📈 What people think

There's a lot of pessimism around major projects. They're never on time and always exceed the budget.

This pessimism is often targeted. Why can't the USA/UK/Sweden/South Africa build on time and within budget?

📈 Here are the facts

Usually, pessimists are the ones who are naive and mistaken, but have they found a niche here where their negativity is justified?

From the world's largest database for major projects, the following can be discerned:

• 91.5 percent of projects go over budget, take longer than planned, or both.

• 99.5 percent of projects exceed their budget, take longer, don't achieve expected benefits, or a combination thereof.

So, a mere 0.5 percent of all major projects are completed according to plan, or better.

There are numerous examples of failures

Sydney's Opera House is an iconic building, but not just it's appearance. Its budget was exceeded by 1400 percent.

Yet, the opera house only ranks third on the list, following the Suez Canal and the Scottish Parliament.

It's not just construction projects that overrun. Fifth on the list of projects with the highest risk of exceeding budgets are IT projects.

Does it have to be this way?

No.

Another iconic building, the Guggenheim Bilbao, was completed on time and cost three percent less than budgeted.

It wasn't luck, it was skill. Because there is a method to significantly increase the chances of large projects being completed on time and within budget.

The man who created the database for major projects - Professor Bent Flyvbjerg - has studied both failures and successes. From this, he has devised a method.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 With the method Think slow, act fast, it's possible to build more and bigger, on time and on budget.

Many major projects never see the light of day because there's a fear of costly and delayed failures. Politicians, business leaders, and heads of major organizations are hesitant to take the risk.

Those who realize that it's possible to build big projects on schedule and within budget have an edge.

👇 Here's how you get the Optimist's Edge

In the book How Big Things Get Done, Danish Oxford professor, Bent Flyvbjerg, explains why large (and small) projects often fail and what can be done about it.

At its core is his motto, Think slow, act fast (inspired by Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow").

An example he provides in the book is Pixar, one of the world's most successful film companies. Their movies undergo a lengthy scriptwriting process (think) before animation begins (act).

• One or two people have the primary responsibility for the script. They create a story with some accompanying visuals.

• This is then presented to a group - The Pixar Braintrust - who provide feedback.

• The writers then revise the script and return to the group.

The process is repeated several times before film production starts. No film ever gets an immediate green light. Feedback is always given, and the final product often significantly differs from the initial presentation.

More about Pixar and their creative process can be found in Ed Catmull's book, "Creativity Inc."

Solar energy projects rarely go over

Looking at the list of failed projects, but from the bottom this time, you'll find the projects with the least risk of overrun. There you have solar and wind energy. The risk of a solar project exceeding its timeline, budget, or both is just one percent.

The reason? Modularity.

If you can start your project with one building block, then add another identical one, and another, and so on until the project is complete, the risk of surprises along the way decreases since you're doing the same thing repeatedly.

Thus, a solar cell becomes a solar panel, which becomes a group of solar panels, and eventually, a solar park.

Nuclear power plants often overrun, but there's hope

Looking again at the top of the list, we see nuclear power in third place. New nuclear power plants are often delayed and over budget. However, a development that might reduce this risk is Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs.

A significant portion of the final product will be mass-produced in factories. Modularly.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

Naturally, a successful project entails many more components. Hence, I highly recommend the book How Big Things Get Done for a deeper understanding of undertaking big projects on time and on budget.

📉 What people think

With the launch of ChatGPT, a wave of "AI is going to take your job" articles emerged. This is nothing new. The invaluable source for a fact-based optimist, the Pessimists Archive, shows a century of fear about "robots/machines/computers taking our jobs".

However, as mentioned, ChatGPT, Midjourney, and the other new AI tools have unleashed a tidal wave of speculation about how many jobs will disappear (300 million, BBC), which jobs are AI-proof ("thought leadership", Entrepreneur), how to keep your job (by becoming robot-like, The Atlantic), and how concerned people are (24 percent think their job could soon be obsolete, CNBC).

On the site Will Robots Take My Job, you can check how doomed you are.

📈 Here are the facts

In 1997, the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, lost to IBM's DeepBlue in a much-publicized game. Kasparov became angry, accused IBM of cheating (which he later retracted), but he did not become a luddite. Instead, he popularized a new type of chess.

In advanced chess, the human player is allowed to use and play with a chess computer.

In such a competition in 2005, something fascinating happened. The competitors consisted of both grandmasters who used the most advanced chess computers, and amateurs with regular personal computers.

The outcome should be a given. But it was the amateurs who won. Not because they were better chess players - they were clearly inferior. Not because they had better computers - their computers were clearly inferior.

How could they win then?

They were better at using the computers.

Time and again, Kasparov observed this phenomenon. Eventually, he formulated it like this:

"I have come to the conclusion that a weak human player plus machine plus a better process is superior, not just to a very powerful machine, but most remarkably, a strong human player plus machine plus an inferior process."

This form of chess has come to be called centaur chess, after the mythological creatures that are half-human, half-horse.

Just chess?

This is applicable in many areas. But since AI tools are so new, it's hard to know how big an impact they will have.

One area where AI has begun to be used to some extent, and many believe it has great potential, is radiology. Doctors who use AI to become better at determining whether the images show tumors.

A new research paper investigated this and found that, on average, there was no positive effect from doctors using AI in their assessment.

"We find that AI assistance does not improve the performance of our participants on average, even though the AI predictions are more accurate than the majority of radiologists, and that radiologists respond to this assistance."

This seems to contradict our thesis. However...

"However, the average treatment effects mask important heterogeneity - AI assistance improves performance for a large set of cases, but also decreases performance in many instances."

The really interesting part is revealed in the question why?

Because the doctors were bad at using the AI correctly. They were weak at knowing when to listen to the AI's assessment and when not to.

The doctors were simply bad at the process, at using the AI tool. Just like the grandmasters in chess weren't as good at using the chess computers as the amateurs who won the competition. The doctors who used the AI correctly performed better with AI than without.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 Optimist's Edge: By becoming really good at using AI tools, amateurs can perform better than experts.

For a couple of million years, human success has consisted of inventing and using new tools. Those who did not use these tools have fallen behind. In today's society, AI will naturally take over tasks and make some jobs redundant, as tools and machines have always done.

But those who learn to handle the new tools need not worry. Their jobs are safer, but if they are threatened, it is these people who move forward. Who become this generation's leaders, who get a boost in their career, who see and take the new opportunities before everyone else.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

Test the AI tools. It is easier than you think, as they are controlled by our normal language. On YouTube, there are plenty of guides and channels dedicated to different AI tools.

Writing and thinking

Here is my simple guide to getting started with ChatGPT:

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

Guide to Bard (Google's ChatGPT)

Images

Guide on how to create images with Midjourney.

Keep up with the development

There's a lot going on in the generative AI area right now. The Rundown is a great daily, free, newsletter that gives you an overview of the latest AI development.

No real experts yet

There is a lot of free help online that you can use to become really good. But everything is so new that there are no real, established experts.

If you want, the field is open. You can create your niche and become the best in the world at it.

But even if you don't have such a high level of ambition, the time you invest in learning and becoming good at using AI tools will pay off. As we wrote earlier:

Generative AI unleashes our creativity and gives us new ways to create. But almost none of it is done. There are dozens of low-hanging fruits. Reach out and pick one of them.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

📈 Here are the facts

Peter Diamandis had grown tired of waiting. It was the early 1990s, and we should have had bases on both the Moon and Mars. Tens of thousands of people should have been in space, not just a few hundred. As a little boy, he had watched the Moon landing, and Star Trek, and became a space nerd. Space development, which had moved so quickly in the 60s, had almost stopped by the early 90s.

Somewhere around there, he read Charles Lindbergh's book, The Spirit of St. Louis, about the first Atlantic flight. He then learned that the reason Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic was to win a prize, The Orteig Prize. The hotel owner and aviation enthusiast Raymond Orteig had offered $25,000 to whoever first accomplished the feat.

Hmm, thought Diamandis, can I do something similar to speed up private space travel?

Said and done.

He put together a $10 million prize, which would go to the first private space flight. Together with Buzz Aldrin and other prominent people, he launched the competition in May 1996.

Since he lacked both prize money and a sponsor, the competition was given a temporary name: X Prize, where the X would later be replaced with the sponsor's name.

Despite this, several teams signed up. Among them one from the creator of Quake, John Carmack, and another financed by the Microsoft founder, Paul Allen. The 26 teams invested over $100 million together to win the competition.

Peter Diamandis pitched to over 500 people to sponsor the prize, but everyone said no.

In a desperate attempt involving a new Atlantic flight by Charles Lindbergh's grandson, Eric, an insurance policy, and a grant from the Ansari family, he finally got the money.

This bizarre and entertaining story is described in the book How to Make a Spaceship.

In October 2004, the competition was won by Paul Allen's team, Scaled Composites. By then, Richard Branson's Virgin had bought into the team. After the competition, it became Virgin Galactic, and when Branson flew to space in 2021, it was in a spacecraft based on the one that won the competition.

Because it took several years to find a name sponsor for the competition, the X stuck, and the X Prize Foundation has now, for over 20 years, run several prize competitions.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 Prize competitions accelerate innovation by both crowdsourcing ideas and financing.

In many prize competitions, the amount invested by all teams is often considerably larger than the prize amount. Not infrequently 10 or 20 times larger. For The Orteig Prize 16 times. In other words, you get a lot of bang for your buck.

Even more important is the diversity of ideas. In "regular" innovation, it is usually those who work in an area who tinker with it, but in a competition, others get the chance to test their ideas. Scaled Composites, who won the Ansari X Prize, had not done anything in space before, they built airplanes.

A properly designed prize competition attacks many brains and money bags and push innovation forward.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

There are two main options. Organize your own prize competition, or participate in one.

There are a number of prize competitions around the world.

• X Prize currently has four competitions underway. Among other things, about forest fires and one about carbon capture with a prize pool of one hundred million dollars, sponsored by Elon Musk.

• DARPA regularly works with prize competitions.

• The European Social Innovation Competition has competitions in the social field, right now about energy poverty.

• Milken Institute is now running competitions in green energy and the UN's sustainability goals.

• At the Innovation Challenge, those who are creative in reducing food waste can win a prize.

Proper design is important

A competition in an area where there is already a lot of innovation is unnecessary. We do not need a competition for generative AI right now, for example. The focus should be where innovation has stagnated and new, fresh ideas and a concerted effort can really push it forward.

The design of the criteria for victory is extremely important. The goal must be ambitious, but not unattainable. It must be clear and should not be possible to circumvent and find a way to win that does not really benefit the purpose of the competition.

Often there are both interim goals and final goals. Since a competition can last several years, financing is often a problem for the teams competing. There, interim goals with some prize money can help. It may also be that several ideas are good, and in the long run, an idea that did not win the final prize may still be the most successful. Then it can be good to spread prestige and money a bit.

After innovation comes implementation

Innovation is one thing, and implementation is something else. It took almost twenty years for Virgin Galactic to go from the first successful journey to space in 2004, to getting the first private individuals into space. They have not yet regularly started flying space tourists.

DARPA kicked off the area of self-driving cars with its DARPA Grand Challenge. Despite this, we do not yet have fully autonomous vehicles on the roads, even though Tesla, Waymo and others are working on it.

Both when planning a competition or participating in one, you should think about what comes after the innovation, after the breakthrough.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

You now have an advantage because you have gained this knowledge before most others – What will you do with your Optimist's Edge?

It began above a revolutionary bookstore

In an office above a communist bookstore, named Revolution Books, a thin-haired man with a boisterous laugh was reading statistics.

He was only 30 years old, but already the vice president at D. E. Shaw & Co. A hedge fund that today manages over $60 billion.

In other words, his career looked very promising. Hedge funds have produced dozens of billionaires.

But he couldn't shake off this statistic. Something called the internet was growing at 2300 percent per year.

"You know, things just don’t grow that fast," he said a few years later.

Despite the bright future on Wall Street, he and his wife quit their jobs. She worked at the same place and they had gotten married the year before.

This was an opportunity too big to miss. If the growth continued, soon everyone would be on the internet and that's where they would want to shop.

It continued with a book revolution

He chose to start with books, but the plan was to sell everything. Books were a good starting product because the supply Amazon could offer online was much larger than what could fit in a bookstore. With over a million books, they could demonstrate the web's advantage.

Books were also standardized. When you bought a book, you knew what you were getting, even if you ordered it online.

A large book distribution center was located in Seattle, so Jeff and MacKenzie Scott Bezos packed themselves in the car and drove across the country to the rainy city in the Pacific Northwest.

In hindsight, the decision seems obvious.

Last year, Amazon had a turnover of over 5,000 billion SEK and has more than 1.5 million employees. Jeff Bezos was the world's richest person from 2017 to 2021. He is now third.

Even the founder has gone through a bit of a transformation...

The internet is just a fad

As I said, in hindsight, the decision to leave Wall Street and start Amazon is obvious.

It wasn't at the time.

This is what the headlines looked like about the internet in the 1990s. Newsweek:

Robert Metcalfe, creator of Ethernet:

And my favorite, Paul Krugman:

A tool for seeing opportunities

What Jeff Bezos used to make his decision was Optimist's Edge.

He looked past the negative headlines and pessimism and looked at the facts.

The internet was growing at 2300 percent, and he made the assessment that the growth would continue. Then something that few knew about, even fewer used, and many believed was a fad would become something big. Really big.

Not just facts, optimism too

But a good analysis wasn't enough. It required something more.

The strength of optimism is that you can visualize a positive outcome. Like an elite athlete, you can see the future success.

That's where you get your strength. To train hard and compete. Or to dare to quit a successful career and venture into the unknown.

Understanding something most people don't

With Optimist's Edge, you understand something most people don't understand.

Most people believed that the internet would remain small and insignificant, collapse completely, or at least not become as big and transformative as it did.

Jeff Bezos looked past negative headlines, general pessimism, and used facts and optimism to make a life-changing decision.

You can do that too.

Mathias Sundin
Arge optimisten

So, what is your edge? Here are 97 Optimist's Edge to start with.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

📉 What people think

Most people think of self-driving cars are like today's cars, only that they drive themselves. They think two people will sit in the front, and three in the back, strapped down by seat belts, facing forward.

They think the cars will have doors like today, and will be pretty hard to get in or out of. At least if you are old, or have some sort of disability.

📈 Here are the facts

• Without the need for a steering wheel, and the fact that self-driving cars will be extremely safe – they can and will look very different from today's cars.

• If you have a disability the car be designed so it easy to get in and out of, and so you sit (or lay) comfortably in it.

• If you use a wheelchair, you will be able to drive the wheelchair directly into the vehicle. No need to get out of it, fold it, and put it into the back.

• Of course, there will be no need to install special driving equipment.

• Since self-driving cars will be much cheaper than today's taxi rates, people who can't travel as much today will be able to do that.

This is Zoox, a self-driving car. It is not designed for people with disabilities, but as you can see it doesn't look like a normal car. And it is pretty easy to see that just a few design changes could make it perfect for a person using a wheelchair or having a hard time getting in or out of a normal car.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 Self-driving cars will look different and be much cheaper to travel, meaning a freedom revolution for people with disabilities.

A disability is very often something that limits your freedom. One of the limitations is travel. It is harder and more expensive. Self-driving vehicles will change some of that, making them less expensive and easier to get around.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

Self-driving cars are soon here. It is time to start thinking of what possibilities and opportunities that will bring. One obvious thing is self-driving cars are adapted for people with disabilities.

Designing and prototyping vehicles for that purpose will take time. Now is the time to start.

Organizations for people with disabilities should start to lobby politicians, regulators, and media companies so the transition to self-driving cars is smooth and as fast as possible.

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

Here is the first part in this series:

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

📉 What people think

If people have seen a self-driving vehicle, it is often something like a neighborhood bus. It travels a specific route, very slowly. Like this one in Stockholm.

Or when a Google Car was stopped by the police, because it drove too slowly.

📈 Here are the facts

The reason they are so slow is partly extreme caution. They are used for limited tests, to learn more, not really to function in traffic

Those cars are also not self-driving in the same way we are talking about in this series of articles. They can only drive specific routes or inside small areas. If you dropped the bus in another part of the city, it would stand still.

• When self-driving cars have reached the level where we are so confident in their capabilities that we can remove the steering wheel, they will be much, much faster.

• The reason is the same as why self-driving cars will be extremely safe: "360° vision, it can with millimeter precision understand what is happening, make lightning-fast decisions and calculate and act based on several possible outcomes."

• Few humans can drive at 200 miles per hour, like an F1 driver, and it is very dangerous to do so. Because of the speed your brain needs to handle a lot more information and make faster decisions. But that would be easy peasy for an autonomous vehicle.

• To get to really high speeds, every car has to be self-driving. At least on that specific road. The cars will have to interact with each other wirelessly. Every car also needs to process information and make decisions at lightning speed. If you add a human-driven car to that, the outcome will be a crash.

• When those conditions are met, all cars on that road could drive really fast.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 When all cars on a road are self-driving, they will be able to drive really fast and shorten our traveling times.

Imagine not just really fast human transport, but also goods. Big trucks driving 150-200 miles per hour, with no need to stop for food or sleep. Delivery times (and costs) will drop dramatically.

Specially designed cars, and roads, could make it possible for extremely high speeds of maybe 300 or 400 miles per hour.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

New larger roads, like highways, should already be designed today with this in mind. To start with, one lane could be dedicated to self-driving cars to make the traffic run smoother. If that lane can be closed off for human-driven cars, the speed limit could be higher.

When all cars are self-driving cars, most roads need to be adapted. Different lanes could have different speed limits, and in them, every car drives at the exact same speed.

This is another argument we can use to promote a fast as possible transition to self-driving cars. They will get a lot of pushback from media sensationalism, irrational fears, and political populism. We must show the world the other arguments, like super safe and extremely fast cars.

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

Other parts in this series:

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

The first part of our series on self-driving cars is found here.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

📉 What people think

86 percent said they would feel scared to ride in a self-driving car, according to a survey from American Automobile Association.

Many who tried Google's self-driving cars in a completly safe environment at Google HQ in San Francisco say they were really scared at first.

The news media LOVES to report on self-driving cars that are in accidents. This headline is a good example. GOOGLE! SELF-DRIVING CAR! CRASH! (turns out it was a minor fender bender.)

📈 Here are the facts

• Approximately 1.3 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes, according to the World Health Organization. Between 20 and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability as a result of their injury. As a comparison, 119,000 people died in violent conflicts in 2021.

• 94% of accidents are because of human error, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the U.S.

• In the United States, fatalities per 100 million miles have decreased by 78 percent since the 1960s.

• Car safety has improved in the rest of the world as well.

• When we've achieved the level where the car understands its surroundings, computers will be much better drivers than humans: 360° vision, it can with millimeter precision understand what is happening, make lightning-fast decisions and calculate and act based on several possible outcomes.

• A computer never gets distracted or angry. It is never tired, drunk, texts a friend, or scrolls through Twitter.

• Because people are (irrationally) scared of riding self-driving cars they will demand much higher safety than in human-driven cars.

• Since the media loves to report even on fender benders in self-driving cars, they will ensure everyone knows as soon as an autonomous vehicle is involved in a deadly crash.

• This will lead to very high safety standards from legislators and regulators.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 Self-driving cars will be many times safer than human-driven cars and save millions of lives and stop even more people from getting hurt.

One of the world's annual biggest killers will be gone. A person killed by a car will not be normal, but something very rare.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

The transition to self-driving can be delayed by media sensationalism, irrational fears, and political populism.

High safety standards for self-driving cars are of course good, but the bar must not be set too high, too early. That will slow down this very beneficial progress.

Since we have (more than) a hunch of what will happen, we can work to counter it.

• If you are offered the chance to take a ride in a self-driving car – do it. Even the early versions are available now. It does feel scary the first time, but you soon get used to the car driving for you.

• If you have a Tesla or another car with an advanced autopilot function, offer people rides. Eventually riding in an autonomous vehicle will be so common that it is boring, but everyone remembers their first time... in a self-driving car!

• Help create public opinion for self-driving cars. At your work, in your family, in news media, and in every relevant opportunity you get.

• Tell people that cars with some self-driving capability already today are safer than purely human-driven cars.

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

Sign up for our free weekly newsletter with fact-based optimistic news on technology, science and human progress.

📉 What people think

Many are pessimistic that self-driving cars are happening. Definitely not soon, probably not in the next decades, and maybe never.

Bloomberg captured the pessimism in this cover story: "...we're still not even close to an autonomous future..."

📈 Here are the facts

• The goal is to get to fully autonomous driving. The level where you are so confident in the car's abilities that you can remove the steering wheel.

• Fully autonomous driving is not an easy problem to solve. On the contrary, it is very hard. The computer in the car has to understand its surroundings perfectly. Which means it has to see, by using vision or other means like radar. Really weird things can happen. Like when people dress up to look like traffic lights (true story!) A human driver would also be confused, but soon see that the traffic lights are humans, and laugh.  That is not as easy for a computer.

• There are two main approaches to solving self-driving. We'll call them the Waymo way and the Tesla way.

• The Waymo way is to create detailed maps and knowledge about a specific area. They started with Phoenix and have now also expanded to San Francisco. There the cars can drive without a driver. But put the same cars down in New York, or in a rural area, and they won't get far.

• For the Waymo way, the cars need more expensive equipment to interpret their environment. Tesla tror de kan klara det med bara kameror.

• The Tesla way is to teach the car to understand its surroundings, and being able to drive anywhere. You can put the car down anywhere on Earth and it should be fine.

• What you need for either solution to work is lots of data and really good machine learning to train the AI that is doing the driving.

• Tesla has by far the most data. Almost all Tesla cars collect data every time they are driven. 400,000 of those cars are in the Full Self-Driving beta. These cars drive much themselves, with the driver ready to take over. A lot of random things happen when 400,000 cars drive around, and this information is used to teach the cars to drive better and better.

• Which company, Waymo or Tesla, has the best AI engineers is hard to say. Both companies are very likely top-notch, which means the data is managed in a useful way.  

• How close are we? That is very hard to say. But the conditions for success are there. Getting to the level where are so confident that we can remove the wheel and the car can drive anywhere on Earth is probably several years away. But a car that can drive itself 99,99 percent of the time on most roads is likely here before 2030.

• The exact year is hard to pin down now, but it is very likely this is happening in the next few years. It is very unlikely we would have to wait several decades, or longer, for cars to drive themselves.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 In 20 years humans will not be allowed to drive cars on regular roads, because computers by then will drive so much better.

Even if it's hard to predict the exact year we will get to complete self-driving, now is the time to start preparing for it. When it happens, the world will change dramatically. In the last hundred years, no other physical product has had a bigger impact on the society and environment we live in than the car. When those cars start driving themselves, society, cities and roads will change.

Also, this won't happen overnight. It is a gradual process of the cars getting better and better at driving. We are already starting to see the early benefits, like fewer crashes.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

Sit down (or stand up, walk, run) and think. What will happen when cars drive themselves?

• When there is no need to have people strapped down with seatbelts, two in the front and three in the back – how will people travel?

• What will we do in the car, and what products or services will we need?

• Do roads need to change, and how?

• How do we change policy to make the transition to self-driving faster and smoother?  

• What can we do to relieve fears and stress about riding in a self-driving car?

• When a self-driving car crashes and kills someone, what can we do so the news media doesn't escalate that into a panic and fear of the new? (Self-driving cars will crash sometimes, but very much less often than human-driven cars that kill over 1 million people every year.)

• Go through every aspect of cars, driving, and the function of cars today, and based on your knowledge, education, or expertise, think about what will change and what opportunities it will create.

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

You now have an advantage because you have gained this knowledge before most others – What will you do with your Optimist's Edge?

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📉 What people think

Be cautious! Slow down! Stop and think!

Right now, it is AI that should slow down, many people believe.

The argument is often that this new technology or knowledge will be dangerous, because we don't understand it. Or someone with ill intent does understand it and will use it against humanity.

Because of recent breakthroughs, AI is now the focus of attention. But throughout history, someone has warned about every new technology or new knowledge and wanted progress to stop or slow down.

More and more often, it is claimed that we are closer to extinction now than ever before. Because now we are powerful enough to destroy ourselves.  

📈 Here are the facts

The seat belt test

An NHTSA study of lives saved by vehicle technologies found that, between 1960 and 2012, seat belts saved more lives than all other vehicle technologies combined, including airbags, energy-absorbing steering assemblies, and electronic stability control.

In 1959 the Volvo Amazon was the first car model that had the three-point seat belt as standard. Volvo made the patent available to other car manufacturers for free.

The seat belt test: Take a modern technology or modern knowledge and inject it somewhere in history. What if the three-point seat belt had been invented and made standard ten years earlier? If progress in vehicle safety would have been faster, that could have happened. The result would have been thousands of lives saved.

Or modern medicine during the Black Death? Dentistry (and anesthesia!) during the middle ages? Democracy a thousand years earlier? Human rights in the Roman Empire? The printing press in 500 BC?

Of course, giving Caligula a nuclear bomb wouldn't be great. But the risk of one technology progressing much faster than the general level of knowledge is low. Innovation depends on earlier innovation. There is a reason the Romans didn't have a Manhattan Project. If we increase the rate of innovation in one area, it will spill over and increase innovation in other areas as well.

The North or South Korea example

This photo from space of North and South Korea shows the difference between slow and fast progress.

In countries where they've stopped or slowed down progress people die younger, are unhappier and unhealthier than in countries with faster progress. The countries with the highest rate of innovation are where people live the longest, are healthiest and happiest.

AI and protein

Proteins are our body's workhorses. They convert food into energy that we can use, fight intruders, transport oxygen in the blood, and much more. Therefore, understanding proteins is essential for understanding our body and diseases and developing effective drugs.

Proteins are folded and to understand a protein you need to understand how. That could be done in a lab, but takes time and money.

In 2020 we revealed the structure of, in total, about 200,000 proteins.

Along came AI. DeepMind and a team at the University of Washington used AI to understand how a protein folds.

Now, just two years later, we know the structure of 200 million proteins!

Would we be better off without knowing that? That would have been the effect of slower progress on AI.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

The intellectual framework

"It is often said that our civilization has entered an era of unprecedented risk from adverse side-effects of progress. It is said that for the first time in history, global civilization, and even our species, are at risk because of the speed of progress. But that is not so: that risk has been with us throughout our species’ existence and is less now than ever."
...
Every species whose members had the capacity for innovation, is now extinct, except ours, and genetic evidence shows that that was a close-run thing. All of them, and every past civilization that has fallen, could have been saved by faster innovation.
...
Nothing can eliminate danger, including from unforeseen side-effects of progress. Therefore caution is always necessary. The first flight of an airliner should not be carrying passengers. One should not trust the first predator 🐺 that seems friendly. But there is also danger from intangible enemies within, like taboos and pessimism. So one shouldn’t forgo the option to experiment with making use of the wolf. Unbeknownst to the people who first tried that, it would go on to create a new species 🦮 that could be of immense use – including guiding blind humans during the millennia before blindness is cured.
- David Deutsch in Optimism, Pessimism and Cynicism

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 Slow progress is more dangerous than fast progress.

If we speed up progress we will solve more problems faster.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

Read David Deutsch's book: The Beginning of Infinity.

Read David Deutsch's Optimism, Pessimism and Cynicism at Warp News:

Warp NewsDavid Deutsch

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

📉 What people think

Over 90 percent say freedom of speech, fair elections, and equal rights are important. People worldwide have faith in democracy, according to the Democracy Perception Index from the Alliance of Democracies.

A record number across the 53 countries participating in the survey, says that democracy is important to have in their country (84 percent).

📈 Here are the facts

• Democracies never go to war against each other. (Or very, very rarely, depending on how you define democracy.)

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

• There has never been a famine in a democracy.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

• Citizens in democracies live longer, healthier, and richer lives. Life in a democracy is way better than in an authoritarian country.

• The Freedom and Prosperity Indexes by the Atlantic Council show a strong connection between democracy and a good life. Of all the countries in the world rated Prosperous, all except two also rank as Free.

• People in free countries are almost three times happier than people in Unfree countries.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

• Democracies also treat the environment better. The average Environment score drops by more than 50 percent when moving from the free group to the mostly Free group.

• In richer, more democratic countries, the decline in wild animals has reversed.

Warp NewsMaria Eriksson

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 A world where everyone lives in a democracy, is a world at peace, with a new mindset for humanity and immense prosperity.

Imagine a world where every country in the world is fully democratic. No Putins or Kim Jong Ils and no one-party dictatorships. Imagine a world where war would be as absurd as the thought of the United States invading Canada, or Sweden invading Norway today.

War has been part of our history for thousands of years, but would then no longer exist. And without war – and even the prospect of war utterly absurd – there would be no need for a military.

In 2021 the world spent over $2 trillion on military expenses. Over 2000 billion dollars! That is 2.1 percent of the world's gross domestic product, GDP.

In a world at peace, that money could be used for science, lowering taxes, art, the environment – or whatever area you prioritize.

Humanity would be healthier, wealthier, and happier.  The average lifespan would shoot up.

No major problems for humanity would exist. There would still be problems, of course, but smaller ones.

That would happen 'just' by everyone living in a democracy. But imagine the changed mindset in a world like that.

When we don't have to worry about war, about famines, or about oppression, how will that change how we think and act?

When all of the world is at the same basic level of prosperity, will we still have borders and countries?

When we don't spend both brain capacity and money on protecting ourselves against each other, what will that new focus mean for human progress?  

When you build infrastructure like roads or broadband connection, that makes innovation possible. People use their imagination and ideas to build using that infrastructure. If the world were fully democratic, that would be like a new infrastructure for humanity. On top of which we could build, innovate and create like never before.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

How do we get there? Non-violent revolutions are the most effective.

• Many think that changing from authoritarian one-party or one-man rule to elected officials needs to be done by violence. Killing the dictator or throwing him in jail, means overpowering the military and secret police. Right?

• Not necessarily. Dr. Gene Sharp dedicated his life to studying revolutions. Using violence against a dictatorship's police and military is going against its strongest point.

• Instead, a resistance movement should challenge the dictatorship where it's weaker. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King did.

• Professor Erica Chenoweth and Dr. Maria Stephan compared 323 non-violent and violent resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006. Non-violent campaigns were twice as likely to be successful than violent campaigns.

• Gene Sharp is the father of the color revolutions and gathered 198 methods (pdf) for non-violent movements. He also wrote several books on the topic. The most influential is From Dictatorship to Democracy: "Not, perhaps, since Machiavelli has a book had such impact in shifting the balance of power between the rulers and the ruled."

• With smartphones and the internet, democracy activists have many new tools. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation every year supports a group of Tech Fellows. Check them out and support them by using their tools and services:

• CANVAS grew out of the Serbian resistance movement that toppled Slobodan Milosevic and has trained over 16,000 democracy activists around the world. You can support their work, apply to become an intern, join the Summer Academy or take one of their university courses.

• Donate money to the AE Institution, founded by Dr. Gene Sharp. AEI trains activists in nonviolent resistance and revolutions.

• Vote for politicians and political parties that fully support and work for democracy at home and abroad.

• Run for political office on a democracy platform.

During 2022 we posted 50 Optimist's Edge articles. Here is a look back and comments on some of them.

Democracy is the edge to rule them all

Nothing is more important for human progress than democracy. That is why we often write on this topic.

Actually, if all humans were free and lived in democracy, all of humanity's major problems would be gone. No more wars. No more famines.

It is the ultimate hack.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

You can't stay in the cradle forever

"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."
- Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky

Humans are curious, and courageous. That is how we've explored Earth and constantly improved society. We think we will, and should, continue doing that. That means establishing several homes for humanity, out in the solar system and eventually beyond.

Over the next two decades, or so, the cost to launch something into space will drop 99.9 percent. One-thousandth of what it cost just five years ago.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

This will make the space economy astronomically bigger. We can live on Mars, but also build huge space stations near Earth.

But what about Earth? We should take very good care of it, of course. And for that, we need space. Like satellites that track global emissions. Or why not something really 'out there'? A space parasol to cool us down.

Climate optimism

Climate change is a big problem for humanity. But so is the constant climate doomsday bombardment in news media. We are confident this is a problem we will solve.

Climate change is no good, but the change is. We will end up in a better society, with a better environment. Not that this will be easy or without hardship, but this change is full of opportunities.

If you want to find the opportunities, just look at the emissions. The larger the emissions, the larger the opportunities.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

One larger emitter is cement, and plenty is going on there.

There are also other things you can do, like help in the effort to plant trees and use new technology to lower your climate footprint.

Food tech

The agricultural sector is responsible for a lot of CO2 emissions, which is a driver of change. But we also get healthier and cheaper food. This is called food tech, of which we've written several pieces.  

Milk without cows, gene-edited fruit, food from air, healthy sugar, new packing for fruit and vegetables. And also new ways to farm, like vertical farms.

Warp NewsChristian von Essen

Artificial Intelligence

The pessimism was strong around AI in 2021 and early 2022. "Tech Giants Pour Billions Into AI, but Hype Doesn’t Always Match Reality" wrote Wall Street Journal in July 2022.

After the breakthroughs with AIs that create images and not least OpenAI's ChatGPT they now instead write how Microsoft is considering investing $10 in OpenAI...

That is why it is so important to be fact-based and optimistic.

During the year we wrote about AI and art, about Tesla's new humanoid robot, how AI can help you find talents, and a world without language barriers.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

Superabundant, super cheap energy

This year our parent, the Warp Institute, created Project Energy Society. The goal is a world where energy is superabundant, fossil-free and extremely cheap.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

An important part of that is wind power, solar power and batteries. Batteries are an area where we've received a lot of pushback. But more and more signs point to that we are right. In 2022 we saw investments in battery tech of up to $30 billion, and many factories are being built.

Renewable energy and batteries don't mean we aren't also excited about new nuclear power.

Traveling faster, cleaner and cheaper

It looks like all transportation is eventually going electric. Cars are well on the way. That was our first Optimist's Edge article. But what about airplanes? That will take longer, but it is possible.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

Flying cars? We call them drones now, and yes, they are on the cusp of a breakthrough.

Warp NewsMarco Borsari

Flying cars will change where we live. Fast, cheap and straight A to B travel will make it more possible to live outside of cities. We think many will.

The no category category

There are a bunch of other Optimist's Edge that doesn't fit into the above categories. Like how Africa is on a fast track to prosperity. And why not connect your brain directly to the computer? I like this one, on how to combine trees and agriculture. Many articles are quite theoretical, but this one is very practical:

Warp NewsMaria Eriksson

Last but not least. Screen time is maybe the thing that annoys me the most. I'm certain we will look back and laugh at the worry that looking at a screen will hurt us and especially our children. The opposite might be true.

Warp NewsAnna Rennéus Guthrie

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

This Optimist's Edge article was created with the help of AI tools ChatGPT, DALL-E, Grammarly and Google Translate.

📉 What people think

Nearly 69% of college graduates believe AI could take their job or make it irrelevant in a few years, according to this survey.

With the breakthroughs of AI:s that create images and with text bot ChatGPT the chatter about AI taking our jobs reached new heights.

There are videos like, These AI’s are coming to take your jobs… and news articles Could the new AI chatbot take your job? by the Irish Times.

Some artists also worry that this will destroy creativity: Artists Are 'Concerned For The Future Of Human Creativity'.

📈 Here are the facts

• Artificial intelligence that creates images and text is just the beginning. AI will also create video, audio, music and more.

• This makes it possible for people who are not professionals in those areas to create at or near a professional level. People who have ideas of, for example, a beautiful painting, but can't paint it, will now be able to create that.

• But what about the professionals? They can take their output to a new level. The digital artist behind the first AI-generated magazine cover, Karen X. Cheng, said: “I am now able to create different kinds of art that I never was able to before.”

• Machines and automation has been 'taking jobs' since the Industrial Revolution. But the lost jobs have been replaced by new jobs. Those jobs have overall meant better working conditions, higher salaries, and have been less tedious.

We, of course, also asked ChatGPT:

Me: AI today can create images and text, like you do. What more creative work will AI be able to do, you think?

ChatGPT: There is a lot of potential for AI to do more creative work in the future. Some areas where AI may be able to make contributions include music, video and film production, and architecture, to name a few. AI could potentially be used to assist with tasks such as composing music, generating visual effects, or designing buildings.

Me: Please make that into bullet points.

ChatGPT:

• Music composition

• Video and film production

• Architecture

• Generating new forms of creative expression

Me: Keep going.

ChatGPT: Certainly! Here are some additional bullet points with ideas for creative work that AI may be able to do in the future:

• Designing and creating new types of fashion and clothing

• Painting and visual art creation

• Writing and storytelling

• Conceptualizing and designing new products or technologies

• Developing and creating new flavors and recipes in the food and beverage industry

• Creating virtual reality experiences and environments

• Developing and creating new video games and interactive experiences

• Generating personalized content, such as customized news articles or social media posts

• Creating personalized marketing materials and advertisements

• Translating and adapting content for different languages and cultures

• Creating and producing educational materials, such as video lessons or interactive quizzes

• Designing and creating new types of software and applications

• Developing and creating new types of virtual assistants or chatbots

• Generating personalized content for virtual reality or augmented reality experiences

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 Artificial intelligence will unleash massive untapped creativity from non-professionals, by giving them the tools to create things that earlier only were available to professionals.

Learning to paint takes years of practice. With AI, everyone who wants to paint just needs to learn how to use AIs that paint.

When we, via AI tools, also can create music, other types of audio, and video – and of course combine them – even more creativity will be unleashed.

This creativity has so far been trapped, but can now come out.

That unleashed creativity will create millions of jobs and tons of human progress. The number of designers, artists, and writers will increase dramatically.

The most important though is this thought from ChatGPT:

"There may also be potential for AI to create entirely new forms of creative expression that we have not yet imagined."

👇 How to get the Optimist’s Edge

• Most importantly: Use them! Test them! It's only then you start realizing how powerful the AI tools are and how you can use them in your daily life and work.

• Ulrika Gerth wrote earlier about AIs that paint. It is very good. Please read it.

Warp NewsUlrika Gerth

Her "how to"-list is great, and I'll copy it here.

• Become a “prompt engineer”: “AI art isn’t just an experiment. It’s a side hustle.” So begins an article in Verge on the emerging market of prompts, the text descriptions that the AI tools translate into art. Do you have a special talent for creating elaborate prompts that yield stunning results? PromptBase, launched earlier this year, allows the new profession of prompt writers to sell their work.

• Get creative: In late September, DALL-E shared some welcome news: the waitlist had been removed, letting anyone use the popular AI art generator (More than 1.5 million users now make 2 million images a day). You can also try Midjourney (you need to start a Discord account), and other applications like VQGAN+CLIP, Wombo AI, The Night Cafe, Deep Dream Generator, and Craiyon.

• Sell your art: AI-generated art offers market potential. Both traditional auctions and NFT marketplaces like Open Sea have shown a growing interest in abstract AI art. Domestika, an online community for creatives, suggests combining AI with your past creations to generate hundreds, if not thousands, of unique artworks, which can then be curated into NFT collections.

• Dive in: Do you want a quick, affordable introduction to anything AI? Udemy, an online learning marketplace, offers countless courses on the topic. These four courses on AI basics also come highly recommended.

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

Here is an overview of the idea behind the Energy Society. In future articles, we will go into more detail about specific parts of the Energy Society.

📉 What people think

We asked 500 people if they think it is possible to offer unlimited electricity to households for a low, fixed fee within about 20 years.

No, said 58 percent, yes said 42 percent.

📈 Here are the facts

• Over a 30-day period in Sweden, the price of electricity for the consumer has varied so much that the highest price has been 1,000 times higher than the lowest price. That is not a well-functioning market.  

• Electricity prices in Europe have almost doubled since 2008, with the sharpest increase since 2021.

• The U.S. is also experiencing increased electricity prices.

• Change is needed – and possible.

• The game changer is when you can store energy, so it doesn't have to be produced and used simultaneously.

• If you also can share that energy, so not everyone has to build to full capacity for every edge case, you have the foundation of something new.

• The current (haha) electric grid was starting to get built in the late 1800s. It was a marvel of engineering and the best we could build before we had computers, electronics, and software.

• But now we have computers, electronics, and software, so a new, smarter electric grid is possible with storage and sharing.

For a more detailed description, please watch the video at the end of the article.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 With storage and the ability to share you can get all the electricity you need for a low flat fee.

A decentralized electric grid, or really thousands of small grids connected to each other, is the new infrastructure for electrical energy. That moves us away from the current society where energy is a limiting factor.

With an abundance of low-cost, clean energy millions of innovations will spur, and we will have created the energy society.

The Energy Society, in a nutshell:

• Abundance of power. Production of power is not going to be a limiting factor. The cost of wind- and solar production is declining rapidly.

• Cost. It will be irrelevant in everyday life.

• Value creation. If we solve the distribution and storage of energy, you enable a whole new system, which creates a lot of value.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

The best way to get the Optimist’s Edge is to join Project Energy Society. Together with Jonas Birgersson and his company we are taking the first steps to create this society.

We need all kinds of people, not just energy experts. It is called the energy society for a reason. In a society, everyone is needed. Lawyers, teachers, artists, doctors, writers, journalists, photographers, programmers, engineers, and maybe even politicians.

People who create the energy society will have a better understanding of the opportunities it brings than anyone else.

Sign up for Warp News free newsletter, where we update on the latest in Project Energy Society every week. There you’ll also get invites and the chance to join the project.

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

📉 What people think

The economy is in a state of flux. The pandemic was followed by an uncertain time, and after that came war, inflation, and an emerging energy crisis with high electricity prices for both households and businesses.

But what do people think?

7 out of 10 believe that prices will continue to rise in 2023, according to a recent survey conducted by the research company Ipsos in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. And 8 out of 10 believe that real incomes will fall.

📈 Here are the facts

It is therefore a rather difficult financial situation that many find themselves in when it is time to welcome the new year. But it is possible to find ways forward that allow one's own situation to be strengthened. Basically, it's about getting a better handle on what exactly you can do.

Everyone has their individual life situation and conditions to take into account. But more knowledge regarding both the small and large perspective is necessary to navigate in the best way in economically turbulent times. There is much you can do yourself to improve your understanding of your own personal finances.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 With digital tools, you can get a detailed overview of your finances.

Some already use a number of services today to get a better handle on income and expenses as well as savings, but this is a field that is growing quickly and new aids are popping up like shoots out of the ground all the time.

👇 This is how you get the Optimist's Edge

Find the right tool. Perhaps a few days of Christmas leave us a good opportunity to browse through what is available to use and what suits you. Here are some tips.

A popular app is Pennies.

"Pennies keeps it super simple, so budgeting doesn’t have to be a chore. It’s got everything you need to track where your money is going and how much you have left," writes MoneysMyLife.

• Anyfin is a refinancing company, developed by former employees from Klarna and Spotify, which collects information relating to your current loans and credits and offers help to lower your loan expenses. Available in Sweden, Germany, Finland, and Norway.

• Are you going to teach the seven-year-old about private economics and the importance of saving? Check out Gimi. Here you can pay for chores and weekly allowance while the child learns more about numbers and finances.

• Here is a list of the best personal finance apps. Top of the list: Mint.

• And here is a list from NerdWallet of the eight best budget apps. Again Mint tops the list.

• Automate. The step from getting an overview of the economy to getting suggestions on how you can act on the facts will be increasingly influenced by AI in the future. Wired has an interesting article about it.

Psst! Don't miss Sweden's thriftiest person - or as some call him, "stingiest" - tips on saving in everyday life. It's about bargains, investments in gadgets, late bookings, and planning.

"In the best of worlds, times of crisis and economic unrest can lead to more and more people gaining better knowledge of economics, both on a macro and individual level. This provides many benefits in the long term" says Günther Mårder, Sweden's thriftiest person.

📉 What people think

When famine or the risk of famine is reported anywhere in the world, the weather or nature is singled out as the cause, such as droughts or floods.

BBC: “Somalia drought: The fight for survival as famine looms”

Africa News: “The perils of starvation and flooding in South Sudan”

Sometimes it is claimed that it is because of a war or an armed conflict.

Guardian: “Ukraine war has stoked global food crisis that could last years, says UN”

LA Times: “Famine threatens wide swaths of world, now worsened by Ukraine war”

Other factors are also sometimes highlighted.

“The current food security challenge that we’re facing is due to these three Cs: climate, COVID, and conflict,” säger Ramin Toloui, Assistant Secretary of State for the United States.

📈 Here are the facts

Droughts, floods, wars and conflicts are causes that can lead to famines, but they are not the main cause.

A drought can wipe out people's local food production. An armed conflict can prevent aid workers from transporting food to those who need it. A war, like the one in Ukraine, can increase food prices. A pandemic can disrupt supply chains.

But if Sweden or the U.S. suffered a severe drought next summer, would people starve? No.

The Nobel laureate in economics, Amartya Sen, who himself experienced famine up close in India, has stated:

''No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”

In the book Development as Freedom, he explains why:

“Quite often economic insecurity can relate to the lack of democratic rights and liberties. Indeed, the working of democracy and of political rights can even help to prevent famines and other economic disasters.
Authoritarian rulers, who are themselves rarely affected by famines (or other such economic calamities), tend to lack the incentive to take timely preventive measures.
Democratic governments, in contrast, have to win elections and face public criticism, and have strong incentives to undertake measures to avert famines.”

At the time of this writing, several million people living in the Horn of Africa are threatened with starvation. The Horn of Africa consists of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. A conflict-filled area, where none of the countries are a democracy. And now they have been hit by a severe drought.

If there were democracy and peace in the Horn of Africa, this drought would not lead to famine. Food from other places would arrive.

Famine is not caused by a lack of food, but by the fact that the available food does not reach those who need it.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 The world can be free from famines if everyone lives in a democracy.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

How do we get there? Non-violent revolutions are the most effective.

• Many think that changing from authoritarian one-party or one-man rule to elected officials needs to be done by violence. Killing the dictator or throwing him in jail, means overpowering the military and secret police. Right?

• Not necessarily. Dr. Gene Sharp dedicated his life to studying revolutions. Using violence against a dictatorship's police and military is going against its strongest point.

• Instead, a resistance movement should challenge the dictatorship where it's weaker. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King did.

• Professor Erica Chenoweth and Dr. Maria Stephan compared 323 non-violent and violent resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006. Non-violent campaigns were twice as likely to be successful than violent campaigns.

• Gene Sharp is the father of the color revolutions and gathered 198 methods (pdf) for non-violent movements. He also wrote several books on the topic. The most influential is From Dictatorship to Democracy: "Not, perhaps, since Machiavelli has a book had such impact in shifting the balance of power between the rulers and the ruled."

• With smartphones and the internet, democracy activists have many new tools. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation every year supports a group of Tech Fellows. Check them out and support them by using their tools and services:

• CANVAS grew out of the Serbian resistance movement that toppled Slobodan Milosevic and has trained over 16,000 democracy activists around the world. You can support their work, apply to become an intern, join the Summer Academy or take one of their university courses.

• Donate money to the AE Institution, founded by Dr. Gene Sharp. AEI trains activists in nonviolent resistance and revolutions.

• Vote for politicians and political parties that fully support and work for democracy at home and abroad.

• Run for political office on a democracy platform.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

You now have an advantage because you have gained this knowledge before most others – What will you do with your Optimist's Edge?

❓ Want more? Discuss with others in our forum!

Please share your ideas and thoughts with other Premium Supporters in our Facebook group. Maybe you will find your future business partner or investor.

📉 What people think

60 percent believe the left image is made by AI. Almost as many, 58 percent, also believe that the right image is made by an AI.

The left image is made by an AI, for the cover of Cosmopolitan's June issue. The one on the right, however, was made by a human several years ago.

📈 Here are the facts

The creation of that Cosmo image required no paint, brushes, or days of Photoshop tinkering. Instead, it was the result of a single language prompt typed into DALL-E by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company founded by Sam Altman (Elon Musk — who else? — was part of the founding team). Twenty seconds later the AI had drawn upon its knowledge of hundreds of millions of images to produce its first-ever magazine cover.

In simple terms, many AI art generators work like a kid memorizing flash cards. Exposed to captioned pictures of — let’s say — cars, dogs, beaches, and Monet, the AI learns not only what the objects are but how they relate to one other. Then, with the help of algorithms modeled on the human brain, it interprets what you type to create that image you always wanted: an impressionist-style painting of a dog driving a car on the beach.

In more complex terms, it was the invention in 2014 of the generative adversarial network (GAN), a class of machine learning that pits two neural networks against each other in a zero-sum game, that powered AI painting to take off. This year, users finally turned on the fire hose, flooding Twitter threads and Discord forums with their works. Google is the latest major player to join the race with the beta release this fall of its own text-to-image model called Imagen.

And, as the judges in a Colorado fine arts competition recently learned, the finished product is often indistinguishable from human-made art. They unknowingly handed the top award to a piece created using Midjourney, an AI platform. A critic called the work “mezmerizing.” Others grumbled.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 AI painting upends creative boundaries by empowering anyone to create art that previously required the skill of professional artists.

Consider the concept of centaur chess. Introduced by grandmaster Garry Kasparov, it brings human and computer skills together to elevate the game to unseen heights. The same thing happens when artists, creative directors, fashion designers, chefs, architects, and average Joes and Janes join forces with AI art tools.

Karen X. Cheng, the digital artist behind the AI Cosmo cover, put it like this in an Los Angeles Times interview:

“I am now able to create different kinds of art that I never was before.”

Another artist, XR Creator Don Allen, said that after only four months of use, AI has expanded his artistic practice beyond what he could ever imagine. He’s now able to generate images for shoe designs in seconds.

“The journey into AI has been a tool that expedites and streamlines every one of my creative processes so much that I lean on it more and more every day,” Allen said.

Midjourney founder David Holz likens his image-generating AI system to the invention of the engine. While other modes of transportation are always an option, if you want to reach your destination faster, you hop in a car.

Aside from supercharging the creative process and automating simple repetitive tasks (think landscaping for open-world games), some technology analysts say AI’s ability to “generate new content from content, at zero marginal cost” offers even greater promise. They see it as the final piece to realizing the metaverse. Only AI has the capacity to create the vast virtual worlds at speed.

“This is how the economics of the metaverse will ultimately make sense: virtual worlds needs virtual content created at virtually zero cost, fully customizable to the individual,” writes Ben Thompson at the Stratechery. “DALL-E is an example of how imaginative humans and clever systems can work together to make new things, amplifying our creative potential.”

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

All movements in art have, at some point, shocked people. In 1911, the New York Times questioned cubism, “Is it art or madness? Who knows?” We all know the current status of Picasso, Braque, and Metzinger who the NYT feared  had lost their senses. Now, you have a chance to leave today’s pessimists behind and greet AI art with open arms.

Become a “prompt engineer”: “AI art isn’t just an experiment. It’s a side hustle.” So begins an article in Verge on the emerging market of prompts, the text descriptions that the AI tools translate into art. Do you have a special talent for creating elaborate prompts that yield stunning results? PromptBase, launched earlier this year, allows the new profession of prompt writers to sell their work.

Get creative: In late September, DALL-E shared some welcome news: the waitlist had been removed, letting anyone use the popular AI art generator (More than 1.5 million users now make 2 million images a day). You can also try Midjourney (you need to start a Discord account), and other applications like VQGAN+CLIP, Wombo AI, The Night Cafe, Deep Dream Generator, and Craiyon.

Sell you art: AI-generated art offers market potential. Both traditional auctions and NFT marketplaces like Open Sea have showed growing interest in the abstract AI art. Domestika, an online community for creatives, suggests combining AI with your past creations to generate hundreds, if not thousands, of unique artworks, which can then be curated into NFT collections.

Dive in: Do you want a quick, affordable introduction to anything AI? Udemy, an online learning marketplace, offers countless courses on the topic. These four courses on AI basics also come highly recommended.

What will be your first prompt?

Read more:

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📈 What people think

Would you like to live in space, on a space station near Earth with up to a million other people? We asked this in a survey.

Three-quarters do not want to, but a full 26 percent can actually imagine becoming a space citizen.

📈 Here are the facts

Gerard O'Neill presented in the 70s, in a series of workshops, an idea for the future of humanity. He suggested that we should build space colonies instead of building cities on planets.

Something that could be done by building rotating cylinders that can create artificial gravity. Several million people could live on such a space station. The choices are considerably more and we can construct a space station according to our needs.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has given life to the idea. Bezos, like Gerard O'Neill, is concerned about Earth's limitations and believes that colonies in space would allow humanity to continue to develop. He believes that 200 million people could live in space by 2050.

In addition to Amazon, Bezos has started the space company Blue Origin, and he says in an interview that an investment in space colonies is considerably smarter than investing in colonizing other planets. Terraforming an entire planet would require significantly more resources and time in comparison.

How would that work?

By building large cylinder structures, artificial gravity can be created. This is a great advantage as we can mimic the gravitational force we are exposed to on Earth. In order for us not to have to go through too many changes, we need to create a colony with similar conditions that exist on Earth. We need a night and day cycle, sunlight, and gravity similar to Earth's.

In this proposal, the size of the cylinder is limited for economic reasons and should be able to be built with a diameter of 2.6 miles (16 English miles), with a rotation of two minutes, and with its axis directed towards the sun. Forests, parks, lakes, and homes can be accommodated in these cylinders – a whole ecosystem.

One of the biggest problems with colonizing other planets, for example, Mars, is that there is a big difference between the gravitational forces. A reduced gravitational force affects our bodies negatively; our muscles break down and bones become brittle, problems with effects we can see and measure on astronauts who have stayed on the International Space Station for extended periods.

Another important problem that needs to be solved is cosmic radiation exposure. As these colonies will be built outside the Earth's atmosphere, there is no natural protection against cosmic radiation. To protect the population against radiation can materials such as steel be used to create a shield.

With innovative engineering, we can build space colonies that many can afford to live in, says a survey by Physics Today reported by NSS.

It is possible to build a space colony with today's technology, but we also need to explore new methods, writes NSS. We need to build a colony that is self-sufficient and financially sustainable, for everyone to be able to settle in space.

1. Choice and infinite resources

With O'Neill colonies, we can create new worlds for humans.

In such a world, we can adapt the force of gravity, weather, and wind, according to our needs, and thereby create optimal conditions for what we desire. O'Neill colonies give us the opportunity to create a sustainable world that we want to live in, according to our conditions.

At the presentation of Blue Origin's new lunar lander, Bezos said: "When we move out into the solar system, we have infinite raw materials." These are found on asteroids and other celestial bodies, for example, our own moon. The moon offers several raw materials such as titanium and aluminum.

The lunar lander is Blue Origin's first step in their venture to build space colonies. They would enable us to continue to develop without being limited by the earth's resources and environment. A base on the moon is a strategic goal to have a starting point for a space colony in the future.

2. No natural disasters

Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis are a thing of the past in O'Neill colonies.

3. No hazardous emissions

With colonies in space, we can move our industries and hazardous emissions away from Earth's sensitive biosphere. In other words, we can reduce our climate impact by moving industries that damage the Earth's environment to space. This can also contribute to self-sufficient systems with great diversity and independence.

4. Close to the earth

One advantage of building a colony in space rather than settling on another planet is that we can choose to place the colony relatively close to Earth. In this way, the colonies do not necessarily have to be a permanent place of residence.

5. Quality of life

Something we must not forget is the importance of quality of life. In space colonies we can avoid the mistakes we have made on Earth and create amazing places to live.

There are many studies that have looked more closely at how our environment affects our well-being, and all point to the same conclusion, that we need biodiversity and variety to feel good. In other words, studies show that exposure to natural areas has many positive effects on our mental health. Furthermore, there is evidence that green areas such as forests and parks can reduce stress. If we are going to settle in space, we must prioritize biodiversity and make it possible to experience different environments.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 Space colonies give millions of people the opportunity to live in space close to Earth and create futuristic utopian communities.

A space colony would give us the opportunity to create a world we want to live in, with optimal conditions for humanity to continue to develop and grow.

👇 This is how you get the Optimist's Edge

It's hard to estimate exactly what it would cost to buy a piece of land on an O'Neill colony, but a Reddit user has made his own tool to estimate the cost and along with other users, they come to the conclusion that it will be about as expensive as buying an equal piece of land on Earth.

You can try making your own O'Neill colony with this tool. My dream cylinder would be about 50 meters in radius, provide viable conditions, with a gravity we could live in.

Get a job in the space industry

The following companies are hiring:

• Blue Origin is looking for people with different expertises

• NASA is looking for experts in many different fields

• ESA is also looking for students and experts in many fields.

• There are a lot of different student projects in the field, for instance at the particle accelerator at CERN.

Invest in space

If you want to be part of the creation of this optimistic future world, you can invest in private space companies today. According to a report by Space investment quarterly, up to $270 billion has been invested in private start-up companies in the space sector this year alone, with 1,753 unique companies behind the success. The majority of companies are located in the US and China, and it is clear that start-up companies in the space sector are on the rise.

It is clear that the satellite industry is a growing infrastructure. With more satellites in orbit that both help us understand our planet better, but also enable, for example, navigation and communication, today's space companies are pioneers and together lay the foundation for future space colonies.

Study physics and space technology

If you want to be part of building the housing market of the future in space, there are many ways to go. For example, you can:

• Become a civil engineer in Space Technology (Luleå)

• Research in the space sector at, for example, Uppsala University or Lund University

• Become a civil engineer in vehicle technology (Stockholm)

📉 What people think

A very common proposed solution to solving climate change is doing less of things that emit CO2 into the atmosphere. Traveling less, eating less meat, building less.

📈 Here are the facts

Cement is responsible for around 8 percent of global CO2 emissions. To reduce that to zero we would need almost completely to stop building things.

Instead of doing less, we can invent more. Like zero-carbon cement.

Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world. It's composed of an aggregate (crushed stone or gravel), sand, and a binder (usually cement) which hardens the mix by reacting with water. The main component of cement is clinker, obtained from clay and limestone by firing in a particular type of kiln.

The recipe remained virtually unchanged for more than a century.

The environmental issue

• About 90 percent of the cement sector emissions are linked to the production of clinker: in addition to fossil fuels generally burned to reach the very high temperatures (up to 1450°C) required inside the kiln, the issue is that limestone is by its nature a highly reactive material and releases a lot of CO2 during the calcination reaction taking place inside the kiln.

• Industry studies indicate that increasing the kiln thermal efficiency or switching to renewables is not enough. It's necessary to find significant variants to the traditional clinker recipe.

A wide range of inventions

• Novel cement: Completely new binder mix is being proposed to replace clinker. The Australian company Zeobond is producing since 2006 cement made with Geopolymers, based on aluminum and silicon instead of calcium and silicon. These very low-energy materials (against the highly reactive limestone) can reduce the carbon footprint by around 80 percent.

• CO2 as a valuable raw material: The start-up Solidia Technologies, in partnership with the world leader LafargeHolcim, is testing low-lime calcium silicate clinker (CCSC) with extraordinary properties: not only the CO2 emissions emitted during its manufacture are reduced by 30%, but the cement reacts with CO2 (and not with water) transforming it from a global issue to a valuable good. In addition to lowering by 70 percent carbon footprint compared to traditional Cement, the CCSC cement cures to reach full strength in a single day against the approximately 28 needed for standard cement!

• Circular economy concrete: Waste materials are also tested as new raw materials. CarbiCrete company is testing a steel slag-based mixture that hardens with CO2 to replace cement, while Blue Planet is trying to use concrete waste and CO2 to reproduce through Geomimesys the earth's natural process of creating carbonate rocks or limestone, in place of aggregates. Using waste materials and CO2 as a value makes the materials carbon negative.

• Bacteria-based cement: At the University of Colorado Boulder they are doing science-fiction studies. In 2020 they published a study to make a living cement by inoculating Bacteria in a solution of sand and gelatin. Bacteria can absorb carbon dioxide to grow and produce calcium carbonate and thus cement. Since they are living beings, they can grow on command and self-heal cracks.

• Algae-based cement: In 2022 the University of Colorado research team switched to studying algae-based cement. By mimicking the coral reef structure, using microalgae, sunlight, seawater and dissolved carbon dioxide they invented a process to create new limestone in minutes rather than millions of years.

• Disruptive technological change: The first CO2 capture systems are being built to recover CO2 emissions from the cement production plants and store them in safe deposits or turn them into carbon-negative chemical products.

• And what about totally changing the perspective?

Warp NewsMarco Borsari

Warp NewsMarco Borsari

Further challenges

• It's necessary to radically change practices consolidated for over a hundred years in order to reduce their environmental impact. Technicians and workers must be well trained to use the new necessary equipment on site (i.e. CO2 injection systems). For example, augmented reality can be used to train builders on-site and facilitate the use of novel cement

• Develop supply chains for new raw materials that can supply them with the same ease and cost as the traditional cement components

• Standardize the industry: Transform the standard on-site building model and enhance the construction of prefabricated structures within the factories to increase flexibility for change. Another possibility is additive manufacturing: for example in China, the company Winsun 3D built the first continuous 3D printer for construction. In 2013 it printed layer-by-layer 10 two-story concrete houses with a special ink based on cement, sand and fiber, together with a proprietary additive. The printing process took only three days and three workers

💡 Optimist's Edge

The cement industry is making a great effort to develop new patented solutions not only to reduce but even eliminate CO2 emissions.

The construction sector is traditionally slow to change, but the time is ripe, the inventions are manifold and the investments are huge.

💡 New green cement could reduce up to 8 percent of global CO2 emissions, and also be stronger and cheaper.

Many of these new types of cement also improve the technical properties of concrete, reduce processing times and potentially also costs.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

It's time for a change, but the great transformation is still slow. Being at the forefront can bring great results to those who dare to take risks.

❓ So, how do you get the most out of this knowledge?

• Do you have to move house or renovate it? Be open-minded! Large construction companies and traditional materials are certainly a safe choice but maybe trying a start-up that offers innovative cement, or even a new bio-based material, could bring surprises: not just sustainability but even faster work, lower cost or peerless comfort.

• Do you work or study as a civil engineer, surveyor, architect or in any role in the construction field? Anticipate change and be an innovation maker: Read and experiment with innovative raw materials, find out how to design structures based on waste, algae, bacteria and how to build them on-site.

• Innovative projects are mostly still in the demonstration phase or growing strongly, so any help is needed. Invest or apply to work in the most interesting projects, such as the start-up Minus Materials to create cement with algae, Bio Mason to work with bacteria, Solidia Technologies, Blue Planet, Carbon Cure, Skyonic to create value from CO2, at CarbiCrete or Celitement to design novel cement or Winsun 3D in China to print houses or even at Norcem in Norway to participate in building the first zero-carbon cement factory.

• We saw that many fast-growing sectors are very important for a radical change in the building field, such as Virtual Reality, Automation, Additive Manufacturing but also AI, Big data, sensors. Even if you operate in these sectors it could be interesting to explore new technologies for building, creating start-ups or partnerships with construction companies.

You now have an advantage because you have gained this knowledge before most others – What will you do with your Optimist's Edge?

❓ Want more? Discuss with others in our forum!

Please share your ideas and thoughts with other Premium Supporters in our Facebook group. Maybe you will find your future business partner or investor.

📉 What people think

We asked 500 people what they think it will cost to launch things into space in 15 years if the approximate cost today is $10,000 per kilogram.

The most common answer, with 42 percent, is that it will be more expensive and cost $15,000 per kilo. 11 percent believe that the cost will remain at $10,000 per kilo. 9 percent think it will decrease to $10 per kilo.

📈 Here are the facts

Launching rockets and their payloads into space is expensive, but it used to be very expensive. Soon it will be pretty cheap.

How much it costs to launch a kilogram of payload into space depends on many factors, like if is to low-Earth orbit (LEO) or higher up, how exact the orbit needs to be and of course what the payload is.

Launching the space shuttle cost $54,500 per kilo. The new small Electron rocket brings a kilo into space for $19,000. Similar to the Russian Soyuz's $18,000. Europe's workhorse, Ariane, gets you there for $9,000. The Chinese Long March is around $8,000. These are not exact costs, but should give you a ballpark figure. Here you can check the cost for several different rockets.

One rocket stands out: SpaceX's Falcon 9. One kilo to LEO costs you only $2,600. Its sister rocket Falcon Heavy is even less costly at $1,400 per kilo. The reason why the Falcon rockets are "the cheapest" is that they reuse most of the rocket. The booster lands and is relaunched.

Even though much cheaper than the others, launching 100 kilos to space with a Falcon 9 sets you back over a quarter million dollars. And that is just the cost of the launch.

From $10,000 to $10

As long as getting to space costs thousands or even hundreds of dollars per kilo, access to space will be limited. But if we could drive the cost down to $10 per kilo, that would be something completely different. A reduction of like 99.9 percent.

That happens to be the goal of SpaceX's next rocket: Starship.

You've probably seen it already.

Crash Spacex GIFfrom Crash GIFs

It is developed – and crashed – in public.

Starship will be fully reusable and eventually will be able to turn around and launch again as fast as an airplane.

It will be able to deliver 100 tonnes (or more) to orbit for a total launch cost of $1 million.

How close are we?

SpaceX is targeting an attempted orbital flight in 2022 or early 2023. Even if that is successful we are far from the rapid turnaround flights that are required

Our estimation is that we can be at $10 per kilo around the mid-2030s. But with spaceflight, there are always a lot of things that can go wrong and set a project back years.

The exact year is not the most important, but the cost trajectory is clear.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡 In just a few years launching rockets into space will become 99.9 percent cheaper than today, opening up space like never before.

Such a low cost of $10 per kilo will make it possible to launch much more and much bigger things into space. We will go from a few thousand satellites to millions of satellites. From one space station to hundreds and eventually thousands. And not just small, cramped ones for five to ten people, but enormous structures where thousands and later millions of people can live and visit.

This also opens the possibility of large-scale asteroid mining and building things in space with material from space.

Warp NewsVincent Roose

If we are to establish a self-sustaining second home on Mars, we need at least one million people living there, to start with. To ferry them all at the current cost would be very expensive and not doable. To make it possible to live on Mars, the Moon, and other places in the solar system we need the low launch cost that could come with Starship.

Scientists are drooling over the possibilities. They envision huge space telescopes, easier and cheaper journeys to the outer planets, and sending droves of rovers to Mars. Building science probes will also be cheaper, when they don't have to choose the super expensive lightweight options, but could buy more off-the-shelf products.

"Astronomy, planetary science, and Earth observation could all boldly go, better than they ever have before."

Starship will also make possible really fast Earth-to-Earth travel.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

❓ So, how do you get the most out of this knowledge?

• First, start by thinking through the field you are working in or have a special interest in. If money wasn't a factor, what could you send to space and what possibilities would that create?

• Don't just think of traditional "space stuff". Maybe you are into ballet, what would a ballet performance look like in space? Making movies or music, writing a book looking down on Earth or out into space?

• We are going to need space people on Earth as well. The space sector is going to expand by thousands of percent. Millions of jobs will be created on Earth by companies doing business in space. Space lawyers are (unfortunately? 😊) going to be in hot-demand. Ginormous amounts of data will be streamed down on Earth, making it possible to build thousands of different services.

You now have an advantage because you have gained this knowledge before most others – What will you do with your Optimist's Edge?

❓ Want more? Discuss with others in our forum!

Please share your ideas and thoughts with other Premium Supporters in our Facebook group. Maybe you will find your future business partner or investor.

📉 What people think

76 percent are wrong about how much fruit and vegetables are thrown away worldwide. It is almost half, 45 percent, that is thrown away.

📈 Here are the facts

• Plastic has long been debated as protection for fruit and vegetables. In practice, it has been a necessary evil to reduce the food waste that would otherwise occur. The negative climate impact of food waste often exceeds that of plastic.

• It is often said that a third of all food produced is thrown away on its way through the supply chain for various reasons. Sometimes it is even said that "the third" is the food that we actually buy in the store, which in that case is even worse.

• Fruit and vegetables are an especially vulnerable category – as much as 45 percent are discarded before the goodies reach our hungry mouths.

• Now, however, a smorgasbord of innovations is starting to appear to extend the shelf life of fresh produce such as fruit and vegetables.

Who is working on it?

• You know those little bags that are in newly bought shoes to keep the moisture away? American SAVRpak has developed a similar solution to eliminate condensation from food. The company believes that you can extend the life of the raw materials by anywhere from 4 to 14 days. The small bags are also used by restaurants to ensure that the takeout food is fresh and crispy when it arrives. SAVRpak believes that they can eliminate food waste equivalent to 78 billion dollars.

• Hazel Technologies uses a similar solution but develops its small bags with varying contents depending on the raw material in question. Generally, these are active ingredients that are secreted to reduce mold attacks or delay the ripening process.

• In Lund we find Saveggy. Their innovation is an invisible coating that vegetables and fruit can be dipped in before they are transported to the store. Several grocery players are now testing Saveggy's solution.

• Apeel, based in the Netherlands and California, has developed a plant-based protective membrane that keeps moisture in and oxygen out.

• Barcelona-based Bio2Coat has a similar solution.

• Israeli food tech company Sufresca has edible coatings specifically developed for avocado, tomato, cucumber, mango, and lemon, a selective coating for berries and snacks, as well as another type of coating used for yellow onion and garlic.

💡 Optimist's Edge

💡Several companies are developing new innovations that mean that fruit and vegetables do not need to be protected with plastic. They thereby contribute to solving two major problems; food waste and plastic addiction.

• Extending the sustainability of fruit and vegetables represents a potentially huge win for the food system, traders, society, and the individual.

• What these food tech startups have in common is that they are driven by solving two major global challenges: reducing plastic dependence (including its fossil emissions) and food waste at the same time.

• The innovations follow the same logic as many other technological achievements: we won't even notice they're there.

👇 How to get the Optimist's Edge

❓ So, how do you get the most out of this knowledge?

• As with all new phenomena, it requires brave companies that dare to test. Saveggy has already started collaborations with both ICA and Lidl in Sweden with some success, but more experiments on a larger scale are needed to progress faster.

• Encourage your local fruit and vegetable dealer, producer, or wholesaler to review what new solutions are available to avoid throwing away almost half of the produce. Question whether the plastic is really necessary.

• For those of you who work in the food industry, there is of course a great potential competitive advantage in applying this type of solution before your competitors.

• If this future can come faster, we can look forward to an increased intake of fruit and vegetables. Good for public health.

You now have an advantage because you have gained this knowledge before most others – What will you do with your Optimist's Edge?

❓ Want more? Discuss with others in our forum!

Please share your ideas and thoughts with other Premium Supporters in our Facebook group. Maybe you will find your future business partner or investor.