2022 was a productive year. I managed to get a few things done, and made progress on a number of different things, including my general engineering craft.
There were a number of areas that were of some interest to me this year. The Godot game engine project moved forward with some significant strength, and Bevy continued to be quietly developed. Somebody created a copilot clone. Deepmind solved protein folding.
People made progress on affordable electric heating for homes, on decarbonising heavy industry incentivised by putting in concrete mid-term legislative targets, and on electrification of new vehicles. There was a surprisingly lifelike robot, progress on autonomous vehicles, progress on nuclear fusion. The James Webb telescope was launched successfully, and is already transforming astronomy and delivering raw, hard data on echoes from the early universe.
Climeworks is making progress on its direct air capture mission backed by Microsoft among others. The Ocean Cleanup has plans for a “System 03” even as they have already cleaned up 1% of the great pacific garbage patch with their system demonstrators. Microsoft made significant progress on topological quantum computing including demonstration of the underlying physics required to create Majorana zero modes, which are a pre-requisite for creating Qubits of topological quantum computing type. Steady progress was made on AR and VR technologies by numerous players, perhaps most notably Facebook and Apple.
There were countless discoveries made in condensed matter physics.
Multiple countries put in colossal amounts of solar and wind power generation, as well as battery fleets – and there is no indication that this is slowing, but this is rather accelerating. Barely any new fossil fuel power plants were created and many were decommissioned. Rewilding initiatives were actioned, marine parks and reserves put aside in multiple regions across the world, natural wildlife corridors created and habitat restoration initiatives advanced. Mangroves were restored in multiple parts of the world such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and India.
Bearing in mind a cautionary note about the map becoming the territory, Metaculus seems to indicate that the first broadly known weak general artificial intelligence system should be made public by around about 2029.
Tags: new years, the year in review
Where's my hat?! 
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