The Good Tech Awards 2023

In the technology industry, 2023 was a year of transformation.

Spurred by the success of last year’s tech star ChatGPT, Silicon Valley’s giants rushed to turn themselves into artificial intelligence companies, packing generative AI features into their products and racing to build their own, more powerful AI build models. They did so while navigating an uncertain tech economy, with layoffs and turnover aplenty, and while trying to keep their aging business models afloat.

Not everything went smoothly. There were misbehaving chatbots, crypto weaknesses, and bank failures. And in November, ChatGPT creator OpenAI collapsed (and quickly picked itself up) after a failed boardroom coup, proving once and for all that there’s no such thing as resting on your laurels in the tech sector.

Every December in my Good Tech Awards column, I try to neutralize my own negativity bias by highlighting a few lesser-known tech projects that struck me as useful. As you’ll see, many of this year’s awards relate to artificial intelligence, but my aim was to sidestep the polarized debates over whether AI will destroy or save the world and instead focus on the here and now . What is AI good for today? Who does it help? What important breakthroughs are already being made with AI as a catalyst?

As always, my award criteria are vague and subjective, and there are no actual trophies or prizes involved. These are just small, personal words of appreciation for a few technology projects that I thought had real, obvious value to humanity in 2023.

To Be My Eyes, Apple and researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, for improving accessibility through AI

Accessibility – the term for making tech products more usable for people with disabilities – is an underappreciated area of ​​improvement this year. Several recent advances in artificial intelligence – such as multimodal AI models that can interpret images and convert text into speech – have made it possible for tech companies to build new features for disabled users. This is, I would argue, an unequivocally good use of AI, and an area where people’s lives are already improving in meaningful ways.

I asked Steven Aquino, a freelance journalist specializing in accessible technology, to recommend his top accessibility breakthroughs of 2023. He recommended Be My Eyes, a company that makes technology for people with low vision. Be My Eyes was announced in 2023 a feature known as Be My AIpowered by OpenAI technology, which allows blind and visually impaired people to point their smartphone camera at an object and have that object described to them in natural language.

Mr. Aquino also pointed out to me what is new about Apple Personal voting function, which is built into iOS 17 and uses AI voice cloning technology to create a synthetic version of a user’s voice. The feature is designed for people at risk of losing their ability to speak, such as those with a recent diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or another degenerative disease, and gives them a way to preserve their speaking voice so that their friends, family members and loved ones can hear from them well into the future.

Let me mention another promising breakthrough in accessibility: A research team from the University of Texas at Austin announced this year that it has used AI to develop a “non-invasive language decoder” that can translate thoughts into speech – in can essentially read people’s minds. This kind of technology, which uses an AI language model to decode brain activity from fMRI scans, sounds like science fiction. But it could make it easier for people with speech loss or paralysis to communicate. And it doesn’t require you to put an AI chip in your brain, which is an added bonus.

To Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, for the good use of gene editing

When CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool, burst into the public consciousness a decade ago, doomsayers predicted it could lead to a dystopian world of gene-edited “designer babies” and nightmarish eugenics experiments. Instead, technology has allowed scientists to make steady progress toward treating a number of dire diseases.

In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first gene-editing therapy for humans — a treatment for sickle cell disease called Exa-cel, jointly developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston and CRISPR Therapeutics of Switzerland.

Exa-cel uses CRISPR to edit the gene responsible for sickle cell disease, a debilitating blood disorder that affects about 100,000 Americans, most of whom are black. Although still enormously expensive and difficult to administer, the treatment offers new hope to sickle cell patients who have access to it.

To Brent Seales, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross, for using AI to unlock the secrets of antiquity

One of the most fun interviews I did on my podcast this year was with Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky who has spent the past twenty years trying to decipher a series of ancient papyrus manuscripts known as the Herculaneum Scrolls . The scrolls, which belonged to a library owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, were buried under a pile of ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. They were so thoroughly charred that they could not be opened without ruining them.

Now AI has made it possible to read these scrolls without opening them. And this year Dr. Seales teamed up with two technology investors, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, to create the Vesuvius Challenge – offering prizes of up to $1 million to anyone who successfully deciphers the scrolls.

The main prize has still not been won. But the competition generated a huge interest from amateur history buffs, and this year a 21-year-old computer science student, Luke Farritor, won an intermediate prize of $40,000 for deciphering a single word – ‘purple’ – from one of the scrolls. I like the idea of ​​using AI to unlock wisdom from the distant past, and I like the audience-oriented spirit of this contest.

To Waymo, for taking the slow road to self-driving

In 2023, I spent a lot of time driving around San Francisco in self-driving cars. Robot taxis are a controversial technology – and there are still many issues to be resolved – but for the most part I agree with the idea that self-driving cars will ultimately make our roads safer by replacing fallible, distracted human drivers with always-alert AI drivers .

Cruise, one of two companies that provided robot taxi rides in San Francisco, has imploded in recent days after one of its vehicles struck and dragged a woman who had been hit by another car. Regulators in California said the company misled them about the incident; Cruise pulled its cars off the streets and its CEO, Kyle Vogt, resigned.

But not all self-driving cars are created equal, and this year I was grateful for the relatively slow, methodical approach of Cruise’s competitor Waymo.

Waymo, which spun out of Google in 2016, has been logging miles on public roads for more than a decade, and it shows. The six rides I took in Waymo cars this year felt safer and smoother than the cruise rides I took. And Waymo’s safety data is compelling: according to a study the company conducted at Swiss Re, an insurance company, Waymo’s cars were significantly less likely to cause property damage than human-driven cars during 3.8 million self-driving miles, and led to no bodily injury claims at all.

I’ll lay my cards on the table: I like self-driving cars, and I think society will be better off once they become widespread. But they need to be secure, and Waymo’s slow approach seems better suited to the task.

To the National Institute of Standards and Technology, for managing America’s AI transition

One of the most surprising – and, in my opinion, encouraging – technology trends of 2023 was that governments around the world became involved in understanding and regulating AI.

But all that involvement takes work—and in the United States, much of that work has ended up at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a small federal agency previously better known for things like making sure clocks and scales were properly calibrated.

The Biden administration’s executive order on artificial intelligence, released in October, designated NIST as one of the key federal agencies responsible for monitoring AI progress and mitigating its risks. The order directs the agency developing ways to test AI systems for safety, devising exercises to help AI companies identify potentially harmful uses of their products, and producing research and guidelines for watermarking AI-generated content, among others.

NIST, which employs about 3,400 people and has an annual budget of $1.24 billion, is small compared to other federal agencies that do critical security work. (For scale, the Department of Homeland Security has an annual budget of nearly $100 billion.) But it’s important that the government builds its own AI capabilities to effectively leverage the progress made by private sector AI labs regulate, and we will invest more in the work being done by NIST and other agencies to give ourselves a fighting chance.

And therefore: happy holidays, and see you next year!