Synthetic Auth

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...

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...