⏰ Now it’s happening – but no one notices

This newsletter is for you who are a Premium Supporter at Warp News. Feel free to share it with friends and acquaintances.

Last week, two things happened that mostly showed up as brief notes in the news. Blue Origin landed an orbital rocket, and Waymo began operating robotaxis on highways.

Having followed both of these developments for several years, I’m fascinated by how little attention they receive. Each of them will, on its own, have a massive impact on our world.

Take two minutes out of your day and absorb the future.

The significance of self-driving vehicles

Hundreds of thousands of taxi trips are now being completed without a driver. So far only in limited areas, but these are expanding quickly. Waymo has previously operated in just a handful of cities; now they are adding highways across large parts of California. Tesla also offers a taxi service, still with safety drivers for the moment, but they will disappear soon. Several Chinese companies are well underway, and smaller pilots will be carried out in Europe.

The development is steady, and generative AI has opened new possibilities to create virtual environments where cars can practice driving.

There seems to be no obstacle to achieving near-perfect self-driving vehicles in the coming decade. It’s “just” a matter of continuing to develop.

This means that in the next decades, all vehicles will become self-driving.

These vehicles will drive much more safely and efficiently. Transport will become cheaper, vehicles will be designed differently, city planning will change as our need for parking spaces shrinks or shifts, business models for transport companies will evolve – and much more. An entire profession – drivers – will disappear, but we have decades to adjust.

This massive shift should receive far more attention and shape how we view and plan our future.

The significance of landing rockets

Ten years after SpaceX became the first to land an orbital rocket, Blue Origin has now replicated the feat. On the first attempt, it landed cleanly on a drone ship at sea.

For SpaceX, this is routine. The day before yesterday they landed a Falcon 9 rocket for the 500th time. But the fact that another company can now do it too means this capability is becoming commonplace.

When a rocket is landed, it can be reused. That is of course much cheaper than building a new one every time. As a result, the cost of reaching space has begun to fall and will drop dramatically. Around ten years ago, it cost about 100,000 SEK to launch one kilogram into space. In the future, that cost may drop as low as 100 SEK.

This means launch costs in the coming decades will fall by 99.9 percent.

This makes space accessible in an entirely new way. In addition to having millions of satellites and more missions around the solar system, we’ll also see several increasingly large space stations. Above all, near-Earth space will become an additional layer around our planet.

Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, envisions moving more and more industry into space.

This massive shift should receive far more attention and shape how we view and plan our future.

Wake up!

Regular readers of Warp News have followed this development since we launched in 2020. Under the tags self-driving cars and space, we’ve reported news and tried to explain what’s happening.

But the rest of the world needs to wake up. Negative news repeatedly gets big headlines, even when the stories are worn out. This kind of news should receive at least as much attention. Not only because these things are crucial to understand – they are also exciting and interesting.

Now the two minutes I promised are up, but keep these two developments in mind when thinking about both the present and the future.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism