2022 was too difficult a year to be optimistic about much in general, and an almost impossible one to be one about technology in particular. Thirty trillion US dollars were wiped out from the stock market this year, with technology companies being the primary culprit. The tech-heavy NASDAQ is down by a third, and stocks which were long the darlings of investors – Meta, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Google – are down 30 to 70 percent from their highs. Cryptocurrency is staring at an Extinction Event. Pundits and investors together are bemoaning about the ‘end of growth’ and a new Dark Age descending on technology. At the end of this gloomy tunnel, however, I see a bright light, the dawn of a new era in a sense. My sense of optimism is not about markets bouncing back to all time highs, bitcoin crossing $70,000 again or Apple becoming the first $5 trillion company. Instead, I am hoping that this never happens, and this is not the way technology, and its success or failure should ever be measured. Let me explain.

I believe that we have winnowed down the definition of technology to a very narrow set; in our minds, tech is about AI and robots and self-driving cars and such like. Technology means something much wider than that; its Greek root ‘techne’ means art, skill, craft tor the manner by which a thing is gained. In Ancient Greek, it meant ‘knowledge on how to make things,’ a definition which even included endeavours like architecture or sculpture. Science, which can be considered the mother of technology, was originally a branch of philosophy. The first scientists (and mathematicians) were all philosophers, natural philosophers to be precise. They marveled at the wonders of nature and sought to explain it through logical and scientific methods. Pythagoras was a philosopher, so was Aryabhata and so was Bertrand Russel. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten this connection of science and technology to philosophy, and instead forged too close an association with coding, microchips, and the economy.

If you think in the context of this wider definition, 2022 was a splendid year. Early in the year, we put a telescope the size of a tennis court two million miles up in space, and the Webb telescope is now allowing us to peer back nearly fifteen billion years back to witness the birth of the universe. Physicists and biologists manipulated human cells’ own mRNA protein to act as a weapon to thwart the deadliest virus in recent times, and now science is looking to further adapt this technology to fight even deadlier diseases like cancer. The first credible drug discovery against Alzheimer’s was announced in November. A month later the astonishing announcement of achieving net-zero in nuclear fusion gave us hope for unlimited, clean energy. Each of these discoveries, and many more, promises a blockbuster 2023 and beyond. My cause for unbridled optimism however goes deeper than this. If you dig a little deeper, there is a pattern emerging here. The James Webb Telescope was a state funded NASA initiative, and the nuclear fusion breakthrough was accomplished by government scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. mRNA was finessed by private companies, but it drew on decades of academic research, most notably by Katalin Kariko. Or consider the most ballyhooed tech launch of 2022, ChatGPT. It is created by OpenAI, which was originally structured as a not-for-profit, so that it could focus its research on making positive long-term contributions to humanity. DeepMind, which has given us some astonishing technology around deep learning, most notably predicting how proteins fold, is a research laboratory. While it did turn a profit for the first time in 2021, its focus remains ‘solving intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity’.

To me, this is very significant since the primary purpose of science and technology should be to advance humankind, not to be a tool for capitalism to create even more wealth. Our species separated itself from the others and became dominant because we had ‘knowledge on how to make things’. There was a selflessness and joy about discovering and creating things, which we seem to have lost somewhere along the way as technology got enslaved by our economic model. Alexander

Fleming refused to patent his discovery, penicillin, and saved millions of lives; Volvo refrained from patenting the three-point seat belt and saved millions more. Jonas Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine; Tim Berners Lee does not own the World Wide Web. Perhaps I am being too hopeful, but in the economic ruins of 2022, I see the hope of technology shaking off capitalism’s yoke. Tesla’s stock might crash and burn, but Elon Musk would have succeeded in converting the entire automobile industry to electric and help the war against global warming. Somewhere in the wreckage of Twitter and the neglect of Facebook, a new kind of social network might emerge – not created purely for usurious profits, but to bring people together in a global town square. As we sift the economic debris of 2022, we would hopefully rediscover science and technology as it was meant to be.