What a year for tech! Technology has carried on its mantle as the fastest evolving field in 2022. The 2020 lockdown came as a reality check for the entire world, prompting every industry to go back to the drawing board and re-think the traditional model of operating business. If there was a kick needed for tech to literally take off, this was it.
Traditional businesses seeking out new and innovative ways to establish systems that require minimum human supervision and boost efficiency was that kick. 2021 saw an influx of efforts towards this. 2022 has been a time of harvest for the seeds sowed.
The purpose of this review is to act as a wide-angle view at the technological trends that dominated in 2022. More importantly, by the end of this article, my hope is that you'll take a more close-angle view of yourself and the part you have played in these trends, if any. And if not, let this in the very least spark a bit of intrigue on why that is, because tech is the future, you're either with it, or you're not.
So let's get started...
Mergers and Acquisitions
In every five big headlines this year was an Mergers and Acquisitions headline. The biggest one by far was Elon Musk's acquisition of the social platform Twitter. However, several other big ones made the news as big tech went out on a witch-hunt for the small fish, eating them up with chunk loads of cash.
In case you're wondering big companies do this either to assimilate a good product that has already established a level of market dominance or to eliminate a growing competition. Often times than not, it's because of the latter.
Microsoft acquired Activation Blizzard for $68.7B and became the 3rd-largest gaming company by revenue.
Adobe acquiring Figma for $20B was another huge one, increasing Adobe's pricing power and user base and eliminating the increasing competition that was Figma.
Broadcom, a semiconductor giant, acquired VMware for $61B.Oracle acquired Cerner for $28.3B to capitalize on the heath-tech boom.
Goldman Sachs predicts 2023 will likely see more cash-rich companies acquiring startups.
The Metaverse: Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
In contrast to Augmented Reality, which improves the real world by superimposing computer-generated data on top of it, virtual Reality is the technology that creates experiences that are almost real and/or credible in a synthetic or virtual fashion.
With virtual reality, you can explore a world created by a computer by donning a headgear. On the other hand, augmented reality is a little different. It uses either a clear visor or a smartphone to layer digital graphics on top of the real environment around you rather than taking you to a virtual world.
Meta, previously known as Facebook, is leading in this field, but at what cost? The company invested $10.2 billion in 2021 on Reality Labs, the division that develops VR and AR products. In 2022, it spent $9.4 billion in the first three quarters alone. This are insane amounts, considering virtual reality has been almost exclusively used in gaming.
In 2022 however, Meta made efforts to diversify into other spaces and we could see more of such advances made in 2023. AR and VR enormous potential in training, entertainment, education, marketing, and even rehabilitation after an injury. Fun fact: 14 million AR and VR devices were sold in 2019. The global AR and VR market is expected to grow to $209.2 billion by 2023.
Artificial Intelligence swings a reality check
As we entered the year 2022, the techies buzzed with excitement about what they thought was the "next big thing", crypto and NFTs. But reality has a bizarre sense of humor. AI, as reality would decree, was the next big thing. I've done an in-depth analysis of AI and how its emergency affects the job market globally.
Here's a breakdown of just a few of the hundreds of advances made in AI in 2022;
Text-to-image (DALL-E 2) and text-to-video (Synthesis) tools went mainstream.
Language models (like ChatGPT and Cicero) launched, which are already being used for writing/debugging code, creating a marketing plan, and more. ChatGPT has crossed 1M+ users in just 5 days.
AI for proteins: DeepMind launched AphaFold2, which can predict the shape of proteins with nearly 100% accuracy.
It's helping research on cancer, antibiotic resistance, and other diseases.
Crypto assets lost $2.5 trillion in value
One of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world at one point, FTX, collapsed in November as consumers rushed to remove billions of dollars from the company out of concern for the true health of its financial sheet.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the company's founder and former CEO, who was located in the Bahamas, was subsequently charged in the US with fraud, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy to defraud the US, and conspiracy to break campaign financing rules. He was released on $250 million bond after being extradited to the US last week.
The so-called stable coins like Luna blew up, losing $60 billion ion value and bankrupting their investors.
NFT trading volume crashed by a staggering 97%.
Biotech boom
• Yale researchers reverse death in pigs.
• Scientists grew an embryo without a sperm, egg, or womb.
• An immunotherapy cured cancer in all patients for the 1st time in history.
Nuclear fusion promises a myriad of possibilities
For the first time on Earth, a controlled fusion reaction generated more power than was used to kickstart it.
Reaching the milestone provides real hope that fusion reactors can deliver on the decades-long promise of abundant, clean energy that, according to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, will be “too cheap to meter”.
This could produce:
• Clean energy, reducing climate crises: floods, droughts and more.
• 24/7 energy with less hazardous waste.
• 4M times more energy than oil/coal.
Robots became a little bit more human
The world of robotics brings a promise of more and more efficiency through automation in a wide range of industries particularly in manufacturing. Earlier this year, Elon Musk's Tesla at the company's AI day in September unveiled two Optimus humanoid robot prototypes.
The robot which would seamlessly perform simple tasks like watering plants and lifting items represented a huge step in the direction that will see robots start to actively take up roles that previously were exclusive to humans.
