⏩ FP! Week In Review #39

Also: Key Up Wing and Down Wing news from the week that was

In Case You Missed It ...

↗️ Measuring human welfare in the Age of AI (Tuesday, 1233 words)

GDP is a great but incomplete economic measure that captures a bit less than the full picture of human flourishing, and I think the Age of AI may require additional ways of measuring human progress.

🗽 The Up Wing road not taken, 1976 (Thursday, 1202 words)

The Bicentennial occurred during the early years the Great Downshift, but so many Up Wing things took place that I wonder if 1976 was a missed opportunity for a different policy path, one we get a second chance at with America 250.

🎈 ‘To Fly!’: The most Up Wing film of the 1976 American Bicentennial (Friday, Q&A)

I loved this film as a kid—director Christopher Nolan, too, it turns out (we saw it at the same IMAX theater in Illinois—and my re-upped chat with co-director Greg MacGillivray has inspired me all over again.

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⤴️⤵️ Up Wing/Down Wing

A selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the past week.

⤴ Up Wing Things

America 250

• What America gets right - Axios

• The Founders Are Why America Is Rich. That Legacy Is at Risk - WSJ

• 25 reasons to be optimistic about America’s future - WashPost

• My fellow American: who should be remembered for the next 250 years? - FT

• Happy 250th to a Battered But Beautiful America - Bloomberg

• No One Can Control the Future - Reason

• The populists lost - The Argument Mag

• The US is better off than it was in 1976. So why does it feel worse? - Vox

Anthropic

• America should not imprison frontier AI - The Economist

• How the world’s top AI models were revived - Axios

• U.S. Lifts Restrictions on Anthropic’s Most Powerful A.I. Models - NYT

• Anthropic Reaches Deal With Trump Administration to Restore Access to Fable AI Model - WSJ

• Anthropic launches Claude Science in push for pharma revenue - FT

Consciousness

• Me, Myself and AI - WSJ

• He warned AI could be conscious. Here’s what happened next. - WashPost

• Tech companies are searching for signs that chatbots are conscious - WashPost

• How Working Memory May Give Rise to Consciousness - RealClearScience

• Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain’s ‘Core Algorithm’ - WIRED

Space

• After 53 years, the FAA wants to bring back civilian supersonic flight - Pop-Sci

• NASA chief praises progress Blue Origin is making after launch failure - Ars Technica

• SpaceX Showed Investors Prototype of Elon Musk’s New AI Device - WSJ

• Curiosity, Perseverance and Now Promise? NASA May Send a Mars Rover to the Moon. - NYT

• Rocket Lab Buys Satellite Operator Iridium in Bid to Challenge SpaceX - WSJ

Biotech

• What is ‘SpudCell’? Arguably the greatest bioengineering feat yet - New Scientist

• Most people are thinking about aging all wrong - WashPost

• New Study of Billions of mRNA Vaccine Shots Confirms Their Safety and Efficacy - Reason

• I’m the first person whose life was saved by CRISPR base editing - New Scientist

Energy

• Battery start-ups see ‘crazy’ demand to smooth power surges in data centres - FT

• Slowdown of AMOC ocean current may be gradual and reversible - New Scientist

• Former managers call for restart of German nuclear power plants - World Nuclear News

Economy

• Eliminate ‘personal pricing’ and you risk harming consumers - FT

• This Music Box Is a Ray of Hope for a Decadent Tech Industry - NYT

• CIA Aims to Speed Up Tech Adoption as AI Is ‘Rewriting’ Conflict - Bloomberg

• Heavy corporate AI spenders add staff faster than peers - FT

• The Tech Innovations Readers Want to See in the Next 20 Years - WSJ

• Opinion | Why A.I. Won’t Steal All Our Jobs - NYT

• Robots, not chatbots, will realise AI’s potential - FT

• What AI Will Do to Art - The Atlantic

• US government wants to have a useful quantum computer by 2028 - New Scientist

• South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots - Ars Technica

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⤵ Down Wing Things

Geopolitics

• A Taiwan Crisis Is Coming — and Xi May Not Wait - Bloomberg

• China Resets the AI Race - WSJ

• China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race - WSJ

• China Emerges as a Relative Winner From Strait of Hormuz Crisis - NYT

Policy

• OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stake - FT

• Donald Trump’s AI regime is opaque, unpredictable—and unsustainable - The Economist

Economy

• The World’s Top Economists Are Sounding the Alarm on AI - WSJ

• AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector - Apollo

• Opinion | The Generational Force Hollowing Out the Economy - NYT

• AI ‘exuberance’ risks ending in lengthy investment bust, BIS warns - FT

• Google caps Meta’s Gemini use as AI demand strains capacity - FT

Space

• SpaceX Is Junk. That’s What the Bond Market Says - Bloomberg

• NASA inspector general suggests Boeing’s Starliner will now be a decade late - Ars Technica

• Why NASA Can’t Leave LEO - D. Dowd Muska Substack

• The Rise of Space AI Might Explain the Fermi Paradox - Universe Today

Energy

• New Jersey Lawmakers Just Nixed a 2-Year-Old Data Center Tax Credit - Heatmap

• Trump’s Nuclear Renaissance Is Stalling - WSJ

• Amid stark opposition, data center developers think twice about Florida - POLITICO

• Why air conditioning became a cross-Atlantic culture war - Vox

• Air Conditioning, Scourge of the French Left - WSJ

• The Overlooked Reason Europe Doesn’t Have AC - The Atlantic

Culture

• AI and the English Language - WSJ

• The rise of vibe lawyering - The Economist

• Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown University - El País

• America’s stillborn 250th birthday - FT

Demographics

• Living in a ghost town: The geography of depopulation and ageing - CEPR

• The Lab Mistake That Might Revolutionize Computing - IEEE Spectrum

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↕️ Which Wing Things?

America

• Will America Survive Another 250 Years? We Asked 11 Historians - Politico

• America is anxious, and awesomely powerful - The Economist

Anthropic

• The Anthropic Fable Ban Is Over. The Battle Over How to Tame AI Has Just Begun - WSJ

• What would multilateral ‘AI arms control’ look like? - FT

• They built the world’s most powerful AI. They’re facing a mystery they can’t explain. - WashPost

• LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out. - MIT Technology Review

Economy

• A.I. Is Reshaping the Economy. Good Luck Measuring How. - NYT

• How Companies Are Managing AI Token Spend - WSJ

• A.I. ‘Employees’ Might Disrupt Work in Unexpected Ways - NYT

• Artificial intelligence and Engels’ Pause - FT

• Why the market for histories of depressions is red hot - The Economist

Chips

• China Defies US Restrictions and Builds the World’s Fastest Supercomputer - WIRED

• How a Niche Technology Became a Choke Point for A.I. - NYT

• Chip Makers Are Profiting Off AI at the Expense of Just About Everyone Else - WSJ

Energy

• AI Data Centers Use Far More Water Than Most Tech Giants Report - WSJ

• Thinking Like an Engineer Won’t Fix the Grid - Heatmap News

• An Alternative Theory of Europe’s AC Problems - Heatmap News

• 6 Facts About Europe and Air Conditioning - Heatmap News

Demographics

• The economics of women’s weight - FT

• Tyler Cowen: The Fertility Crash Will Make the World a Small Town - The Free Press

Aviation

• NASA’s X-59 “frankenjet” tests supersonic flight without the sonic boom - Ars Technica

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