In the tech world, in the year 2022, there was a lot of progress.
Some of the industry's most well known names were included in the falls. Sam Bankman-Fried started the year with a net worth of more than $20 billion and ended it as a pariah who faces criminal fraud charges. As the world's richest man, Musk had a thriving electric car company and a name synonymous with success, but as the owner of a social media company, he seems to be ruining his life.
High inflation and rising interest rates made it difficult for the tech industry to succeed. Tech giants cut perks and laid off workers as the sector ended its decade of hypergrowth.
The many noble, clever and socially valuable tech projects that made progress this year should not be ignored.
These kinds of projects have been highlighted in my Good Tech Awards column for a long time. These aren't necessarily technologies that will make the world a better place. I believe they are tools that could improve the world. They could go badly if they are mismanaged or co-opted.
There were a lot of choices this year. The final cut was here.
generative A.I., a term for the new type of artificial intelligence apps, trained on vast amounts of data, that can create new media objects out of thin air, was the biggest tech breakthrough of the year.
A.I. image generators like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney set off an explosion of new, ultra capable A.I. tools. When it started cranking out term papers, original poetry and working snippets of code, it was a viral sensation.
The generative A.I boom would not have been possible without the creation of the technology by Google. This year, OpenAI and the makers of Midjourney and Stable Diffusion all released public-facing products that allowed millions of people to use them.
The effects of generative A.I. are not known. Some people think that these apps will destroy millions of jobs while others think they will be a boon to creativity. The tools have arrived and we now get to decide how to use them, meaning that we are no longer debating theoretical costs and benefits.
I'm aware. It feels like putting credit default swaps in a "cool financial innovations" list in 2008 is the same thing.
While the industry took a nosedive this year, there was at least one brightspot. In September, the network behind the second most valuable coin completed what was known as the merge, a years-in-the-making project to switch from an energy-guzzling form ofBlockchain known as Proof of Work to a more energy efficient one.
The switch, which was a smashing success, cut the energy required to power Ethereum by more than 99 percent. It did not increase the price of the coin, which ended the year down 70%.
It was a bad year for start-up fund-raising, but it was a good year for climate tech start-ups, which raised billions of dollars to bring climate-friendly technologies to market.
There are too many promising climate tech start-ups to name, but a few that caught my eye this year were Living Carbon, Twelve and Bee Hero.
Living Carbon uses genetically engineered trees and plants to capture and store more carbon from the atmosphere. The company claims that the G.M.O. super trees can survive in soil with metal concentrations that would be harmful to other plants.
Twelve, which is based in Berkeley, Calif., is using a novel process to turn carbon dioxide into industrial products. The company raised $130 million in funding this year and struck deals with brands like Mercedes-Benz and P&G.
BeeHero is using new technology to address problems facing one of the most important parts of our global food supply. Fears of a food shortage are being set off by the fact that bees are dying off at an alarming rate. BeeHero created a system that allows for industrial beekeepers to monitor the health and productivity of their bees in real time. General Mills was one of the investors in the Series B round of the company.
Nuclear fusion, an emissions-free form of energy generation, took a few important steps towards reality this year.
The biggest fusion news of the year came a few weeks ago when scientists at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory crossed a major threshold known as "ignition", creating a fusion reaction that generated more energy than it takes to produce. The secretary of energy called it a "landmark achievement."
Many start-ups have been working on fusion. One, Helion Energy, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from well-known investors, including Sam Altman,Dustin Moskovitz and Peter Thiel. Helion says it will be able to create energy with its next fusion reactor. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plans to have a prototype fusion machine up and running by the year 2025.
According to experts, affordable fusion power may not be available for a long time. The public and private sectors showed a glimpse of a future powered by fusion.
The year when social media died was also the year when start-ups began trying to make up for lost time.
Locket is one app I use a lot. It is a very simple idea, that if you install a widget on your phone's home screen, you can create a digital photo frame that your friends and family can view.
Locket was created by Matt Moss, a young developer who wanted a way to send photos to his long-distance girlfriend; this year, the app quickly grew to millions of users and won an Apple cultural impact award. Locket is an easy way to share photos with your friends and family.
Locket was used by my wife and I to share photos of our child in a way that wouldn't require us to dig through huge photo albums to find them later on. It isn't the tech product I've used the most, or the one that will create the most net good for society. It is fun, uncomplicated and respectful of its users.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
