Five Things Tech: Innovation, Social Media, AI Glasses, Tiny LED, Internet Freedom
Everything you should read about Tech right now.
Why Europe Doesn’t Have a Tesla — and Why Regulation Isn’t the Whole Story.
Welcome back to Five Things Tech! Innovation needs risk, but Europe has made risk expensive. When firing costs four times more in France or Germany than in the U.S., experimentation slows, and so does ambition. Yet maybe the real problem isn’t labor law at all, but a deeper cultural complacency: too little appetite to back new ideas with big, sustained investments. Meanwhile, a global wave of digital regulation, from teen social media bans to surveillance debates, shows how much we struggle to balance progress and protection.
Oh, and in case you missed it: Meta’s AI glasses are already causing chaos in classrooms, nanoLEDs are literally bending light, and U.S. funding for internet freedom just fell off a cliff. So much going on in Tech - read up!
Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖
Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla
What really sets Europe apart from states like California is different. Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers, a difference arising entirely from different regulatory approaches. As a result, it virtually never happens: Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans in any given year. In this respect, the European economy differs greatly from the American one. By American standards, a European business has to be exceptionally confident that it will want an employee for a long time before hiring them.
This may sound like a great virtue of European life, and in a way it is. But it has costs. If you make it expensive to fire people, then companies may pay them less in order to balance out employment costs, or they may not employ people at all. To understand the innovation gap, however, there is a third effect that is even more important. If it is expensive to lay people off, employers avoid creating jobs that they might subsequently discontinue. Innovation involves experimentation and risk, so jobs in innovative areas of the economy are more likely to be discontinued than jobs elsewhere. High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.
This article has been discussed online the last few days, so I guess I need to chime in. I do not think it is the labour laws that is holding Europe back, it is a lack of appetite to invest into new ideas and then follow through with even larger investments. Complacency is slowing the contintent down more than its labour laws.
From Paris to New Delhi, the Push to Ban Teens From Social Media Is Going Global
What started as an isolated regulatory gamble by Australia last fall has spread to more than a dozen capitals, where leaders are seizing on issues raised by childhood scrolling to appeal to parents across the political spectrum.
It adds to a growing backlash against teenage smartphone use, which is being blamed by some critics for deteriorating mental health and an epidemic of screen addiction.
From Paris to New Delhi, limits on children’s access to apps such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are now being debated or implemented, marking a tipping point in the conversation about regulating social media and a potential blockage in tech companies’ pipeline of users.
As a parent, I think it is better to educate than to take away - and I also think that we need to regulate better. TikTok, Meta and others should not be able to create algorithms that suck people in so much.
Meta’s A.I. Smart Glasses Are Wreaking Havoc in Schools Across the Country. It’s Only Going to Get Worse.
After pushing billions of dollars into the metaverse, Meta has now found overwhelming demand for its Ray-Ban display glasses, which allow users to take photos, stream content, and talk to an A.I. assistant. Waitlists for the product have surged, and the company’s pivot away from the metaverse and toward smart glasses has become aggressive: Hundreds of Meta workers in the Reality Labs division and virtual games studios were laid off, product rollout was paused to address the supply shortage, and it was reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban’s owner, are discussing possibly doubling production capacity for the A.I.-powered glasses by the end of this year, all in a bid to capitalize on the growing demand as well as get ahead of competitors.
But its usages—specifically its ability to capture photo and video—have raised questions about how the devices will be applied in real life, especially in settings among children and young adults. Issues around academic dishonesty, classroom surveillance, and harassment have been growing in recent years but have been exacerbated as students gain access to the controversial wearable.
These kinds of glasses will be common place very soon and we will have to live with it. As always, not everyone is using new technology the right way. Again, we need better regulation.
New Approaches to LED
But the tiniest nanoLEDs may have even more exotic applications, because they’re smaller than the wavelengths of their light. “From a process point of view, you are making a new component that was not possible in the past,” Shih says.
For example, Shih’s group showed their nano-OLEDs could form a metasurface—a structure that uses its pixels’ nano-sizes to control how each pixel interacts with its neighbors. One day, similar devices could focus nanoLED light into laser-like beams or create holographic 3D nanoLED displays.
Wow, that is truly stunning stuff.
US funding for global internet freedom ‘effectively gutted’
Meanwhile, the Trump administration this January withdrew from the Freedom Online Coalition, a global alliance set up by the US to defend digital rights.
The cuts risk curtailing technologies that helped Iranians to coordinate during recent anti-government protests, and that allowed videos and images of massacres to reach the outside world. They could have a major impact in other nations too; the efforts of groups in Myanmar to get past the junta’s “digital iron curtain”, and the ability of users in China to avoid surveillance.
Despots everywhere are happy about Trump and his MAGA idiots.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
🤖
— Nico