The 2021 Fantastic Tech Awards

In the tech market, 2021 was a 12 months of revenue and pivots.

Thanks in element to the pandemic and the digitization of our lives, all of the big tech organizations obtained greater. Facebook adjusted its name to Meta, Jeff Bezos went to space, Jack Dorsey still left Twitter and Silicon Valley fell more durable for crypto.

Every single December, partly to cheer myself up following a yr of covering tech’s scandals and shortfalls, I use this column to lift up a handful of tech assignments that improved the planet throughout the calendar year. My requirements are to some degree loose and arbitrary, but I appear for the forms of deserving, altruistic projects that implement technological innovation to large, societal difficulties, and that really don’t get substantially focus from the tech press, like start off-ups that are making use of artificial intelligence to fight wildfires, or food-supply plans for the needy.

In particular at a time when numerous of tech’s leaders feel more intrigued in making new, digital worlds than increasing the planet we are living in, it is value praising the technologists who are stepping up to solve some of our major complications.

So in this article, devoid of more ado, are this year’s Fantastic Tech Awards.

To DeepMind, for cracking the protein problem (and publishing its operate)

A single of the year’s most exciting A.I. breakthroughs came in July when DeepMind — a Google-owned artificial intelligence corporation — published data and open up-resource code from its groundbreaking AlphaFold challenge.

The job, which applied A.I. to predict the structures of proteins, solved a problem that had vexed experts for many years, and was hailed by authorities as a single of the best scientific discoveries of all time. And by publishing its knowledge freely, AlphaFold established off a frenzy amongst scientists, some of whom are previously making use of it to produce new drugs and superior realize the proteins involved in viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

Google’s overall A.I. efforts have been fraught with controversy and missteps, but AlphaFold appears like an unequivocally good use of the company’s wide expertise and means.

To Upside Foodstuff, Mosa Meat and Wildtype, for pushing lab-developed meat towards the mainstream

Folks enjoy taking in meat. But the industrial-farm technique that generates the vast the greater part of the world’s meat source is an moral and environmental disaster, and plant-centered substitutes have not caught on widely with carnivores. That’s why the value of cultured meat — which is grown from cells in a lab, relatively than taken from slaughtered animals, and which could be tech’s remedy to our worldwide meat dependancy.

Irrespective of more than a decade of exploration and growth, cultured meat is still considerably much too expensive and tricky to develop. But that may possibly be changing shortly, many thanks to the endeavours of dozens of get started-ups including Upside Meals, Mosa Meat and Wildtype.

Upside Food items, formerly acknowledged as Memphis Meats, opened a 53,000-sq.-foot plant in California this year, and announced it experienced figured out a way to expand cells into meat devoid of utilizing animal components.

Mosa Meat, a Dutch cultivated-meat start out-up, announced main breakthroughs in its technological know-how, way too, which include a technique of expanding animal fats that is 98 per cent more cost-effective than the past approach.

And Wildtype, a San Francisco start out-up that is developing lab-developed seafood, launched a new, mobile-based mostly salmon merchandise this year that is obtaining excellent critiques in early tests, even nevertheless the Food stuff and Drug Administration hasn’t still permitted it.

To Recidiviz and Ameelio, for bringing far better tech to the prison justice program

Prisons aren’t recognized as hotbeds of innovation. But two tech projects this year tried using to make our criminal justice technique extra humane.

Recidiviz is a nonprofit tech get started-up that builds open-source information equipment for felony justice reform. It was commenced by Clementine Jacoby, a former Google worker who saw an opportunity to corral information about the prison procedure and make it accessible to prison officials, lawmakers, activists and scientists to advise their conclusions. Its equipment are in use in 7 states, such as North Dakota, exactly where the facts equipment served jail officials evaluate the danger of Covid-19 outbreaks and recognize incarcerated people who ended up eligible for early launch.

Ameelio, a nonprofit get started-up established by two Yale students and backed by tech honchos like Jack Dorsey and Eric Schmidt, is seeking to disrupt prison communications, a notoriously exploitative business that charges inmates and their liked types exorbitant costs for mobile phone and video phone calls. This year, it introduced a cost-free online video calling support, which is being tested in prisons in Iowa and Colorado, with plans to insert far more states subsequent yr.

To ICON and Mighty Buildings, for using 3-D printing to tackle the housing crisis

When I very first heard about experimental attempts to 3-D print residences a several decades back, I dismissed them as a novelty. But 3-D printing engineering has enhanced steadily considering that then, and is now currently being used to construct precise residences in the United States and abroad.

3-D printing homes has numerous benefits: It is appreciably less costly and more quickly than traditional development (residences can be 3-D printed in as minor as 24 hrs), and they can be built utilizing neighborhood products in elements of the environment the place concrete is tricky to come by.

ICON, a design technology business dependent in Texas, has 3-D printed much more than two dozen buildings so far. Its know-how was used to print homes in a village in Mexico this calendar year, and the company ideas to split ground following yr on a advancement in Austin, Texas, that will consist completely of 3-D printed houses.

Mighty Structures, dependent in Oakland, Calif., is using a a little distinct method. It sells prefab home kits consisting of 3-D printed panels that are built in a manufacturing unit and assembled on internet site. Its properties are run by photo voltaic panels and loaded with power-productive options, and it lately struck a deal to 3-D print 15 properties in a subdivision in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Our countrywide housing crisis, it need to be claimed, is not mainly a tech problem. Negative zoning and tax legislation, NIMBY protectionism and other components have performed a element in building housing unaffordable for many. But it’s comforting to know that if and when local and state governments get their acts together and commence constructing additional housing, 3-D printing could assist pace up the system.

To Frances Haugen and the Integrity Institute, for assisting to clean up up social media

Number of tech stories made as massive an impact this 12 months as the revelations from Frances Haugen, the Facebook merchandise supervisor turned whistle-blower who was the most important resource for The Wall Avenue Journal’s blockbuster “Facebook Documents” sequence. By generating general public countless numbers of files detailing inside Facebook analysis and discussions about the platform’s harms, Ms. Haugen sophisticated our collective understanding about Facebook’s interior workings, and her congressional testimony was a landmark moment for tech accountability.

Shortly right after Ms. Haugen went community, two previous associates of Facebook’s integrity workforce, Jeff Allen and Sahar Massachi, started the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit that is intended to enable social media providers navigate thorny challenges all over belief, basic safety and system governance. Their announcement got a lot less notice than Ms. Haugen’s doc dump, but it’s all component of the very same deserving effort and hard work to educate lawmakers, technologists and the general public about building our social media ecosystem more healthy.

And an honorary point out to MacKenzie Scott, for turning out to be the world’s quickest philanthropist

Ms. Scott, who got divorced from Jeff Bezos in 2019, did not introduce new know-how or a start-up in 2021. But she is providing absent her Amazon fortune — estimated to be really worth more than $50 billion — at a speed that makes other tech philanthropists glimpse like penny pinchers.

She donated far more than $6 billion in 2021 on your own to a host of charities, educational facilities and social systems, an astonishing feat for an unique functioning with a tiny workforce of advisers. (For scale, the overall Gates Foundation gave out $5.8 billion in direct grants in 2020.)

And in contrast to other donors, who splash their names on buildings and museum wings, Ms. Scott introduced her presents quietly in a collection of understated weblog posts. Let’s hope that in 2022, much more tech moguls adhere to her guide.