The 2021 Excellent Tech Awards

In the tech business, 2021 was a calendar year of revenue and pivots.

Many thanks in component to the pandemic and the digitization of our life, all of the major tech companies acquired larger. Facebook changed its identify to Meta, Jeff Bezos went to area, Jack Dorsey still left Twitter and Silicon Valley fell more challenging for crypto.

Each and every December, partly to cheer myself up after a 12 months of covering tech’s scandals and shortfalls, I use this column to carry up a handful of tech jobs that enhanced the earth throughout the year. My standards are considerably free and arbitrary, but I appear for the types of deserving, altruistic initiatives that utilize technological innovation to major, societal issues, and that never get much consideration from the tech press, like start off-ups that are using artificial intelligence to combat wildfires, or food stuff-shipping and delivery programs for the needy.

Primarily at a time when many of tech’s leaders appear to be far more intrigued in making new, virtual worlds than strengthening the entire world we live in, it’s value praising the technologists who are stepping up to resolve some of our largest troubles.

So below, without having more ado, are this year’s Excellent Tech Awards.

Just one of the year’s most interesting A.I. breakthroughs arrived in July when DeepMind — a Google-owned synthetic intelligence enterprise — revealed info and open up-supply code from its groundbreaking AlphaFold job.

The project, which used A.I. to predict the buildings of proteins, solved a dilemma that experienced vexed experts for many years, and was hailed by experts as a single of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time. And by publishing its information freely, AlphaFold established off a frenzy amid researchers, some of whom are currently using it to develop new drugs and superior realize the proteins concerned in viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

Google’s in general A.I. initiatives have been fraught with controversy and missteps, but AlphaFold would seem like an unequivocally good use of the company’s huge abilities and resources.

Folks love eating meat. But the industrial-farm method that creates the broad the greater part of the world’s meat provide is an moral and environmental disaster, and plant-based substitutes haven’t caught on greatly with carnivores. Hence the great importance of cultured meat — which is grown from cells in a lab, instead than taken from slaughtered animals, and which might be tech’s response to our world-wide meat dependancy.

Despite more than a ten years of research and enhancement, cultured meat is nonetheless considerably as well high priced and hard to generate. But that may perhaps be altering shortly, thanks to the attempts of dozens of start-ups including Upside Foodstuff, Mosa Meat and Wildtype.

Upside Food items, formerly acknowledged as Memphis Meats, opened a 53,000-sq.-foot plant in California this yr, and introduced it had figured out a way to grow cells into meat without applying animal elements.

Mosa Meat, a Dutch cultivated-meat start off-up, announced important breakthroughs in its engineering, way too, which includes a approach of increasing animal unwanted fat that is 98 per cent less costly than the former process.

And Wildtype, a San Francisco start-up that is manufacturing lab-grown seafood, produced a new, mobile-dependent salmon merchandise this yr that is getting fantastic evaluations in early tests, even however the Foodstuff and Drug Administration hasn’t however permitted it.

Prisons aren’t recognized as hotbeds of innovation. But two tech tasks this yr attempted to make our prison justice method additional humane.

Recidiviz is a nonprofit tech start-up that builds open-source data applications for felony justice reform. It was started out by Clementine Jacoby, a previous Google worker who saw an chance to corral knowledge about the jail technique and make it readily available to prison officials, lawmakers, activists and researchers to advise their selections. Its instruments are in use in seven states, together with North Dakota, where by the information tools served prison officers assess the chance of Covid-19 outbreaks and discover incarcerated people today who were being suitable for early launch.

Ameelio, a nonprofit start off-up established by two Yale pupils and backed by tech honchos like Jack Dorsey and Eric Schmidt, is making an attempt to disrupt prison communications, a notoriously exploitative marketplace that costs inmates and their cherished types exorbitant fees for telephone and movie phone calls. This calendar year, it launched a totally free movie calling assistance, which is remaining tested in prisons in Iowa and Colorado, with designs to include far more states following 12 months.

When I 1st read about experimental initiatives to 3-D print homes a handful of several years ago, I dismissed them as a novelty. But 3-D printing engineering has improved steadily considering the fact that then, and is now being utilised to build actual properties in the United States and overseas.

3-D printing houses has several benefits: It is appreciably cheaper and speedier than traditional building (residences can be 3-D printed in as small as 24 several hours), and they can be produced employing community components in pieces of the planet exactly where concrete is hard to come by.

ICON, a construction technology enterprise based in Texas, has 3-D printed extra than two dozen constructions so far. Its technological innovation was employed to print homes in a village in Mexico this calendar year, and the enterprise plans to crack ground next 12 months on a enhancement in Austin, Texas, that will consist fully of 3-D printed homes.

Mighty Properties, primarily based in Oakland, Calif., is getting a a little various method. It sells prefab property kits consisting of 3-D printed panels that are created in a manufacturing facility and assembled on internet site. Its residences are run by solar panels and loaded with vitality-successful features, and it not long ago struck a offer to 3-D print 15 houses in a subdivision in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Our countrywide housing disaster, it ought to be said, is not largely a tech issue. Terrible zoning and tax legal guidelines, NIMBY protectionism and other elements have performed a element in earning housing unaffordable for several. But it’s comforting to know that if and when nearby and point out governments get their functions with each other and get started making much more housing, 3-D printing could help pace up the method.

Number of tech tales manufactured as big an effects this yr as the revelations from Frances Haugen, the Fb merchandise manager turned whistle-blower who was the major source for The Wall Avenue Journal’s blockbuster “Facebook Files” series. By generating community thousands of paperwork detailing inside Facebook research and conversations about the platform’s harms, Ms. Haugen advanced our collective expertise about Facebook’s inner workings, and her congressional testimony was a landmark instant for tech accountability.

Soon following Ms. Haugen went community, two previous members of Facebook’s integrity staff, Jeff Allen and Sahar Massachi, started the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit that is meant to enable social media corporations navigate thorny challenges all over have confidence in, basic safety and system governance. Their announcement bought considerably less focus than Ms. Haugen’s document dump, but it is all portion of the identical deserving effort to educate lawmakers, technologists and the community about making our social media ecosystem more healthy.

Ms. Scott, who received divorced from Jeff Bezos in 2019, did not introduce new engineering or a get started-up in 2021. But she is supplying away her Amazon fortune — estimated to be well worth extra than $50 billion — at a rate that will make other tech philanthropists look like penny pinchers.

She donated a lot more than $6 billion in 2021 on your own to a host of charities, educational institutions and social systems, an astonishing feat for an individual working with a little staff of advisers. (For scale, the full Gates Basis gave out $5.8 billion in immediate grants in 2020.)

And unlike other donors, who splash their names on properties and museum wings, Ms. Scott announced her gifts quietly in a series of understated blog site posts. Let’s hope that in 2022, extra tech moguls stick to her lead.


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