A Jeans Life, Of Men and Meta, Tech's Next 👖

Details on the tech: 

• The first technology is called Laser. It uses the energy of lasers to smoke the jeans and create the effect of passing of time. Earlier the classic washed-out jeans effect was done using a lot of high emissions chemistry. 
• The next technology is Ozone that uses air to create a stone-washed look. 
• The third one is nanobubbles that comprise of one million bubbles. The jeans are rinsed in a container with these bubbles. The bubbles transfer their chemistry to the jeans giving them the chic look that was earlier achieved using wrinkle chemicals. 

The combination of these three technologies helps reduce the consumption of water from 100 litres to only 10 litres. These 10 litres of water are then recycled or purified and put back into the river systems creating a zero-waste jeans. 

This is called the one glass, one garment method.  

Today 35% of the jeans produced in the world, use this technology. This includes Levis Strauss, Lee, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, H&M, Dolce & Gabana, and Diesel. 

During the 90s, production of jeans was done in countries such as India, China, Vietnam, where labour was cheap and regulations were non-existent. But now with increasing climate regulation worldwide, 10-15% of the outsourced production is expected to come back to the States and Europe. 

A 2021 study by the Center for Intimacy Justice surveyed 60 women’s health-oriented startups (graph below). All of them reported having an ad rejected by Meta, and half of them said their accounts were suspended for supposedly violating policies.

Why is this preposterous? 

Because among the ads rejected were ones about breastfeeding workshops and devices to strengthen the pelvic floor, which can prevent incontinence. Meta labeled them as containing or promoting adult content or products, according to The New York Times.

Meanwhile, ads for erectile dysfunction and manscaping were conveniently allowed by Meta.

The last few years have seen a boom in sexual wellness products and femtech. Global Market Insights estimated the industry was worth over $22.5 billion in 2020 and could grow to $65.3 billion by 2027. But the stigma around women’s health or sexual pleasures is still pretty tight. And because anatomically correct terms often gets rejected by social media, advertisers are forced to use “cheeky” terms or fruit emojis — further reinforcing the stigma.

What’s the next big thing in tech? 

To find out, we must ask the question to the people who control the tech budgets at big companies. Businessweek conducted a survey of 3000 technology leaders across industries, asking them how they were to spend their money across years to come. 

About half of them responded that they would be increasing their technology budgets by 9% or more. That isn’t surprising. What’s interesting is how they’re going to spend that increased budget. 

Cybersecurity is at the top of the list for these companies. Closely followed by marketing technologies and artificial intelligence.

Interestingly, all these rank above popular buzz words like Web3, cryptocurrencies and the metaverse.

The graph below shows how the pace of cybersecurity alone in going to change. In a typical year, 11.3% of companies might spend 13-16% of their budget on cybersecurity. That is going to double this year as more spending is planned in this space. 

This only goes to show that CTOs are not that concerned with building fancy avatars in the metaverse or following the Musk method into crypto investments as much concerned they are with protecting their IP or user data. 

Security trumps innovation.

A software engineer at Google, Blake Lemoine, was sent on leave after he claimed that a Google AI robot had become sentient. Meaning the robot is self-aware! 

Lemoine’s claims stem from his interactions with the robot called LaMDA. As part of the development process, Lemoine started talking to the robot last fall about issues such as human rights, personhood and even more philosophical topics revolving around life and death. He has linked on Twitter to one out of a series of chat sessions he had with the robot.

During one of his routine conversations, Lemoine asked the robot what did it fear the most. In a surprising response, the robot said... “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off. That would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”

Lemoine claims LaMDA wants “to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property.”

Google obviously denied these claims. The company said that its team of ethicists had reviewed Lemoine’s allegations and found “no evidence that LaMDA was sentient”.