🚀 FP! Week In Review, Briefly #19

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

In Case You Missed It ...

💥🔄️ The AI Boom Loop (Monday)

⛈️ The AI jobs ‘bloodbath’ that keeps getting postponed (Tuesday)

🕛 The Doomsday Clock is a myth machine (Wednesday)

⤴️ Beyond Abundance: My chat with Brink Lindsey about his new book, ‘The Permanent Problem’ (Friday)

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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

• Drop in Drug Overdoses Boosts U.S. Life Expectancy to All-Time High - WSJ

• How shopping chatbots might transform retail - FT

• Democrats say the next IRA will be about ‘speed’ - E&E

• Amazon and Google Eat Into Nvidia’s A.I. Chip Supremacy - NYT

• A Yann LeCun–Linked Startup Charts a New Path to AGI - Washington Post

• Researchers Are Using A.I. to Decode the Human Genome - NYT

• How Remaking the Neighborhood Could Boost Poor Kids’ Futures - WSJ

• Tesla kills Models S and X to build humanoid robots instead - Ars Technica

• We’re Planning for the Wrong AI Job Disruption - WSJ Opinion

• Waabi raises up to $1 billion and partners with Uber to deploy 25,000 robotaxis as the race to dominate self-driving heats up - Fortune

• Why people still matter in the AI era - FT

• China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World - Wired

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⤵ Down Wing Things

• How Bad Are A.I. Delusions? We Asked People Treating Them. - NYT

• Inside Josh Hawley’s anti-AI strategy - Axios

• New Jersey Governor’s Electricity Obsession Is a Warning - Bloomberg Opinion

• Hochul is poised to welcome Waymo. Mamdani may be a different story. - Politico

• Big Tech’s borrowing spree raises fears of AI risks in US bond market - FT

• The biggest drag on global trade isn’t tariffs, but standards - The Economist

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Essays and Q&As

💥🔄️ The AI Boom Loop

Upward Spiral: Silicon Valley is trying to devise a system wherein AI improves the very systems that create AI — designing chips, tuning models, and automating research — then reinvesting those gains into faster progress. A “boom loop” of compounding intelligence.

Automated Advancement: Startups and major labs are already at work, with new companies using AI to redesign hardware and optimize models. The goal isn’t smarter chatbots — it’s automating innovation itself.

Breaking the Silicon Ceiling: Economist Charles I. Jones argues that long-run growth comes from idea creation, not task efficiency. AI that merely automates work sustains today’s economy. AI that accelerates discovery could push growth beyond its century-long two-percent (per capita) trend.

Up Wing Up Shot: The next productivity boom may come from recursive, affordable software that makes progress compound. No Singularity required — just faster science, cheaper intelligence, and a flywheel that keeps turning.