Top Breakthroughs in 2022
- HanseaticHunter
- Dec 29, 2022
- 7 min read
With lasting consequences for this decade and beyond
As this year nears its end, 2022 will commonly go down as a bad year for most of humanity. It started with much hope after the pandemic driven previous two years. Unfortunately, but in retrospect not unsurprisingly, a number of neglected structural issues came to the fore in a very negative way: Ukraine war, China conflict, inflation driven poverty and the energy crises, to name the major ones. However, as a counterpoint to current structural problems, there are underlying long term trends that will greatly improve the way we live. Here are two excellent references:
Some landmark achievements were reached this year within these trends. Here is a summary of the key ones:
Artificial Intelligence
Smart software has been on the rise for decades with occasional headline grabbing results: AI beats best human in chess (1997, IBM - Deep Blue), Jeopardy! (2011, IBM - Watson), Go (2017, Google DeepMind – AlphaGo), poker (2019, Facebook AI - Pluribus) and even Diplomacy (2022, Meta AI – Cicero). This year we had two further achievements:
(1) ChatGPT (Open AI)
OpenAI was founded exactly 7 years ago by a number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (Sam Altman, Elon Musk et al.) with a pledge of over $1 billion and with the lofty goal of creating an AGI (artificial general intelligence) to benefit of all humanity. Three years ago, Microsoft entered as a partner with a $1 billion investment.
After 3 previous versions (GPT 1 to 3 based on generative pre-training), ChatGPT brought the breakthrough this month. This AI is programmed with trillions of data points from the language on websites. It is the first time, an AI was opened for any developer to build apps for any English language AI task tapping OpenAI’s API (application programming interface). Using the interface, one blogger turned programmer who had not even finished his 100-day course was able to program a copy of the New York Times website. He named it “GPT Times – all the news that’s fit to generate” and generated the articles out of Twitter tweets using ChatGPT.
It is a language model irrespective of factual content. In our field test conversation, we were able to point out such a factual mistake, and the AI recognized its mistake and apologized(!).
(2) AlphaFold (Google – DeepMind)
One of the big challenges in the advancement of medicine is the translation from gene sequences (essentially two dimensional) into the actual structure of proteins (three dimensional). Knowledge of the 3D-composition greatly enhances the development off effective drugs.
In July of this year, DeepMind Technologies, now a subsidiary of Alphabet, announced that its AI was successful in predicting the 3D structure of nearly every catalogued protein known to science: over 200 million in plants, bacteria, animals and humans. This will greatly accelerate medical therapy development.
As a whole, with ever cheaper processing time and competition among various AI initiatives, the frequency of AI breakthroughs will be rising.
Fusion energy: breakthrough or not?
Ever since the first H-bomb was ignited in 1952, humanity has worked on harnessing the tremendous heat from nuclear fusion reaction. Our Sun is a natural fusion reactor, but the plasma cloud is way too hot for any material on Earth to hold it. Hence various techniques, mostly involving magnetic power, have been developed to contain the plasma. All of them use too much electricity.
Now, the leading American fusion reactor facility created more energy from the fusion reaction than was consumed by the ignition and the containment field: National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (llnl.gov)
WARNING: This statement is grossly misleading. The Livermore fusion ignition was realized with powerful lasers. It is true that the energy of the light bursts was less than the energy gained through the ignited plasma. However, lasers lose most of the electrical energy in the form of heat. Normal lasers have a 0.01% efficiency. The Livermore lasers were 100 times more efficient, but still only resulted at 1%, i.e. 99% is heat loss, which was not included in the bold announcement. In other words, Livermore is still far away from a breakthrough.
There is justified hope for other experimental reactors. The two leading multi-billion dollar large-scale reactors are ITER (EU led with global participation of all major powers even China and Russia) and EAST (China only). Both use the traditional donut shaped magnetic fields called Tokamak. EAST achieved a new record of a 17-minute-long plasma reaction reaching 70 million degrees (more than the Sun’s temperature).
More realistic are small-scale reactors that use more innovative approaches (e.g. sonic waves, accelerating plasma rings, dense plasma). Interestingly, related to the previous topic AI, a German start-up called Marvel Fusion is working with an AI to optimize a laser-driven fusion reactor resulting in much lower power consumption.
In sum, commercial fusion reactors are no longer the usual 50 years away, but at least one of these prototypes should deliver positive results within the next 10 years. As always, competition accelerates human ingenuity.
Biotechnology
The strain on health care due to the pandemic has obfuscated some decent progress. While there was no single headline grabbing breakthrough, the basic technologies to enable life improving therapies such as DNA analysis, mRNA, gene editing, nanobots as well as improved medtech monitoring have delivered results.
Due to the Covid vaccines, “mRNA” is now a household term. What was a breakthrough in 2021, now must be re-evaluated (also see our post on utilitarian calculus: Corona is NOT the end of the World: a solution! (hanseatichunter.com)) by comparing the positive impact of preventing worse outcomes versus the cost. In terms of benefits, they are initially almost impossible to gauge as the degree of infectiousness and mortality is only known after a significant spread. This held true for the flu virus as well as the corona virus.
The cost side is more obvious. The $-cost of the mRNA vaccines is known and some crowding out of other medicines due to the strain on health budgets can be drawn from health statistics. However, the most difficult part to assess on the cost side are side effects, both short and long-term.
Hopefully, the emotions around Covid will soon subside in order to execute a sober analysis and improve future health policy responses. Therefore, time will tell whether it was an efficient allocation of resources. Nonetheless, the mRNA technology is here to stay and the billions earned are being put to good use with the launch of a host of new research studies to combat primarily cancer.
Space Exploration
One can be forgiven for claiming space exploration is a waste of resources given more pressing issues on Earth. Nevertheless, 2022 saw the breakthrough of global space communication. SpaceX has now launched over 3000 Starlink satellites into orbit in less than two years. These provide satellite Internet access coverage to over 40 countries into areas where there are no/sporadic links. It became most noticeable in a war zone due to the success in helping the Ukraine.
Bitcoin: FTX/Crypto scandal
How can 2022 be considered a breakthrough for Bitcoin, when its price dropped 63% in USD this year?
Similar to Japan in the 80s, NASDAQ in the 90s, Neuer Markt in the 00s, the hype-upped space of alternative monetary solutions, commonly called crypto-currencies, matured this year. The bubble was pricked, frauds uncovered, and many inexperienced investors got washed out.
Within this space, BTC is the most solid. It will therefore benefit from the current shake-out and survive the “Trough of Disillusionment” of the Gartner cycle (technology adoption):
Bitcoin has the chance of becoming a real alternative as a store of value to gold. It was the best hedge against money printing over the last 10 years: while the USD lost 15% of its value in real terms, gold -4% real, S&P500 Index was +146% real and BTC +97,428% real (if you drop the first half of Bitcoin’s existence as the discovery phase by taking the last 7 years, it still is +2,800%).
Journalism – “the 4th estate”
In the age of echo chambers and perceived societal divisions, it is worth following current events at Twitter: 1. The uncovering of investigative journalists (so-called “Twitter-Files”); and 2. more importantly for the future, the changes being implemented by the new management. Musk is polarizing in what he tweets, but we are better served to judge him by the outcomes he achieves. The latter point is evolving and far from set in stone.
What is set is that technology also drives changes in the way news gets published. A good antidote to the fake news phenomenon is cryptological solutions such as the blockchain offers. Deep fake videos putting words into people’s mouths are indeed disturbing but can increasingly be identified.
Efficient (avoidance of wasting public resources) and fair government works much better with a critical fourth estate. Traditional media (TV/Radio networks, newspapers/magazines) may still seem critical at first glance, however many journalists quickly vilify any idea outside the consensus corridor even calling for more censorship.
We should therefore welcome more open, bottom-up, diverse reporting without forgetting that laws against journalistic harm already exist.
“The Network State”
This last breakthrough is perhaps the most revolutionary and likely most controversial as it moves most people out of their comfort zone. It is no less the design for a visionary yet practical solution of creating a better, less divisive society.
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.” Balaji Srinivasan, 2022
Srinivasan is not a blogger, journalist nor author, but has a track record as entrepreneur (biotech testing), venture capitalist and crypto exchange founder (bought by Coinbase). This lends credibility to his visionary ideas. Whatever your political inclinations and views of our society, you will find something of interest in this book, even if one is happy with the current nation states and the modern form of western democracy. In addition, anyone who is stuck on the left vs. right political dimension will at least get an idea that other dimensions exist.
Here are the core elements:
· Social network: online first, real estate footprint later
· National consciousness with recognized founder(s)
· Capacity for collective action
· Consensual government limited by a social smart contract
· Integrated cryptocurrency
· Archipelago of physical territories with a virtual capital
· Verifiable on-chain census proving a large enough population, income & real estate to attain diplomatic recognition
Is this just a “pipe dream”? Maybe, but humanity has thrived on competition and 24 networks already exist.
The Network State also lends itself to how people want to work. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky recently said, "Pre-pandemic, ~1% of all jobs posted on LinkedIn were remote. As of today, that number is ~14%. But that's not the fascinating part. What's fascinating is north of 50% of all job applications on a daily basis on LinkedIn go to that 14% of remote jobs."
We will bring a separate blog purely on The Network State.
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In summary, any of these breakthroughs have the power to change humanity for the better. It will hardly ever be a straight-line trend as we have pointed out examples of possible failures. Nevertheless, they are a potent antidote to the apocalyptic world views that are so fashionable these days.
Happy Holidays and a great start to the New Year!
The HanseaticHunter
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