Synthetic Auth

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...

Greetings! For those unfamiliar with Silicon Valley, it was an HBO comedy series (2014-2019) that satirized the tech industry through the misadventures of a startup called Pied Piper and its rival, the fictional tech giant Hooli. The show became beloved for its uncanny ability to parody real Silicon Valley excess, hubris, and absurdity—often having episodes feel prophetic months after they aired. This fictional episode, however, isn't prophetic. It's documentary “The Power Problem” A Silicon...

Greetings! This week: AI models that occasionally notice their own thoughts, 250,000 quantum jobs race, and 180 million job postings reveal that "photographer" now means "orchestrator of image generation." The common thread? We're watching identity—both digital and human—get redefined not by what something is, but by what it can make other things do. Which raises the question: for those who've always answered "who are you?" with "I'm a writer" or "I'm a photographer"—people whose sense of...

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...