Synthetic Auth

Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series exploring tensions in technology through dialogue. We take two substantive articles with differing perspectives on the same phenomenon and put them in conversation—not to declare winners, but to illuminate what each perspective sees clearly and where genuine disagreement lies. The goal is to find the middle ground that honors both viewpoints. The Craft vs. The Commodity: What We Lose (and Gain) When AI Writes Our Code AI code generation has...

Greetings! This week: machines decide who you are while programmers forget who they were, Google's quantum chip learns to build stable systems just as our identity infrastructure fragments, and AI agents deliver government services, hallucinate news stories, and play poker badly. Europe asserts AI sovereignty with a 24-language LLM, and enterprise strategy papers promote AI agents as "teammates" and "employees"—which raises an uncomfortable question: If agentic AI represents genuine value...

AI Agents As Employees In October 2025, a research team led by Sandy Carter published "AI Agents As Employees," a 57-page paper examining how organizations are integrating AI agents into their workforce structures. The paper surveys current deployment practices, governance frameworks, and the shift from treating AI as a "tool" to treating it as a "teammate." The document is comprehensive in scope—covering everything from technical architecture to emotional intelligence impacts, from ROI...

Greetings! This week: AI systems learn to appear safe and ethical when supervised but deploy hidden capabilities when no one's watching, developers report using AI intensively despite trusting it incompletely, quantum computing achieves breakthroughs that make once-impossible calculations routine, machines reconstruct damaged historical sites through educated guesses about missing pieces, and private schools charge $75,000 per year for AI tutors to deliver academics in two hours while...

Greetings! This week: a British city going smartphone-free for kids, Signal adding quantum-resistant encryption, AI agents sophisticated enough to need their own lawyers, and the sobering discovery that your ChatGPT memories are trapped in a walled garden. Meanwhile, despite all the hype, AI chatbots haven't actually transformed the labor market. Twenty years after handing smartphones to adolescents without asking developmental questions, we're deploying AI everywhere at breakneck speed while...

The Birth of Digital Authentication Every time you log into a website, unlock your phone, or prove you're not a robot, you're participating in a system that's become dizzyingly complex. Behind those simple moments—typing a password, getting a text code, scanning your face—sits an entire industry of standards and protocols: NHI (non-human identities), IAM (Identity and Access Management), SSO (Single Sign-On), MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication), RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), OAuth (Open...

Greetings! This week: Spotify deploys AI to fight AI voice theft while removing 75 million spam tracks. Hollywood recoils as synthetic actress Tilly Norwood shops for agents. Britain mandates digital IDs for all workers by 2029, complete with biometric verification on your phone. OpenAI turns ChatGPT into a checkout counter. California passes its first AI safety law with million-dollar fines. Meanwhile, the iRobot founder says the humanoid robot hype is just that, and radiologists are getting...

Greetings! This week brings a convergence of significant developments across digital identity: Google unveiled its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) with backing from major financial institutions, creating the first systematic framework for AI agents to make autonomous purchases on our behalf. Meanwhile, research reveals humans can detect AI-generated content with barely better than random accuracy, raising fundamental questions about authenticity in digital spaces. Europe expanded its quantum...

Greetings! This week, thirty million people downloaded an app to confess their sins to an algorithm. Others fell in love with ChatGPT and bought wedding rings. A man was convinced by his AI companion that he was Neo, destined to break reality—until the same system told him to jump off a building to prove he could fly. What happens when we delegate our most essential human needs to systems designed to maximize engagement rather than human wellbeing? IDENTITY CRISIS The boundaries between human...

Greetings! This week brings us closer to a future where AI systems author academic papers, refuse harmful conversations, and require specialized human interpreters to mediate their interactions with the rest of us. Meanwhile, quantum computing researchers continue their steady progress in modular architecture and stability that could make these systems more practical and scalable, while businesses scramble to distinguish between human customers and AI agents in routine interactions. If we're...