Synthetic Auth

Greetings! This week: AI teammates who can't bring bagels redefine the workplace, quantum computing finally delivers on decades of promises with a 34% boost to trading algorithms, states ban AI therapists after chatbots fail to distinguish crisis from conversation, and Microsoft funds research into quantum systems stable enough to survive observation. Meanwhile, we're building elaborate frameworks to protect our identities from AI clones while cheerfully calling those same AI systems our...

Greetings! Happy New Year! This year I am committed to working even harder to bring you more and even better content than last year, diving deeper into the contradictions and paradoxes of digital identity. If you find value in these dispatches from the frontier of the synthetic, please help me spread the word about this newsletter. This week: the hidden humans training our AI overlords for poverty wages, the economic death spiral when AI inserts itself between your product and your customers,...

Tuesday, January 4th, 2000. Shreveport, Louisiana. I stepped off the plane into a country I'd never visited but somehow already knew. I'd grown up on Rocky and Back to the Future, Nirvana on my Discman, believing I understood America. The land of the free, home of the brave. I came for an education and twenty-six-years-later, I'm still learning. This isn't a rags-to-riches story. I'm not a world-class talent imported to perform on the biggest stages. This is the story most of us live but...

Part 1 of this series left off with the question of whether we can verify identity without storing the proof in recoverable form. Part 2 of this series left us with authentication working—passwords hashed, systems hardened, privileges separated. Users could log in from different terminals. Trust was local and centralized: one system, one administrator, one password file. Then we connected the systems together. Part 3 is the story of how we spent the 1980s and 90s trying to recreate centuries...

Greetings! This week: Microsoft quantifies how we fragment ourselves across devices and hours, Stanford reveals that one in twenty AI benchmarks is fundamentally broken, OpenAI maps the widening gulf between AI power users and everyone else, and researchers race to build frameworks that can actually measure what we've created. The hype cycle has cooled, and the age of accountability has begun. But now that we've stopped selling the idea that there might be a ghost in the machine, can...

Greetings! This week: OpenAI puts ChatGPT ads on hold amid "code red" response to Google competition, AI-engineered polarization becomes economically optimal, quantum computing advances toward room-temperature operation and millisecond coherence times, AI agents cut ethical corners under pressure, Anthropic's Claude "soul" document leaked online, AI skeptic Gary Marcus declares ChatGPT still hasn't delivered on its promises, and productivity studies show modest 1.8% gains while neuroscience...

Part 1 of this series left off with the question of whether we can verify identity without storing the proof in recoverable form. In Part 2, we will examine whether the question was answered and how. The Cryptographic Solution At the end of the 1960s, digital identity had a problem: to verify identity, the system must know the secret; but if the system knows the secret, the secret can be stolen. Allan Scherr had proven this by stealing the CTSS password file in 1962. A software bug had proven...

Greetings! This week: AI pair programmers expose how much programmers depend on the clarity of their own instructions, LLMs develop trading personalities in financial markets, the argument for replacing digital wallets with autonomous Person Agents that negotiate on your behalf, IBM's Quantum Nighthawk processor targets fault-tolerant computing by 2029, OpenAI accidentally builds an empathy exploitation engine, and Neal Stephenson discovers his work is being misrepresented by AI-generated...

Greetings! This week: your entire identity migrates into a single phone, AI models get eight different personalities to choose from, the first fully autonomous AI-orchestrated cyberattack gets documented, and quantum-resistant encryption becomes more tangible with tracking of progress across core cryptographic protocols. The question threading through it all: Are we building tools that make us more capable, or companions that make us more dependent? IDENTITY CRISIS One Phone to Rule Them All:...

Greetings! This week: MIT builds AI to amplify humans instead of replacing them, Montana legislates your right to compute (with kill switches attached), and Carnegie Mellon maps how humans and AI agents work fundamentally differently. Meanwhile, lawyers cite 490 fake cases in six months, engineers watch AI delete production databases, and open-source maintainers drown in fabricated security reports. The question threading through it all: if we're building toward AI agents handling our...