Looking Up at 2022: A Year in Review

I’m going to list some things that happened in 2022. Not all of them. Just the ones I can’t stop thinking about.

The James Webb Space Telescope sent back images of galaxies 13 billion years old. Light from the beginning of the universe, captured by gold mirrors floating at a Lagrange point, sent to our screens.

DALL-E 2 turned text into photorealistic images. Stable Diffusion made it free. A person could type words and see something that never existed before.

NASA hit an asteroid on purpose and changed its orbit. Planetary defense went from theoretical to demonstrated.

Samsung shipped the first Gate-All-Around transistors, the biggest change in transistor architecture in 20 years.

The US passed $52 billion in chip manufacturing subsidies. The geography of silicon is shifting.

Fusion achieved net energy gain for the first time in human history. Seventy years of trying, and it worked.

ChatGPT launched and 100 million people used it in weeks. My mom. My barber. My niece. Everyone.

I could keep going. Artemis 1 orbited the Moon. Tesla showed a humanoid robot. The chip wars between the US and China escalated to export controls. Waymo expanded to more cities.

Sometimes a year happens and you don’t realize how much it held until you lay it out like this. 2022 felt normal while it was happening. Looking back, it was anything but.

I’m on the roof again. Same spot. The sky is clear enough to see a few stars through the city light. Somewhere up there, JWST is collecting photons from the edge of time. Somewhere in California, a fusion lab is planning the next shot. Somewhere in San Francisco, a language model is answering a question from someone who’s never talked to a machine before.

What a year. What a time to be paying attention.

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