Continuing Scientific and Technological Breakthroughs in 2022 – Part 3

Continuing Peter Diamandis’ top breakthrough science and technology advances in 2022, we look at innovation in food sciences, robotics, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence.

These are Peter’s picks and there is no doubt that the implications for the planet and humanity from these advances will be significant in this decade and beyond.

Did he miss any field and scientific and technology breakthroughs that should have been included? I will consider that and maybe add some of my own in the coming weeks. So please continue to visit this site and let me know if you agree with his or my additions to his best breakthroughs of 2022 list.

Food

The #12 breakthrough is the approval of laboratory-grown meat by America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In November, California-based Upside Foods received FDA approval for its lab-grown chicken. Before the company can begin selling its product it still needs approvals from the Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS) which is expected soon. This marks the second country to approve lab-grown meat. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) granted Eat Just Inc. approval for its cultured chicken in December 2020.

Of the 80 billion animals raised for meat annually, 70 billion are chickens. Demand has increased six-fold in the last century. I think the chickens of the world will thank these cultured meat companies in the years to come. And so will the environment as agricultural practices change to reflect the move away from livestock. Animal welfare advocates will also be much happier. And cultured meats may solve food insecurity issues for those areas of the planet facing agricultural challenges from climate change.

The #13 breakthrough is perennial rice. China’s Yunnan University has created PR23 rice, a perennial. They have been published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Rice is an annual which means it needs to be planted every season. But PR23 can be harvested and automatically regrows. In tests, 8 consecutive harvests were produced over 4 concurrent years. Using PR23 reduces farm labour by 60%, and production costs by 50%. Farmers in Southern China have planted more than 15,000 hectares in the last year representing a 4-fold increase from 2020. Considering that rice is a staple and food source for 4 billion on the planet, the development of a perennial version can alleviate food insecurity in South Asia, Africa and elsewhere. After this, the next food crops on the bucket list to develop perennial versions are wheat and corn.

Robotics

The #14 breakthrough is the Tesla Humanoid Robot called Optimus which stands 1.7 metres (5 feet 8 inches) tall. It lifts 68 kilograms (150 pounds) and carries up to 20 kgs (45 lbs.). It travels at speeds of 3 kilometres (5 miles) per hour. Future versions will climb stairs and hills, use tools such as drills and screwdrivers, and develop other abilities.

Tesla plans to mass-produce Optimus selling each for less than $20,000. This could make robots a future household and work fixture. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX sees Optimus as a part of the “future where there is no poverty, where you could have whatever you want in terms of products and services. It is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it.” That may be an overstatement, which Musk is known to express, but we will see.

The #15 breakthrough is the XPrize ANA Avatar called NimbRo. NimbRo won for its University of Bonn team, the $10 million prize. What avatars make possible is for humans to work through a robot in real-time without being at a location. NimbRo allows its operator to hear, see, and interact with a remote environment. In winning it teamed up with an operator to complete 10 tasks earning a perfect score. Avatars make it possible for humans to do tasks in areas that normally would be hostile to them: think disaster relief, nuclear reactor accidents, dismantling a bomb, or search and rescue operations.

The #16 breakthrough is robotaxis getting approvals for use in public transportation. Alphabet’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise are two leading companies developing these autonomous vehicles. Waymo was the first to offer fully autonomous public rides which began in Phoenix, Arizona in 2020. In November 2022, it won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to carry passengers in robotaxis without a safety driver present. GM Cruise has operated a robotaxi service in Austin and Phoenix and recently was approved to offer a fully driverless ride-hailing service in San Francisco.

The use of robotaxis will lower the cost of personalized transport and should increase car-sharing taking more cars off the roads and streets of cities. This ultimately can lead to less land used to support automobiles. That means fewer parking spaces, more manageable road networks, and turning asphalt and concrete into parks and sustainable housing. This should help reduce the urban heat island effect in cities and mitigate global warming.

The #17 breakthrough is eVTOLs which stands for Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing vehicles. The emergence of flying cars made the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration propose new rules in 2022 to help pave the way for commercial air taxis to operate by 2025. The goal is to have them in Los Angeles in 2028 for the Olympic Games.

Top companies include Joby Aviation which this year received Air Carrier certification and formed a partnership with Delta Air Lines. Another company, Lilium, demonstrated the Phoenix-2, an eVTOL that transitions from hover to wing-borne flight. Saudia Airlines signed an MOU to purchase 100 and develop an eVTOL network across Saudi Arabia. Archer Aviation formed a partnership with United Airlines to deliver 100 eVTOLs for passenger service between Newark Airport and downtown Manhattan. And BETA Technologies demonstrated human-piloted eVTOLs winning military airworthiness approval.

It looks like eVTOLs are about to take off in major metropolitan cities with the market estimate for these services to be worth $30 billion by 2030. As eVTOL networks grow this will change where and how we travel making difficult-to-reach geographies more accessible.

Quantum Computing

The #18 breakthrough is in the proliferation of Qubits in new quantum computing platforms. Qubits are the equivalent of the bits and bytes that can be found in today’s computers. Several significant advances in 2022 have included extending qubit lifetimes by a factor of 5. Other advances include tuning large numbers of qubits to interact with each other while maintaining coherence using what is called quantum many-body scarring (QMBS). These advances address the biggest challenges in quantum information science. Longer coherence times mean more useful qubits for applications in physics, chemistry, medicine, transportation, finance and other fields. McKinsey estimates that four industries, in particular, automotive, chemicals, finance, and pharmaceutical will see quantum applications worth $700 billion by 2035.

The #19 breakthrough comes with IBM unveiling its largest quantum computer yet called Osprey, a 433-qubit machine that is three times larger than the 127-qubit Eagle which the company announced just last year. The new processor has the potential to perform complex quantum calculations far beyond the capabilities of any classical computer. As IBM points out, “the number of classical bits that would be necessary to represent a state on the IBM Osprey processor far exceeds the total number of atoms in the known universe.” And IBM has plans for a 1,000-qubit chip to be released in 2023.

The larger the quantum computer, the greater its ability to tackle more complex problems. For example, Toronto-based Xanadu this year used a 216-qubit quantum chip called Borealis to tackle the “Gaussian boson sampling” problem, a benchmark used to measure quantum computing prowess. The Borealis did it in 36 microseconds. A conventional computer would have taken over 9,000 years.

Artificial Intelligence

The #20 breakthrough is progress using synthetic data to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) systems development. Data feeds AI systems. Good data is great. Bad data, not so much. The real world can be messy and data can be riddled with biases. Gartner estimates up to 85% of AI projects end up delivering erroneous outcomes because of data bias. That’s where synthetic data comes in.

Synthetic data is artificial. It mimics real-world observations. It is used to train AI machine-learning models. This year researchers at MIT, IBM Watson, and Boston University built synthetic datasets from 150,000 video clips capturing a range of human actions. Machine-learning models used the clips for training. Videos with fewer background objects produced better outcomes than AI using real data. What this potentially means is that synthetic data by 2030 will overshadow real data in AI models and will save hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

The #21 breakthrough is text-to-image generation. Open AI’s DALL-E 2 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion are advanced machine-learning text-to-image platforms. DALL-E 2 is built to understand natural language and turn it into images, creating creepily accurate renderings. Today, 1.5 million active users are working with it to create over 2 million images daily at no cost. OpenAI has partnerships with Microsoft, Shutterstock and others to increase the platform’s use and influence. Stable Diffusion’s Stability AI is currently used by more than 10 million people. And apps from TikTok to Lightricks are also AI-powered art generators.

For creatives doing art and design, these tools are game changers. A recent New York Times interview with several creative professionals talked about how partnering with AI was allowing them to generate more creative ideas faster. Filmmakers are using the tools to create pitches for studios. And generative AI isn’t limited to images. It can also be used to generate computer code from text. That can make anyone a programmer.

The #22 breakthrough and the last in this list is ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot created using OpenAI and the recently released GPT 3.5 language. This chatbot is a tool for AI-human collaboration and works by taking conversational input and producing code or text output. It can be used to answer coding queries, run virtual computing platforms, write song lyrics, and even novels. When OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, by December 5th over 1 million people were using it. What will be the new forms of art and business that this type of AI tool creates?

A final if not ominous note:

Peter Diamandis concludes his 22 breakthroughs with this comment related to the implications of advances in AI, stating: “By the end of this decade, there are going to be two kinds of companies, those that are fully utilizing AI and those that are out of business.”