The Week Everything Real Became Optional
There are weeks when the world doesn't advance but slides, like a piece of furniture across a freshly waxed floor, and nobody remembers who pushed it. This was one of those weeks. The Moon had visitors again, diamonds stopped being expensive, concrete learned to think, a furniture store discovered its customers wanted advice instead of shelves, and Europe asked its citizens to stay home. All at the same time. All with the ease of someone changing channels.
The Moon gets visitors after half a century of silence. On April 1st at 6:35 PM Eastern, the SLS rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center carrying four astronauts aboard the Orion capsule: Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Canadian Jeremy Hansen. Glover became the first Black person, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-American to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Nobody had made this trip since December 1972, when Apollo 17's crew returned from the lunar surface. That's fifty-three years. An American Airlines passenger named Jane Clukey filmed the rocket's trail from her window seat on a flight between St. Croix and Charlotte, and the video went viral, because that is what we do with miracles now: we film them in portrait mode from seat 14F. Meanwhile, SpaceX filed its confidential IPO under the codename "Project Apex" with twenty-one banks lined up and a target valuation that started at $1.75 trillion on Tuesday and climbed above $2 trillion by Wednesday, per Bloomberg. If the Moon is the destination, Wall Street is the gas station.
IKEA built an AI assistant, and what failed turned out to be the business. The chatbot is called Billie (with an ie, like the bookcase) and was deployed by Ingka Group, IKEA's largest franchisee, across markets in Europe, Australia, and the UAE. Billie resolved forty-seven percent of customer service queries, which sounds like failure until you read what happened with the other fifty-three percent. Most were people asking for design advice, not complaining about a missing screw. Ingka, in a pivot that only late capitalism can execute with such grace, retrained eight thousand five hundred call center employees into remote interior design advisors working by phone and video. The remote sales channel generated 1.3 billion euros in fiscal year 2022, according to Ingka's Chief Digital Officer Parag Parekh. The goal is to grow remote design sales from 3.3% to ten percent of total revenue by 2028. It turns out what people wanted from IKEA wasn't a cheaper shelf but someone to tell them where to put it.
Lab-grown diamonds now cost less than the dinner where they're presented. In five years the price has dropped eighty percent. Two carats of lab-grown diamond can be had for under a thousand dollars, and they account for sixty-one percent of engagement rings sold in the United States, according to industry data. The cause is the same as in every good story of artificial abundance: CVD (chemical vapor deposition) technology got cheaper, Chinese and Indian producers scaled manufacturing, and De Beers, which for a century controlled scarcity like a theological monopoly (diamonds are forever because we say so), launched its own lab brand, Lightbox, at eight hundred dollars per carat, like opening a taco stand next to your fine dining restaurant. The traditional jewelry industry is learning what the music industry learned with streaming: when the copy is indistinguishable from the original, the original's price becomes a matter of faith.
Meta taught an AI to design concrete, and the sentence is not a metaphor. BOxCrete, released under the MIT license by researchers at Meta and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a Bayesian optimization model that predicts concrete compressive strength over time and suggests mixes that minimize carbon emissions. Portland cement accounts for six to eight percent of global CO2 emissions. BOxCrete achieves an R-squared of 0.94 predicting strength across five curing ages, and its open dataset includes five hundred measurements from one hundred and twenty-three distinct mixes. The authors — Bayezid Baten, Ayyan Iqbal, Sebastian Ament, Julius Kusuma, and Nishant Garg — published the code on GitHub under facebookresearch/SustainableConcrete. There is something deeply strange about the company that built a metaverse nobody visited now designing the foundations of buildings where people actually live. But that's how research works: sometimes the longest road leads to the most solid ground.
Europe asks its citizens to stay home, and this time it's not a virus. The European Commission issued recommendations for citizens to work from home and reduce driving amid a prolonged energy crisis stemming from the Gulf conflict. The scene has a déjà vu quality: in 2022 it was Russian pipelines, now it's Gulf oil, and the message is the same. Turn off the lights, lower the thermostat, stay put. The difference is that this time nobody seems surprised. Energy, that ghost Europe believed it had tamed with windmills and solar panels, is reminding everyone it has a will of its own. And the European citizen, who during the pandemic learned that pajamas are a valid uniform, receives the instruction with the resignation of someone who already knows where the slippers are.