone.
Using Worldcoin
Free money is a powerful lure. When Worldcoin launched in July 2023, Kenyans queued up to get their eyeballs scanned.
Converting worldcoins into actual money you can spend is fraught. The WLD token trades only against the tether stablecoin and mostly on confessed criminal crypto exchange Binance. [CoinDesk, 2023;CoinGecko]
WLD tokens live on World Chain, a blockchain implemented as an Ethereum layer 2 sidechain. So WLD hooks into the rest of the crypto trading system and you can lose all your WLD pretending you’re a hotshot DeFi trader. [Cointelegraph]
Or you could take your chances with over-the-counter buyers, offering you ready cash for WLD at a discount — and who may disappear without ever paying you.
So Worldcoin is a playground for scammers: [Rest of World, 2023]
“There’s no regulation in the space, and the people receiving the free tokens don’t have enough information. What do you expect?” Evrard Otieno, a Nairobi-based crypto trader and software developer, told Rest of World. “It’s just another opportunity for traders to make some money in the market.”
In the quest for free money, brawls even broke out in Germany in March this year. Poor people were being recruited by gangs to get scanned for worldcoins — the subject would get about 100 EUR worth of WLD and their handlers would give them 50 EUR in cash for it right away. Worldcoin staff tried to block these “undesirable” users who didn’t know or care about the fabulous crypto dream, and the poor people and their handlers got angry. [DLNews]
WLD is not officially available in the US — it’s really obviously a security under US regulations. US users can still get their eyeballs scanned if they like, though they won’t get any WLD.
Make worldcoins operating an orb!
Worldcoin distributes the orbs to operators around the world under the name Tools For Humanity. It’s a sort of multi-level marketing arrangement, complete with a three-day sales conference in Dubai for orb operators. The operators get paid in tethers. [MIT Technology Review, 2022, archive]
The orb distribution enterprise had a shaky start when it turned out to be filled with crooks and corruption from top to bottom. Hundreds of people got scanned and were never paid their WLD. The operators were paid late and had onerous signup quotas. The orbs frequently failed to work.
“We didn’t want to build hardware devices,” said Blania. “We didn’t want to build a biometric device, even. It’s just the only solution we found.” Perhaps you could try not doing all of this, then. [Buzzfeed News, 2022]
In its push for more eyeballs, this year Worldcoin introduced a new version of the orb for mass production in Germany.
Worldcoin is also opening new orb scanning venues in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Though a partnership with the delivery app Rappi, in parts of Latin America you can have a new-model orb delivered to your door on demand, “like a pizza.” You get your scans and worldcoins and the orb goes on to the next sucker. [Wired, archive]
About that biometric data
It’s entirely unclear if people submitting to the scans understand how their biometric data will be used — and how secure the data is.
Days after the 2023 launch, the Communications Authority of Kenya and the Office of the Data Protection Commission ordered Worldcoin to suspend operations while they reviewed the project’s privacy protections. [Twitter, 2023,archive]
The Kenyan police raided Worldcoin’s Nairobi warehouse on August 5, 2023 and seized the orbs. [KahawaTungu, 2023].
Data watchdogs in Britain, France, and Germany started investigating — it’s utterly unclear how any of this works with the GDPR. The Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington urged further government scrutiny: [ICO, 2023;Reuters, 2023; EPIC, 2023]
Worldcoin’s approach creates serious privacy risks by bribing the poorest and most vulnerable people to turn over unchangeable biometrics like iris scans and facial recognition images in exchange for a small payout.
Worldcoin has already created a black market in biometric data. [Wired, 2021;Reuters, 2023;Gizmodo, 2023]
Kenya has since allowed Worldcoin to proceed. But it’s also facing scrutiny in Colombia, Hong Kong, and Argentina. Orb scans and WLD trading are not legal in Singapore. Spain and Portugal issued temporary bans over privacy concerns. [MAS; AEPD; CNPD, PDF]
Will any of this work?
The investors’ worldcoins are unlocked as of July 2024, if they want to sell up. At present, the World team appears to be making sure the token stays nicely pumped up for the insiders. [Twitter, archive]
The main issue is that there’s no real world demand, so there’s no liquidity — Worldcoin is just another minor crypto altcoin for speculators and any substantial dump will crash it.
Blania this year gave Worldcoin “maybe a 5% chance of succeeding” — though whether at saving humanity from economic destruction by the future AI or perhaps at being allowed to run at all was not clarified. [Bloomberg, archive]
Printing their own pump-and-dump magical crypto money and collecting a vast pile of exploitable biometric data will just be consolation prizes, then.
As employers increasingly use digital tools to process job applications, a new study from the University of Washington highlights the potential for significant racial and gender bias when using AI to screen resumes.
The UW researchers tested three open-source, large language models (LLMs) and found they favored resumes from white-associated names 85% of the time, and female-associated names 11% of the time. Over the 3 million job, race and gender combinations tested, Black men fared the worst with the models preferring other candidates nearly 100% of the time.
Why do machines have such a outsized bias for picking white male job candidates? The answer is a digital take on the old adage “you are what you eat.”
“These groups have existing privileges in society that show up in training data, [the] model learns from that training data, and then either reproduces or amplifies the exact same patterns in its own decision-making tasks,” said Kyra Wilson, a doctoral student at the UW’s Information School.
Wilson conducted the research with Aylin Caliskan, a UW assistant professor in the iSchool. They presented their results last week at the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society in San Jose, Calif.
The experiment used 554 resumes and 571 job descriptions taken from real-world documents.
The researchers then doctored the resumes, swapping in 120 first names generally associated with people who are male, female, Black and/or white. The jobs included were chief executive, marketing and sales manager, miscellaneous manager, human resources worker, accountant and auditor, miscellaneous engineer, secondary school teacher, designer, and miscellaneous sales and related worker.
The results demonstrated gender and race bias, said Wilson, as well as intersectional bias when gender and race are combined.
One surprising result: the technology preferred white men even for roles that employment data show are more commonly held by women, such as HR workers.
This is just the latest study to reveal troubling biases with AI models — and how to fix them is “a huge, open question,” Wilson said.
It’s difficult for researchers to probe commercial models as most are proprietary black boxes, she said. And companies don’t have to disclose patterns or biases in their results, creating a void of information around the problem.
Simply removing names from resumes won’t fix the issue because the technology can infer someone’s identity from their educational history, cities they live in, and even word choices for describing their professional experiences, Wilson said. An important part of the solution will be model developers producing training datasets that don’t contain biases in the first place.
The UW scientists focused on open-source LLMs from Salesforce, Contextual AI and Mistral. The models chosen for the study were top-performing, Massive Text Embedding (MTE) models, which are a specific type of LLMs trained to produce numerical representations of documents, allowing them to be more easily compared to each other. That’s in contrast to LLMs like ChatGPT that are trained for generating language.
The authors noted that numerous previous studies have investigated foundation LLMs for bias, but few have looked at MTEs in this application, “adding further novelty and importance to this study.”
Spokespeople for Salesforce and Contextual AI said the LLMs used in the UW research were not intended for this sort of application by actual employers.
The Salesforce model included in the study was released “to the open source community for research purposes only, not for use in real world production scenarios. Any models offered for production use go through rigorous testing for toxicity and bias before they’re released, and our AI offerings include guardrails and controls to protect customer data and prevent harmful outputs,” said a Salesforce spokesperson by email.
Jay Chen, vice president of marketing for Contextual AI, said the LLM used was based on technology from Mistral and is not a commercial Contextual AI product.
“That being said, we agree that bias and ethical use of AI is an important issue today, and we work with all of our customers to mitigate sources of bias in our commercial AI solutions,” Chen said by email.
Mistral did not respond to GeekWire’s request for a comment.
While the propensity of bias in different software solutions for screening resumes is not known, some elected leaders are taking initial steps to help address the issue.
In a move to provide more comprehensive safeguards against discrimination, California passed a state law making intersectionality a protected characteristic, in addition to identities such as race and gender alone. The rule is not specific to AI-related biases.
New York City has a new law requiring companies using AI hiring systems to disclose how they perform. There are exemptions, however, if humans are still involved in the process.
But in an ironic twist, that can potentially make the selections even more biased, Wilson said, as people will sometimes put more trust in a decision from technology than humans. Her next research will focus on how human decision makers are interacting with these AI systems.
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