Change is the only constant in the world of technology. Every year, you can count on several new technologies to appear and either enable you to do completely new things or enable you to do old things in entirely new ways. In 2022, the tech world gave us a mix of everything – some exciting new technologies appeared, and some early-stage technologies finally began to come of age.
One of the biggest tech stories of 2022 was the implosion of the cryptocurrency market. Seemingly overnight, the technology that got the most press in 2021 became substantially less relevant as one crypto exchange after another experienced liquidity problems and ultimately folded. The “crypto winter” is a prime example of how quickly things can change in the tech world.
In this article, though, we’re going to focus on the positive. Many of today’s hot new technologies will eventually become irrelevant, but how long it’ll take for that to happen is anyone’s guess. For now, these are the technologies that had everyone talking in 2022.
Self-Driving Vehicles
When you think about self-driving vehicles, Tesla is probably the first car brand that comes to your mind. Tesla finally introduced its Full Self Driving (FSD) beta in 2020, and by 2022, over 100,000 Tesla owners were enrolled in the program. Tesla, however, is far from the only company to offer vehicles with autonomous driving features. In fact, there are millions of vehicles on the road today that offer various levels of autonomy ranging from automatic highway cruising to full point-to-point travel – at least for some routes – in Tesla vehicles with the FSD feature. Automated taxis and delivery vehicles also exist.
It isn’t quite fair to say that self-driving vehicles truly came of age in 2022. After all, it’s still not possible to let your car do the driving while you watch a movie or take a nap. That’s what everyone wants, and that level of automation probably isn’t happening in the near future. It’s safe to say, though, that self-driving technology was a mainstay in the tech news world in 2022. The technology will only get better from here. If and when Apple (News - Alert) finally releases their long-rumored self-driving car, who knows what might happen?
Vaping
Although vehicle automation didn’t exactly come of age in 2022, many people would argue that vaping did. For millions of former smokers around the world, vaping is easily one of the most important technologies ever developed. It enabled those people to quit smoking, which is something many of them probably thought they’d never do.
Vaping is over a decade old at this point, so it’s definitely not a new technology. The nature of the technology, however, changed a great deal in 2022. Until recently, the vast majority of the vaping devices on the market were rechargeable and stored their e-liquid either in refillable tanks or replaceable pods. Over the past year, though, the industry’s manufacturers released a number of very appealing disposable vaping devices. Consumers responded to disposable vapes in a big way as stores like Virginia Beach vape shop Vapor Chasers struggled to keep their inventories up to date.
At the end of 2022, disposable vapes were so popular that refillable devices had become largely irrelevant to a significant segment of the vaping community. Although it’s difficult to know how the vaping industry will change in the future, it’s definitely looking like disposable devices are going to outnumber refillable devices in many vape shops for a while.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) found its way into the national headlines a number of times in 2022 with some stories that definitely had everyone talking. One of the biggest stories involved a Google (News - Alert) engineer who believed that a chatbot he was working on had become sentient. Although the news was met with much skepticism from the tech community – most of whom believed and continue to believe that sentience simply isn’t possible for an AI system – the chat transcripts released by the engineer certainly triggered a lot of discussion.
By the end of 2022, it seemed as though AI was in the news almost constantly. One podcasting group released an entirely AI-generated – and surprisingly believable at times – audio interview with Steve Jobs (News - Alert), who had been deceased since 2011. An AI-generated piece of art won first place in a competition. An AI-generated Bruce Willis made an appearance in a commercial several months after the actual actor retired from public life. By the end of the year, it was very clear to the public that AI is now capable of generating images, videos and voices that are difficult to distinguish from real life. The implications are both exciting and frightening.
The Metaverse
What, exactly, is the Metaverse? No one is quite sure what the answer to that question is, but Mark Zuckerberg of Meta – the company that was called Facebook (News - Alert) until the name was changed to reflect the new direction – knows that he wants to control it. To that end, Meta has invested billions of dollars into the nascent technology, which revolves around the use of Meta’s Oculus-branded virtual reality hardware. The idea is that the virtual environments enabled by the Metaverse will be so compelling that people will want to spend their time living, working and playing in them.
The reality, though, is that the environments haven’t actually been that compelling so far. People have commented about the poor graphical quality of the virtual worlds, and many have also complained of nausea and headaches when wearing Meta’s headsets. Furthermore, people aren’t necessarily convinced that the Metaverse has a valid use case.
News reports published in 2022 have suggested that most of the environments available for users to visit are virtually empty. It seems that people generally don’t find the environments fun enough to justify visiting them more than once or twice. Businesses, meanwhile, have had difficulty identifying the benefit of conducting meetings in virtual spaces when they could simply use existing video conferencing technology instead.
By the end of 2022, excitement around the Metaverse had cooled significantly, with Meta laying off over 11,000 employees in the face of mounting financial losses. Although it’s unclear what the future of virtual reality will be, it seems likely that it will continue to be a major part of the technological landscape in 2023. Whether Meta will actually be the leader in that space, however, is difficult to guess.Change is the only constant in the world of technology. Every year, you can count on several new technologies to appear and either enable you to do completely new things or enable you to do old things in entirely new ways. In 2022, the tech world gave us a mix of everything – some exciting new technologies appeared, and some early-stage technologies finally began to come of age.
One of the biggest tech stories of 2022 was the implosion of the cryptocurrency market. Seemingly overnight, the technology that got the most press in 2021 became substantially less relevant as one crypto exchange after another experienced liquidity problems and ultimately folded. The “crypto winter” is a prime example of how quickly things can change in the tech world.
In this article, though, we’re going to focus on the positive. Many of today’s hot new technologies will eventually become irrelevant, but how long it’ll take for that to happen is anyone’s guess. For now, these are the technologies that had everyone talking in 2022.
Self-Driving Vehicles
When you think about self-driving vehicles, Tesla is probably the first car brand that comes to your mind. Tesla finally introduced its Full Self Driving (FSD) beta in 2020, and by 2022, over 100,000 Tesla owners were enrolled in the program. Tesla, however, is far from the only company to offer vehicles with autonomous driving features. In fact, there are millions of vehicles on the road today that offer various levels of autonomy ranging from automatic highway cruising to full point-to-point travel – at least for some routes – in Tesla vehicles with the FSD feature. Automated taxis and delivery vehicles also exist.
It isn’t quite fair to say that self-driving vehicles truly came of age in 2022. After all, it’s still not possible to let your car do the driving while you watch a movie or take a nap. That’s what everyone wants, and that level of automation probably isn’t happening in the near future. It’s safe to say, though, that self-driving technology was a mainstay in the tech news world in 2022. The technology will only get better from here. If and when Apple finally releases their long-rumored self-driving car, who knows what might happen?
Vaping
Although vehicle automation didn’t exactly come of age in 2022, many people would argue that vaping did. For millions of former smokers around the world, vaping is easily one of the most important technologies ever developed. It enabled those people to quit smoking, which is something many of them probably thought they’d never do.
Vaping is over a decade old at this point, so it’s definitely not a new technology. The nature of the technology, however, changed a great deal in 2022. Until recently, the vast majority of the vaping devices on the market were rechargeable and stored their e-liquid either in refillable tanks or replaceable pods. Over the past year, though, the industry’s manufacturers released a number of very appealing disposable vaping devices. Consumers responded to disposable vapes in a big way as stores like Virginia Beach vape shop Vapor Chasers struggled to keep their inventories up to date.
At the end of 2022, disposable vapes were so popular that refillable devices had become largely irrelevant to a significant segment of the vaping community. Although it’s difficult to know how the vaping industry will change in the future, it’s definitely looking like disposable devices are going to outnumber refillable devices in many vape shops for a while.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) found its way into the national headlines a number of times in 2022 with some stories that definitely had everyone talking. One of the biggest stories involved a Google engineer who believed that a chatbot he was working on had become sentient. Although the news was met with much skepticism from the tech community – most of whom believed and continue to believe that sentience simply isn’t possible for an AI system – the chat transcripts released by the engineer certainly triggered a lot of discussion.
By the end of 2022, it seemed as though AI was in the news almost constantly. One podcasting group released an entirely AI-generated – and surprisingly believable at times – audio interview with Steve Jobs, who had been deceased since 2011. An AI-generated piece of art won first place in a competition. An AI-generated Bruce Willis made an appearance in a commercial several months after the actual actor retired from public life. By the end of the year, it was very clear to the public that AI is now capable of generating images, videos and voices that are difficult to distinguish from real life. The implications are both exciting and frightening.
The Metaverse
What, exactly, is the Metaverse? No one is quite sure what the answer to that question is, but Mark Zuckerberg (News - Alert) of Meta – the company that was called Facebook until the name was changed to reflect the new direction – knows that he wants to control it. To that end, Meta has invested billions of dollars into the nascent technology, which revolves around the use of Meta’s Oculus-branded virtual reality hardware. The idea is that the virtual environments enabled by the Metaverse will be so compelling that people will want to spend their time living, working and playing in them.
The reality, though, is that the environments haven’t actually been that compelling so far. People have commented about the poor graphical quality of the virtual worlds, and many have also complained of nausea and headaches when wearing Meta’s headsets. Furthermore, people aren’t necessarily convinced that the Metaverse has a valid use case.
News reports published in 2022 have suggested that most of the environments available for users to visit are virtually empty. It seems that people generally don’t find the environments fun enough to justify visiting them more than once or twice. Businesses, meanwhile, have had difficulty identifying the benefit of conducting meetings in virtual spaces when they could simply use existing video conferencing technology instead.
By the end of 2022, excitement around the Metaverse had cooled significantly, with Meta laying off over 11,000 employees in the face of mounting financial losses. Although it’s unclear what the future of virtual reality will be, it seems likely that it will continue to be a major part of the technological landscape in 2023. Whether Meta will actually be the leader in that space, however, is difficult to guess.
