The Thunderbolt Kidis one of the best books by Bill Bryson, the acclaimed travel author. It describes his life growing up in Des Moines, Iowa and has this unforgettable opening line: “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”. As I reread the book, the thing that shone out was the sheer positivity and optimism of small town America and the world in those years. Science and technology had won the West the War, and the Empire before that, and there was a sheer, unalloyed enthusiasm about how technology would make humanity happy and prosperous. The atom had been tamed, automobiles rolled over highways, humans were eyeing the Moon, vaccines cured deadly diseases, supply chains and industries had brought the world’s bounty to their doorsteps. Science and technology would make us conquer the world, space, even death itself.

Cut to now, and the dominant narrative seems to be how stultifying and enervating technology has become. Powerful atomic weapons are raising their heads again, social networks seem to be hollowing out an entire generation, and artificial intelligence threatens to unleash Terminator-like killer robots and autonomous weapons on cowering humans, or at the least, take all our jobs. Even amazing AI advances like GPT3, DALL- E2, and autonomous vehicles fascinate us, but also fill us with dread – will they replace human creative faculties, will they destroy the remaining vestiges of our privacy and security, or destroy humanity itself? Big Tech seems to be taking the role of governments as we increasingly become tax-paying subjects of their platforms, enslaved by network effects and recommendation algorithms. Tech advances over the past few years seem disquietingly disappointing. As investor Peter Theil laments: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters”. In this dispiriting narrative, as I plough my increasingly lonely furrow as a tech optimist, I do get questions from people around me: What makes you an optimist, albeit a cautious one? What makes you believe? So, to answer those Doubting Thomases, I turn to these three momentous technological advances, one among those veritably saved humanity, and another which could potentially do that all over again.

The first such breathtaking discovery is undeniably the COVID vaccine. Pandemics are humanities worst killers, only an asteroid impact can rival their sheer destructiveness. The Plague of Justanian  in the 6^th Century CE eradicated up to half the entire human population, the Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 40 to 100mn people. The COVID pandemic was equally virulent and could have led to hundreds of million deaths, but for heroes like Katalin Kariko, OzlemTureci and UgurSahin, who manipulated human cells’ own mRNA protein to act as a weapon to thwart the virus. These and other vaccines were created and scaled at blinding speeds through other amazing developments in science – DNA sequencing, and custom AI to quickly identify the spike proteins. However disruptive and disturbing the COVID pandemic was, this generation of humanity is incredibly fortunate that these marvels of science and technology have brought the planet back on its feet in a mere two odd years.Talking of marvels, my second cause of optimism is the incredible story of the universe being narrated to us through breathtaking pictures by another astonishing piece technology – the $10bn James Webb Telescope. Launched by a giant Ariane rocket to orbit Earth nearly two million kilometers away, the telescope has allowed us to peer into the universe almost to its origin. We have seen the GLASS-z13, which at 13.5 billion years old was born just 300 mn years after the Big Bang.It has revealed ‘nurseries’ where stars are born, depicted another star in its death spasms, shown the Stephen’s Quintet of galaxy clusters pirouetting together, and will one day uncover a planet with life forms as curious as us. Consider the complexity: the telescope has a mirror made of 18 separate segments which unfolded with clock like precision after they reached their orbit, along with a five-layered sun shield the size of an entire tennis court to diminish the heat from the Sun more than a million times!

Finally, there is this other staggering gift of science, which prompted me to write this article and brought back my sense of belief and wonder in technology in general, and AI in particular. The deep learning AI company DeepMind announced that its AI engine AlphaFold 2 will predict the shapes of almost every protein in the human body! More than 100mn structures will be revealed in the next few months, almost all proteins known to science. This has the potential to fundamentally alter medical science, the same way that antibiotics or vaccines did. Proteins are our building blocks, and the way they fold determine what they do and if they fold wrong, they can cause life-threatening diseases. If they fold like “snakes in a can”, they create a tunnel that allows traffic into and out of cells and the spike on the coronavirus is a shaped protein. AlphaFold predicted 36%of shapes with an accuracy correct down to the level of individual atoms, which satisfies the conditions for new drug development. With the pandemic, war, global warming and recession drowning the world in melancholy, it is unsurprising that many do not get those positive vibes from technology like Bryson’s generation did. But astounding stories like the three above again make me want to believe how technology can transform our world. I believe that technology is a force for good. Somebody has to.