22 Innovations Arriving in 2022

2021 was a rough year. Covid. Covid. Covid. But 2022 is about to get a whole lot better. Here are 22 reasons why starting off, the MRNA technology that was used to develop the vaccines is going to get way more useful next year. Most people don't know that the scientists at Moderna had actually been working on MRNA since 2010, and they weren't planning on building a business around pandemic prevention. Instead, the original goal of the company was to create a vaccine for cancer. It was seen as a long shot and they were mocked by the press and called the next Theranos. This obviously looks ridiculous in hindsight, but MRNA was largely an untested technology at the time, so it seemed like it might not have an impact. Well, the skeptics were wrong. And now it's clear that MRNA is an incredibly important biological tool. Over the past two years, scientists have flocked to the industry, billions of dollars have flowed into companies, and now people are talking about a vaccine for hiv. But MRNA isn't the only biotech breakthrough we should be tracking in 2022. Machine learning and AI are finally starting to prove useful to biologists. The protein folding problem has been seen as the Mount Everest of biology for nearly 50 years, and for good reason. Proteins are incredibly important to all aspects of biological life. When you digest food, flex your muscles, or even just breathe some air, your proteins are hard at work. Understanding how these proteins are built up from amino acids will speed up the entire biotechnology. And just last year we had a major breakthrough on the protein folding problem. Google's DeepMind team released AlphaFold 2, which beat out every other protein folding method that had ever been tried before. Then they open sourced the project, effectively letting the entire scientific community use this new technology for free. The story doesn't end here though. A new company called Isomorphic Labs just spun out of DeepMind to focus on AI driven biotech research specifically. So there's clearly a big opportunity here. Now, this whole AI driven biotech thing is pretty new still, and we're unlikely to see real products come out of this research next year. But AI will definitely have other meaningful impacts in 2022. We've been talking about self driving cars for nearly a decade now, but I think next year is going to be the start of a real turning point. Tesla is rolling out new versions of the full self driving beta every few weeks now. Cruise is now offering driverless taxi services in San Francisco on a limited basis. And comma AI shipped the comma3 aftermarket unit, which adds self driving capabilities to normal commuter cars. These are just three of the major players in self driving and they are all taking radically different approaches. It's hard to definitively say which company will deliver the best self driving experience in 2022, but I think we can be confident that the number of people who have actually ridden in a self driving car is going to skyrocket. And a lot of the technology that's used in self driving cars will also be used to speed up deliveries. Starship Technologies has already completed over 1 million deliveries using small SEL self driving sidewalk robots. And pretty much every self driving car company is thinking about how they can compete in the fast growing delivery market. The past few years have led to a massive shift towards on demand delivery. And self driving cars are a logical way to increase access to delivery services more and more. It looks like fully self driving cars are going to be extremely expensive, so it's going to be critical to get the most value out of them by using each car essentially 24,7. Now robots are easy to get excited about. We've all seen them in science fiction movies and can easily visualize the benefits to our daily lives. But there's another side to AI that will be incredibly impactful, even if it's a lot less exciting. Instead of one big breakthrough in robotics or AI that changes everything, sometimes it's the small optimizations that add up to big impacts. Some people call this area boring AI and it's basically just the automation processes that happen across our entire economy. Here's an example. Imagine your average mid sized company. Every year they process 100,000 pages of documents and don't really think anything of it. It only takes three minutes of employee time to process a single document. But depending on what they pay their employees, that can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. And no one likes doing these jobs. Boring AI helps automate everyday tasks, shaving off a few minutes every day. It's not as flashy as a chrome robot, but it makes everything just a little bit more efficient and can add up pretty quickly. Remote work will also make us more efficient and looks like it's here to stay. At least for some jobs. There's obviously some drawbacks to remote work, but there's a lot to like about it. Everyone hates long commute times. And perhaps most importantly, remote work has let people disentangle their jobs from their living arrangements. It's now entirely possible to get a great job at a company in a major city and then move to a cheaper city, hours away or even halfway around the world. There are obviously going to be challenges here as remote workers adjust to competition in a global workforce, but there could be some big wins. Most importantly, we're going to learn a lot about remote work in 2022. We will finally have several years of data to analyze and be able to understand the long term effects of this change in the way we work. Remote work has led us to spend more time in front of screens, and that's created a major trend around the Metaverse. Zuckerberg really believes that we are only a few years away from people spending hours every day in virtual worlds. This year he launched Horizon Workrooms to enable remote workers to talk to each other in a virtual environment. Early reviews have been surprisingly good, so I think we'll see more of this in 2022. Zuck's big plan for the Metaverse will take years to fully roll out, but I'm sure that the Metaverse will be a central topic of many keynotes next year. One interesting development on the Metaverse side is specifically involved. I think that whether or not you like Zuck, it's exciting to see so much money get poured into virtual reality development. Even if no one winds up using whatever Metaverse product Zuck releases, just the fact that he will have spent billions of dollars on VR will enable some really cool things. It's totally possible that we wind up seeing a bifurcation in the Metaverse, with Zuck's version being completely different from the open source crypto native version. But even in that scenario, I think everyone benefits from new investment in VR. If the team at Meta can develop a VR headset that's lightweight, high resolution, low latency, and reliable, that's a win for everyone. And virtual reality is already accelerating. This chart blew my mind when I saw it. Oculus actually outsold the Xbox this year. At first I thought that was just because of supply constraints, but Oculus actually sold more units in 2021 than the Xbox has in any of the past five years. And look at the growth rate. It's not going to be enough to just have good VR headsets, though. We're eventually going to need faster Internet to support streaming content to these headsets. And that's where 5G comes in. This is an interesting one, because on a day to day basis it might not seem all that relevant. Current 4G speeds feel plenty fast, and as long as you can stream HD video reliably, what else could you want? But as VR and AR become more essential in everyday life, streaming content is going to require a lot more bandwidth. We should see American 5G break 100 million users in 2022, or about 1 third of all cell phones. That's probably enough of a critical mass to start developing apps and services that require 5G to work well. We might see certain existing technologies get better, like video game streaming, but my hope is that we see entirely new apps emerge. One particularly interesting area is AI generated content. As the number of virtual worlds proliferates, the and more and more of our daily life is spent online, the demand for content will continue to grow. The Internet has enabled micro communities to flourish and AI could create even more bespoke experiences. GPT3 has made incredible progress in text generation, and there are already some apps that use AI to create role playing game scenarios. These are still very rough around the edges though, but hopefully next year we'll see a new game experience that leverages AI to deliver truly unique storytelling. And while we're on the topic of uniqueness, we have to talk about NFT gaming. 2021 was dominated by NFTs, so 2022 is a bit of a make or break year in my opinion. If everyone who's working on NFTs can deliver something meaningful beyond just price spikes, I think the conversation will start to change dramatically. Gaming is one place where NFTs could make a lot of sense. After all, the gaming industry has already shifted to a free to play model where the majority of revenue comes from cosmetic items. NFTs are a perfect fit for things like Fortnite skins, but it's still an open question as to how these unique gaming items will actually integrate into various games. A common example of interoperability is taking your Fortnite skin into Minecraft and vice versa. But what if the developers of these games can't come to an agreement and just don't want to integrate? All of a sudden we're going to need entirely new games. Well, new NFT based games are being developed And I think 2022 will see the first set of actual reviews pour in. If the games are great, I think it will be a huge win for the NFT community broadly. If they suck, we could wind up with a bit of an NFT winter. And this same logic applies to Web3 broadly. Crypto got a bit of a makeover this year with the new buzzword web3. It's a hugely controversial topic with tons of skeptics on every side of the issue. The general idea is that by rebuilding the basic infrastructure of the Internet using blockchain blockchains, apps and services can be more open, reliable and equitable. It's a promising idea and one that I think should be taken seriously. But usage of Web3 technologies is still extremely low. In 2022, we should be better equipped to answer the question of where Web3 is going. If we see tens of millions of people using Web3 tools on a daily basis for something other than just day trading, there should be a lot less skepticism. Part of what drives so many people crazy about Web3 and crypto in general is all of the scams associated with it. It's still so easy to lose passwords to crypto holdings and never be able to recover the money. There are also tons of scammers constantly trying to steal whatever they can from people who are new to crypto. And even when everyone is behaving honorably, crypto projects often drop in value very quickly. I think we're going to see a much bigger focus on fraud prevention in 2022. If the crypto community wants adoption to continue, someone is going to have to fund the tools and educational materials to help people stay safe when interacting with web 3. Stablecoins could help here in some ways. There's still an overwhelming focus in the crypto community on getting rich quick. I don't mean to discredit any of the incredible programmers working hard to just build cool technology, but go and search YouTube for any crypto related topic and you will see that most of the attention is on prices. If stablecoins go mainstream, we might be able to shift the industry away from get rich quick schemes and demonstrate some actual value. Critics of Web3 and crypto always say there are no real use cases, but that's never really been true. Moving money across borders affordably has always been difficult, and crypto really is well suited to solve that problem. Overall, crypto is going to finally start solving the problems that everyone has been pointing to for years. These are going to come down. Using web3 tools is going to get safer, and even the carbon footprint will shrink as proof of stake rolls out. And moving towards a net zero economy is definitely going to be a bigger trend in 2022. Already, 59 countries, which account for over half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, have committed to cutting net emissions down to zero by 2050 or earlier. Now, 30 years is a long timeline, but as they say, the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step, and governments are already taking action to reach their net zero targets. The US, Canada and 18 other countries recently agreed to stop financing fossil fuel projects abroad by the end of 2022. This agreement works out to $18 billion, leaving the fossil fuel industry every year. That money was basically acting as a massive subsidy for the internal combustion engine. And in 2022, we're going to see electric vehicle sales hit a new record. 2021 already saw a massive 88% increase over 2020, and there's really no signs of that slowing down. Almost every major automaker has announced that they will be transitioning from internal combustion engine cars to battery powered EVs. And Kelley Blue Book estimates that by the end of 2022, there will be more than 100 different EV models available on the market. Electric options are available for any lifestyle now. They're getting easier and easier to charge, and most importantly, they're getting a lot cheaper. The price of lithium ion batteries hit a record low in 2021 and is estimated to continue dropping over the next four years. And the electricity that flows into these batteries is getting greener as well. There isn't all that much benefit to driving an electric vehicle if the electricity that charges it comes from a coal plant. But fortunately, renewable energy is growing as a percentage of total energy production, and the growth isn't small. In 2022, renewable energy sources, which include wind, solar, hydro, biomass and geothermal energy, will be the second largest source of US energy generation, growing 10% from 2021 levels. Carbon capture is also going to become more widespread, and there's even progress being made in fusion energy now. There are also efforts underway to make supply chains more environmentally friendly. Cargo ships collectively release 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. That's about as much as all of the US Consumers coal fired power plants combined. This is because most ships run on a highly energy dense oil called bunker fuel. Fortunately, there are a number of initiatives underway to reduce emissions. Container ships that use liquid natural gas are already in use, and methanol powered ships are in the works. There are even some crazy attempts to add giant inflatable sails to the container ships, although who knows where that will go. Perhaps most promising is the potential for building new nuclear powered container ships. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers have been working flawlessly for decades now, so we know it can work regardless of the specific technologies. 2022 needs to be a year where supply chains get a lot more efficient. As we saw all through 2021, our supply chains are remarkably brittle and can jam up when subjected to unexpected stress. Americans are buying more physical goods than ever before, and that trend doesn't seem to be slowing down. So making sure that our supply chains are well thought out and resilient will be key in 2022. But moving things around on Earth can be a bit boring. It's way more exciting to talk about moving things to space. So we have to talk about SpaceX's launch calendar. Elon is planning 36 different launches in 2022. That's three per month, almost one every week. And that's going to have a pretty dramatic impact on the industry. We will likely see the first first orbital launch of Starship by February. The plan is for Starship to launch via the super heavy booster from Boca Chica. It will complete about half an orbit before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. And throughout next year, SpaceX plans to conduct 12 different Starship test launches, which will inform the decision to start carrying real payloads into space. Starship is going to dramatically change the economics of getting to space. And we will likely see payload costs decrease significantly once the Starship program gets the green light. The current market for rocket launches is actually pretty small, but the market for doing interesting things in space is nearly limitless. Entirely new industries are going to start popping up that take advantage of this lower cost to get to space. We're already seeing this with startups like Varda, which aims to manufacture sensitive materials in space. A business that really can't exist without dirt cheap launch costs costs. 2022 is going to see a lot more competition between various space companies, but it won't stop there. International competition in space is going to become a much hotter topic in 2022. China is about to complete a new space station in low Earth orbit, which will obviously put pressure on other countries to develop more aggressive space plans. The decommissioning of old satellites has also become a major international issue as space junk continues to threaten the iss. Hopefully the result of all this competition is just more funding for space related programs. There is so much to explore in our solar system and we're clearly just getting started. So here's to a great 2022. Happy New Year and I'll see you in the next.