🚀 FP! Week In Review, Briefly #34
Also: Key Up Wing and Down Wing news from the week that was
In Case You Missed It ...
✝️✨ On Pope Leo’s AI encyclical letter (Wednesday)
⤵️ Decline is still a choice (Thursday)
💥 A bad day for the American space program. There will be more. And that’s OK (Friday)
⤴️⤵️ Up Wing/Down Wing
A selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the past week.
⤴ Up Wing Things
Why data centers don’t deserve so much hate - WashPost
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says we’re close to AGI - Axios
Mathematicians stunned by AI’s biggest breakthrough in mathematics yet - NewSci
Sundar Pichai Understands Why People Are Anxious About A.I. - NYT
France’s Answer to OpenAI Warns of Dangers of U.S. Tech Dominance - WSJ
Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI - Free Press
How Amazon Went From an AI Also-Ran to a Real Contender - WSJ
I Have Seen the Future of Physical AI in Dusty West Texas - Bloomberg
NASA takes steps toward building Moon Base, including discussing a “perimeter” - Ars Technica
Tesla’s Newest Electric Vehicle Could Jolt the Trucking Industry - NYT
Musk’s SpaceX Writes Tesla’s Future in the Stars - Bloomberg
SpaceX IPO filing lays out Musk’s interplanetary manifesto - Semafor
Ozempic may be reshaping the brain, scientists say - WashPost
A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial - MIT Tech Review
SandboxAQ brings its drug discovery models to Claude — no PhD in computing required - TechCrunch
A revolutionary cancer treatment could transform autoimmune disease - Ars Technica
The smartphone theory of birth rate decline doesn’t hold up - Reason
⤵ Down Wing Things
China overhauls world’s biggest surveillance network with advanced AI - FT
The most spectacular rocket explosion since N1 just happened in Florida - Ars technica
Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets - WSJ
Ebola Science Is Moving Fast. It Might Not Be Enough - Bloomberg
Q-Day could destroy bitcoin – and our retirement saving - NewSci
MAGA’s civil war over immigration is over. Silicon Valley lost. - Vox
The Great Depopulation - The Atlantic
↕️ Which Wing Things?
Elon Musk is going all-in on an unproven technology - Economist
Phoenix Built an Empire of Cubicle Jobs. AI Is Coming to Tear It Down. - WSJ
The internet is being rebuilt for machines - TechCrunch
What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring? - FT
Essays and Q&As
✝️✨ On Pope Leo’s AI encyclical letter
The good: Leo’s vision of keeping humanity central to the Age of AI aligns with the Up Wing project: using technology and policy to alleviate suffering and unlock new possibilities. Not utopia. Just a wealthier, healthier world.
The concern: The encyclical frames AI-driven automation almost entirely through “social disruption and moral risk”—warning that pursuing greater profits cannot justify “systematically sacrificing jobs.”
Why it matters: That view ignores the historical pattern whereby disruptive general-purpose technologies—steam, electrification, the internet—eventually created new industries and dramatically higher living standards.
The bottom line: Pope Leo’s “technocratic paradigm” framing carries a Down Wing intellectual pedigree that has proven harmful to human flourishing for more than half a century. The Vatican should hire better economists.
The pattern: At precisely the moment innovation became harder after the postwar boom, America became less willing to tolerate the risks and disruptions inseparable from innovative discovery. We underfunded science, overregulated the physical economy, and abandoned Apollo-scale aspirations.
The new wrinkle: A Peterson Institute brief finds the AI economy is growing at over 2,000 percent per year in quality-adjusted terms—yet barely registering in GDP because per-unit prices are crashing as fast as output rises. We may be dramatically underestimating AI’s impact.
The real question: Imagine Washington pushing an EU-style AI Act, compute restrictions, algorithmic mandates. What would that cost us—economically and in national security terms?
The bottom line: So many decisions to be made. Are our current leaders ready to make them?
🚀💥 A bad day for the American space program. There will be more. And that’s OK
The week: NASA awarded contracts for the first elements of a lunar base — then Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded during a static-fire test, badly damaging its only launch pad and possibly grounding the rocket for a year or longer.
The stakes: China is steadily ticking off boxes for a crewed lunar landing before 2030—maybe before America. A successful Chinese landing would hand Beijing a soft-power coup beamed across social media.
The history lesson: The New Glenn explosion echoes the Soviet N1 disaster of July 1969—one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. The N1 catastrophe ultimately helped kill the Soviet lunar program entirely.
Why this is different: America today enjoys what the Soviets lacked—multiple rockets, multiple firms, multiple reasons to keep going. Commercial incentives plus strategic competition with China make space imperative regardless of setbacks.
The bottom line: We will continue to keep lighting the candle!
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