Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:41:37 +0000
Also: A special 50% off sale! ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- # 🚀 Jeff Bezos plans a Space Age reboot ### Also: A special 50% off sale! | | James Pethokoukis --- | Oct 13 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- 💥 I'll keep this short and sweet. **Over this long Columbus Day weekend, all my wonderful free subscribers can purchase an annual subscription for 50% off!** That's just $40 for the next 12 months! Hey, miss a little, miss a lot! **Smash the Big Blue Button and subscribe now!** Get 50% off for 1 year * * * My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, OK, this I like: Jeff Bezos, the centibillionaire founder of Amazon the retailer and Blue Origin the rocketeer, wants to put gigawatt-scale data centers in Earth orbit, process the Moon's raw materials into power and infrastructure, and shift heavy industry away from Earth.¹ It sounds like science fiction, but it's also a forward-looking, 21st century business plan -- and an encouraging sign that America's long Up Wing² imagination deficit may finally be ending thanks to technology CEOs. From the 1950s through the Apollo era,³ futurists such as Walt Disney, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov helped make tech-optimism a kind of national identity. Their Tomorrowlands and space odysseys both reflected and spurred technological ambition. Then came oil shocks, "The Limits to Growth" and eco-pessimism, and a long retreat from bold ideas -- and the risk inherent in making them reality. The optimistic tech-futurists faded from relevance, replaced by prophets of gloom.⁴ For years, the speculative futures most Americans see come from Hollywood -- and they've been almost uniformly grim ones. Climate collapse, AI rebellion and robopocalypse, and social decay are standard fare.⁵ #### Time to write a new story of the future Those storylines now feel really stale in many ways. Sure, plenty of pessimism still exists. Public and political sentiment -- nudged by the need for abundant clean energy, competition with China, and the emergence of AI and other new technologies -- is as open as it has been in decades to a more Up Wing narrative, at least about technology. One reason why: The most important futurists today now sit in boardrooms, not backlots. And they're builders, not bemoaners. Some of these folks and they're visions: * Elon Musk foresees a civilization that is both electrified and multiplanetary. Reusable rockets will make Mars a second home for humanity. On Earth, a self-sustaining energy economy built on solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles will banish dependence on fossil fuels. Autonomous robotaxis and humanoid robots will transform labor. Starlink will knit the planet together. And brain-computer interfaces will heal and enhance the mind. * Anthropic boss Dario Amodei imagines what he calls a "country of geniuses in a data center." In his Up Wing future, powerful AI systems compress a century of progress into a decade -- eradicating disease, ending poverty, doubling human lifespans, and expanding cognitive and biological freedom. Yet he is acutely aware that these same systems could go awry if misaligned or misused. His tech-optimism is conditional: Abundance and democracy must be built and strengthened alongside robust safeguards against the very risks that such intelligence theoretically creates. * OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pictures a "gentle singularity," not an explosion but a steady climb. Intelligence and energy (if we choose), he argues, are about to become limitless commodities. Agents that write code, robots that build other robots, and data centers that replicate themselves will accelerate discovery until scientific progress moves at machine speed. Again, the challenge, in his view, is not invention but alignment--ensuring that superintelligence, once achieved, remains both safe and shared. * * * **On sale everywhere** _**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- * * * #### AI and rockets Then there's Bezos. Speaking at Italian Tech Week in Turin earlier this month, he outlined a vision that is both pragmatic and grand. Progress, he argued, depends on "harmony between dreaming and building" -- on alternating bursts of invention and disciplined execution. Entrepreneurs, he said, must heed their customers yet still invent on their behalf, guided as much by instinct as by data.⁶ Bezos describes the emerging age of artificial-intelligence as an "industrial bubble," but one that, like the internet boom, will leave behind enduring infrastructure. He sees AI as a "horizontal enabling layer" -- a general-purpose technology, like electrification, that will lift productivity across every sector it touches.⁷ In the spirit of his favorite science-fiction writer, Iain M. Banks, he imagines a future in which humans and machines advance together: a practical, not utopian, partnership. Meanwhile, the businessman has his eyes on the skies. Blue Origin is developing hydrogen-powered lunar landers cooled by solar-driven cryogenic systems⁸ and experimenting with ways to make solar panels from lunar soil. Within two decades, Bezos says he expects data centers in orbit, as well as millions of people living and working in space.⁹ In short, a new industrial frontier rising above the world's atmosphere. This generation of Up Wing futurists are not content to daydream about tomorrow -- they're engineering it into existence. Bezos, Musk, Altman, Amodei, and others aren't sketching utopias on whiteboards; they're raising capital, building rockets, training models, and wiring the infrastructure of a more abundant world. After half a century of retreat from technological daring, America's futurist builders are back -- and futurity is once again under construction. Get 50% off for 1 year 1 Much of the Bezos vision is reflected in the Blue Origin mission statement: "Blue Origin means 'Earth.' We envision a future where millions of people will live and work in space with a single-minded purpose: to restore and sustain Earth, our blue origin." 2 "Up Wing" denotes a forward-looking, pro-progress outlook that welcomes innovation, growth, and calculated risk to improve human flourishing. "Down Wing" reflects a limit-accepting, risk-averse attitude that prioritizes stability and restraint over technological or economic advancement. 3 In _The Conservative Futurist_ , I describe the Up Wing 1.0 period as the post-World War II decades, roughly from 1950 to 1973, when America surged with technological progress, rapid productivity growth, and an almost unshakable optimism about the future. 4 Herman Kahn, a former nuclear strategist turned futurist and founder of the Hudson Institute, was a striking exception to the prophets of gloom who dominated the 1970s and 1980s. Kahn was convinced that human ingenuity and market-driven innovation would create abundance rather than scarcity. He's an important figure in my book. 5 Popular culture's futures have long skewed dystopian -- from _Soylent Green_ (environmental collapse), _Westworld_ (rebellious machines), _Logan 's Run_ (overpopulation), and _Planet of the Apes_ (nuclear ruin) to more recent films like _The Matrix_ , _Elysium_ , _Ex Machina_ , and _Don 't Look Up_, which echo the same anxieties about technology, inequality, and ecological collapse. 6 When asked what market research went into the iPad, Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously replied: "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." 7 A general purpose technology as a transformative innovation -- like electricity, industrial plastics, or the computer -- that drives widespread follow-on innovation, boosts productivity across sectors, and takes decades to fully reshape economies and daily life. 8 Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander uses liquid hydrogen and oxygen for propulsion. Because hydrogen must stay ultra-cold, the craft employs solar-powered cryocoolers to keep the fuel from boiling off -- allowing longer missions and on-orbit refueling. 9 The exact quote: "In the next kind of couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space. That's how fast this is going to accelerate. It's interesting too because they'll mostly be living there because they want to. Our robotic technology is getting so good. We don't need people to live in space. Anything that we need done -- if you need to do some work on the surface of the Moon or anywhere else -- we will be able to send robots to do that work, and that will be much more cost-effective than sending humans." | | ---|---|--- #### Invite your friends and earn rewards If you enjoy Faster, Please!, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. 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