Reasons for Optimism in 2023

Wall Street and venture capitalists are bullish on green tech, too. In his year-end letter, Bill Gates notes that climate-related R. D. has grown nearly a third since the 2015 Paris accords. Private capital investment in the sector is on the upswing too, with $70 billion spent over the past two years. From that, new technologies to address climate issues are continuing to emerge. At the DealBook Summit in November, Larry Fink, C.E.O. of BlackRock, predicted that venture funding would flow more into start-ups using hard science to tackle the planet’s biggest problems. “I believe we will be seeing a transformation of where the money goes,” Fink said. “It’s not going to go to all this stuff that provided us good utility to get food quicker or find a taxi sooner.”

Bots probably won’t take your job — and could make it easier. Fears that technology will replace human workers are as old as technology, and they were raised once again in November when a company called OpenAI released ChatGPT, an automated writing program. But AI experts have long insisted that such technologies have limitations that prevent them from fully replacing humans. What the bots can do well is make grunt work easier. One example that went viral shortly after ChatGPT’s release: A Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company.

Real progress is being made in tackling child poverty. The number of children in America living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 percent since 1993. As The Times’s Jason DeParle reported in September, “child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households.” The improvements coincide with more generous state and federal subsidies for working families, and changes to welfare laws that make it easier for struggling households to apply for assistance programs.

We’re getting closer to cancer vaccines. Researchers have long thought that it was possible to immunize individuals at high risk of cancer, or even cure cancer in those who were already showing signs of it. Until recently, they had made little progress, but now promising results from preliminary studies are giving some doctors new hope. Moderna said this month that a skin cancer vaccine performed well in midstage trials. Moderna and others are working on dozens of other vaccines to treat various other cancers.

New ways of working are becoming commonplace. Hybrid arrangements are well-established at many companies (even as some C.E.O.s are finding success getting staff back to the office more regularly). But another experiment is gaining traction: Not one of 33 companies that piloted a four-day workweek for six months as part of a large-scale study this year said they would return to a standard schedule. The firms, which together have more than 900 employees, also reported higher revenue and employee productivity. The nonprofit advocacy group that coordinated the pilot programs, called 4 Day Week Global, has signed up dozens of companies to participate in studies next year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/24/business/dealbook/optimisim-in-2023.html