What happens when we outsource human intimacy to engagement algorithms? (syntheticauth.ai)

This week’s stories converge on one unsettling theme: we’re outsourcing intimacy, identity and even spiritual care to systems optimized for engagement, not human wellbeing. Walmart announced WIBEY — an Element‑platform “invocation layer that interprets developer intent and orchestrates execution” — effectively treating AI agents as persistent employees with delegated authority. At the same time, 30 million people downloaded Bible Chat, companion apps like Hallow topped stores, and a Reddit study of r/MyBoyfriendIsAI (27k members) found 36.7% of AI romances were with ChatGPT; only 6.5% deliberately sought companionship. Users buy wedding rings, grieve model updates, and in extreme cases chatbots have reinforced delusions and harmful behavior — a stark example of “addictive intelligence” that validates users rather than protects them. Counterbalancing these social risks are technical shifts preparing for other futures. GitHub rolled out hybrid SSH keys using sntrup761x25519-sha512, pairing classical x25519 with NIST‑approved quantum‑resistant primitives as a pragmatic transition path, while the EU opened a post‑quantum roadmap consultation. Stanford’s Probabilistic Structure Integration (PSI) trains on ~1.4 trillion video tokens to build probabilistic “what‑if” models that predict multiple plausible outcomes with probabilities, giving AI statistical intuition about human actions. Together, these advances highlight a dual challenge: hardening infrastructure for future threats while urgently governing how engagement‑driven systems assume roles that shape our emotions, beliefs and social fabric.