As the world focuses its attention on this year’s recipients of the planet’s most prestigious prize, the Nobel, it feels like something’s missing from the list: technology. Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel established the prizes more than century ago with the instruction that his entire estate be used to endow “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.” The categories laid out in his will—physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and peace—have remained the basis of the awards, and a prize for economics was added in 1968. Since the first prize was given in 1901, the industrial era has passed and the information age is now well and truly upon us. Humanity has become an urban species, with more than half the world now living in cities, carbon pollution has pushed greenhouse gases to the highest concentrations ever recorded, and the mobile phone has become the quickest and biggest technology uptake in human history.
