Reality Under Threat

Back in October, I wrote about Worldcoin and the Orb, a real device that scans your iris and gives you a digital ID and a bit of crypto in exchange. At the time, it felt like speculative tech dressed in science fiction clothing. Today, it feels like quiet infrastructure being laid in plain sight.

These Orbs available around the globe are now appearing across the United States—not in labs or corporate headquarters, but at easily accessible scanning stations. You scan your eye, prove you are human, and get access to a digital identity that may soon be necessary just to use the internet. This isn’t a future scenario. It is happening right now.

And yet, in so many corners of higher education, we are still debating whether using ChatGPT constitutes plagiarism. We sit in meetings discussing how to ban tools that most faculty haven’t even explored. We are operating as if time is on our side, as if the world will slow down while we catch up. It won’t!

What we are really experiencing is a kind of institutional paralysis. It feels like we are trapped in bullet time, that surreal moment in The Matrix when perception slows, but everything else continues at full speed. Outside the classroom, AI agents are already writing, designing, building, and learning. Inside, we are still clinging to outdated rubrics, assessment models, and assumptions about what creativity and authorship even mean.

When I bring up the Orb in conversation, many colleagues look at me like I’m joking. They assume I’m describing an episode of Black Mirror. They cannot believe this is real, let alone in rollout. But it is, and our educational systems are not adapting fast enough to make sense of what it means.

There is, however, a quieter path being explored. The Content Credentials initiative, led by Adobe and others, offers a softer and more transparent response to the same core question. Rather than trying to prove you are human through biometrics, Content Credentials aim to show where content came from and how it was made. It is metadata with a conscience, offering transparency instead of surveillance.

It is not a perfect solution, but it is a meaningful one. It allows artists, writers, and educators to mark their work with clarity and context, especially as AI begins to shape and blur the boundaries of what “authorship” even looks like.

And that’s the deeper issue. What kind of digital world are we building? One where your biological identity is the price of entry? Or one that emphasizes openness, trust, and context?

This question becomes even more urgent when you factor in the rapid evolution of generative video. Tools like Google Veo 3 and Kling 2.1 are now generating high-resolution, photorealistic video from simple text prompts. The line between what is captured and what is fabricated is fading. Soon, our very sense of what is real—what we can trust with our eyes—will be fundamentally challenged.

The fact that most institutions are not addressing these changes with any urgency is troubling. We are not preparing students to think critically with these tools, let alone use them well. We are not rethinking what learning, making, or even being human means in a digital landscape increasingly shaped by synthetic media.

We cannot keep teaching like it is 2015. We cannot keep pretending that originality means what it used to. We cannot reduce AI to a classroom threat while ignoring its broader implications for creativity, identity, future work, and truth. And we should not pretend that students are ahead of us. Many are just as stuck, often using these tools in the most surface-level ways—patching together responses for assignments designed for a pre-AI world. They are not leading the charge. They are trying to survive systems that no longer make sense.

Outside our classrooms, the foundations are shifting. Infrastructure is being built. Biometric systems are coming online. Reality itself is being redefined. While we debate policy and reword assessment rubrics, the architecture of the future is being constructed without us.

The time for speculation is over. The time for incrementalism is past. What we need now is a clear-eyed, unapologetic commitment to rethink our systems—from the way we teach to the way we define what is real—so they align with the world we are actually living in, not the one we used to know.