As 2022 draws to a close amid stubborn inflation, a ‘triple epidemic’, a climate crisis and a brutal war with no end in sight, it can be hard to remember that good things happened this year as well.
Coronavirus vaccines became available for children as young as 6 months old, a relief for parents as much of the world returned to a new normal. Rich countries agreed to do more to help poor countries cope with climate disasters. And major scientific breakthroughs brought us a little closer to long-held ambitions like nuclear fusion and curing cancer.
While the world faces many challenges, there are reasons to be hopeful about 2023 and beyond. In our last Saturday newsletter of 2022, we decided to continue the DealBook tradition of highlighting the most promising developments of the year.
We are a little closer to a new source of clean energy. Following a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion this month, investors are pouring money into companies looking to harness the type of energy that powers the sun and stars. Fusion, if deployed on a large scale, would provide an almost limitless, pollution-free source of energy. But until this year, scientists had never created a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California finally hit that milestone this month. While it could be decades before fusion becomes a practical source of energy, the achievement is a big step toward that goal.
Wall Street and venture capitalists are also optimistic about green technology. In his year-end letter, Bill Gates notes that climate-related R&D has grown by nearly a third since the 2015 Paris accords. Private capital investment in the sector is also on the rise, with $70 billion spent in the past two years. New technologies continue to emerge from that to address climate issues. At the DealBook Summit in November, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink predicted that venture capital would flow more to startups that use hard science to tackle the planet’s biggest problems. “I believe we will see a transformation of where the money is going,” Fink said. “It doesn’t go to all those things that helped us get food faster or find a taxi sooner.”
Bots are unlikely to take your job – and can make it easier. The fear that technology will replace human workers is as old as technology, and was raised again in November when a company called OpenAI released ChatGPT, an automated writing program. But AI experts have long maintained that such technologies have limitations that prevent them from fully replacing humans. What the bots do well is make grunt work easier. An example that went viral shortly after the release of ChatGPT: a Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company.
Real progress is being made in combating child poverty. The number of children in America living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 percent since 1993. As Jason DeParle of The Times reported in September, “child poverty has declined in every state, and it has declined at about the same rate among children who are white, black, Hispanic, and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households.” The improvements coincide with more generous state and federal subsidies for working families and changes to social security laws that make it easier for struggling households to apply for welfare programs.
We are getting closer to cancer vaccines. Researchers have long believed it was possible to immunize individuals at high risk of cancer, or even cure cancer in those who already showed signs of it. Until recently they had made little progress, but now promising results from preliminary studies are giving some doctors new hope. Moderna said this month that a skin cancer vaccine performed well in interim trials. Moderna and others are working on dozens of other vaccines to treat various other cancers.
New ways of working are becoming commonplace. Hybrid arrangements are commonplace in many companies (even though some CEOs are managing to get staff into the office more regularly). But another experiment is gaining ground: None of the 33 companies that tested a four-day workweek for six months this year as part of a large-scale study said they would return to a standard schedule. The companies, which have more than 900 employees combined, also reported higher employee turnover and productivity. The nonprofit advocacy organization that coordinated the pilot programs, called 4 Day Week Global, has signed up dozens of companies to participate in studies next year.
Here are some more innovations and milestones, some long in the making, that happened this year:
-
The James Webb Space Telescope imaged distant and ancient galaxies for the first time – and oh, what a view!
-
The era of electrically powered aviation was getting a little closer.
-
Mycotecture, the growing field of making things out of mycelium (a material derived from the root structure of mushrooms), kept growing and growing. A start-up called MycroWorks specializes in mold-based leather. Designers at Hermès are sold.
-
Wooden skyscrapers and 3D-printed houses have sprung up in cities across Europe and North America. Both types of structures are faster and cheaper to build and produce less construction waste and fewer emissions.
-
This giant fan sucks tons of carbon dioxide from the air in Iceland. The Department of Energy and a bevy of investors are racing to bring the technology, called direct air capture, to other parts of the world.
We want your feedback. Email your thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@CBNewz.
