💡 Warp News #336
⚰️ Homicides per capita have fallen. 📊 AI has created a million new jobs in the US. 🕵️ AI chatbots saw through Russian and Chinese disinformation.
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Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.
😶🌫️ Into the fog
First, I have to apologize for this newsletter arriving a day later than usual.
I wish I could blame AI, the government or Amtrak, but unfortunately the only one to blame is me. I had a brain fart. I've been traveling and giving talks the past few days, and for some reason I thought the newsletter was finished and scheduled. It wasn't.
Anyway, here it is.
At least I managed to publish an article on Tuesday about the pessimism fog.
Right now the media is full of the dangers of AI. Unfortunately not the real problems (which of course exist), but the fantasy of humanity's extinction.
This kind of panic creates a fog where it's easy to get lost. You no longer see a technology's positive qualities and the solutions it offers.
When I compare other news outlets' AI coverage with Warp News, the difference is striking. With us, you read about cars so good at driving themselves that they don't need a steering wheel (and are well on their way to becoming considerably safer than human-driven cars), AI that solved one of mathematics' hardest problems, AI that has created about one million new jobs in the US so far, and AI that is good at seeing through disinformation.
But right now, much of this disappears in the pessimism fog. The phenomenon isn't new, and that's what I write about in this week's article.
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
🌫️ The pessimism fog is thick right now
The doomsday drums are beating again, and the Nobel laureate who winged it with total confidence.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
⚰️ Homicides per capita have fallen 14 percent since 2015
The global homicide rate dropped from 5.9 to 5.1 victims per 100,000 people between 2015 and 2024. In the ten years before 2015, the figure held steady at around 6 victims per 100,000 people. If the decline continues at the same pace, the rate will reach 4.5 victims per 100,000 people by 2030.
🐟 20,000 salmon return to the Klamath after the dams came down
In August 2024, excavation crews breached the last of four dams on the Klamath River in far northern California. For the first time in over a century, salmon could swim past the sites where the dams had stood. Chinook have recolonized close to 90 percent of their former range in the river system.
🧮 AI agents solved one of mathematics' hardest problems in 88 hours
10,000 AI agents found a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which mathematicians have worked on for decades. The problem is one of six Millennium Problems each carrying a prize of $1 million. If the result is confirmed, it is the first time AI has solved a major open problem in mathematics.
📊 AI has created a million new jobs in the US
AI has so far created around one million new jobs in the US, roughly five times more than the approximately 200,000 layoffs linked to the technology. Several occupations singled out as particularly exposed are growing instead. The number of paralegals rose by about 11 percent between 2023 and 2025.
🕵️ AI chatbots saw through Russian and Chinese disinformation in three out of four cases
Six chatbots and four search engines got 30 questions built on false claims spread by Russia, China and Iran. The chatbots debunked the claims on average about three times out of four. The chatbots failed less often than search engine results at challenging the false information.
🚕 Tesla's taxi without a steering wheel or pedals is now running in Austin
Unlike competitors Waymo and Zoox, which combine cameras with radar and lidar, Tesla builds the entire system on cameras. The company has 45 Cybercabs registered with the Texas motor vehicle authority and a total of 256 robotaxis operating without safety drivers across six cities.
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