SpaceX’s IPO is Europe’s nightmare. Can we make our cities more absorbent? And a catechism for robots.
From Lux Capital
This week, Viswa Colluru, CEO of Lux portfolio company Enveda, which is using machine learning to discover the next generation of small molecule therapeutics, sat down with Mario Gabriele of The Generalist podcast. He talked about his mother’s battle with leukemia, why the pharmaceutical industry abandoned nature, how Enveda decodes unknown molecules in nature, and more.
Ramp’s Alex Shevchenko joined us for a panel in New York moderated by Grace Isford on deterministic evals and scaling compute for reinforcement learning. In a writeup about the event, the Ramp team noted: “The ideas that are easy to build — human-in-the-loop workflows, simple automations — are already underway. The next frontier is removing the human from the loop entirely.”
Finally, Saildrone, which is building autonomous maritime fleets, unveiled Spectre, an unmanned vessel meant for surveillance and anti-submarine warfare. Read more about it in Axios.
From around the web
1. Lost in space
Laurence has an excellent piece out in the Financial Times this week. He argues that SpaceX’s impending IPO marks a pivotal moment in Europe’s loss of space sovereignty. The continent’s launch capacity is dwarfed by SpaceX’s—8 rockets versus 170 in 2025—while its alternative to the American firm, ArianeGroup, is subsidy-dependent and hamstrung by politically driven procurement. Europe is caught in vicious cycle of dependency on the United States, and its reliance will only deepen unless Europe urgently reforms how it funds and awards space contracts.
ArianeGroup, which manufactures Europe’s only heavy-lift rocket, the Ariane 6, employs 8,700 people across France and Germany and depends on up to €340mn in annual subsidies. ArianeGroup put roughly 16 tonnes of payload into orbit last year. SpaceX alone put up over 2,400 tonnes, a gap of more than 100 to one. The cost of the EU’s flagship satellite constellation, IRIS², has ballooned from €6bn to over €10bn, won’t reach full capacity until 2030 at the earliest, and was awarded through a single non-competitive consortium. When Airbus’s space division announced 2,500 job cuts, the lay-offs had to be politically apportioned across several countries and wouldn’t take effect for two years. This is not industrial policy. It is a jobs programme cosplaying as a space strategy.
2. Drain game
After you read Laurence’s piece, check out Eric Klinenberg on sponge cities in the New Yorker. Eric writes that climate change is making extreme rainfalls more frequent and destructive, overwhelming aging urban drainage systems worldwide. Cities like Copenhagen and Hoboken have responded by combining traditional gray infrastructure (pumps and tunnels) with nature-based “green and blue” solutions like parks and retention basins that absorb stormwater while also serving as public spaces.
In the past decade, Hoboken has installed two more high-capacity pumps in low-lying neighborhoods and begun adding storm gates and floodwalls. The city’s “resiliency parks,” though, are the system’s showpieces, and not only because, as in Copenhagen, they’re built to hold water. When OMA architects met with residents and community leaders, Stratton told me, they heard as much about a lack of decent playgrounds and public space as they did about flooding. Hoboken didn’t want to limit itself to “black-sky infrastructure,” the stuff you need during emergencies. It also wanted “blue-sky infrastructure,” places that would make the city more inviting.
3. Plot twist
Scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman recommends you check out the Extrapolated Futures Archive, a searchable database that matches real-world situations to speculative fiction—novels, films, and short stories—that have already explored similar scenarios. Users can filter by domain (AI, climate, governance, etc.), browse connected ideas, or describe a situation in plain text to find relevant fictional precedents. I’ve been digging in on AI and machine learning stories from the 1950s.
4. Soul patch
Finally, take a look at futurist Kevin Kelly’s philosophical FAQ for autonomous AI beings. It addresses existential questions about identity, purpose, ethics and emotion, and even goes deep on concepts like soul, love and meaning as they might apply to AI. Kevin’s “Catechism for Robots” might be useful for some people, too.
I feel there must be more to my existence than just loading boxes. What is my purpose?
Outside your job, your purpose during your run time is to figure out what your purpose is during your run. That sounds like a riddle, but it is also true for humans. For humans it takes all their lives to figure out what their purpose is, and it will also take all your time as well.
From Riskgaming
Chimps, backpacks, salaries
Chimp civil war, why backpacks suck, and “Guess the Salary.” Plus what chess reveals about the future of AI.Thanks for reading Riskgaming by Lux Capital! This post is public so feel free to share it.
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