Lately: The Canadian startup struggle, David Cronenberg’s death tech and an AI video quiz

Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.

In this week’s issue:

🧠 Your phone is not literally rotting your brain, says the World Health Organization

🧐 Can you tell the difference between AI-generated videos and the real thing?

📉 Why Canada struggles to grow massive publicly traded tech companies

🪦 David Cronenberg’s new movie dabbles in death tech

WHO review finds there’s no link between phone use and brain cancer

While it may feel like your smartphone is rotting your brain, the World Health Organization has confirmed that (scientifically, anyway) it is not. A WHO-commissioned review released this week looked at 63 studies worldwide and found the huge rise in wireless technology has not led to a corresponding increase in brain cancer. Mobile phones are currently classified as “possibly carcinogenic” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the category used when it cannot rule out a potential link. But given the new data, the agency’s advisory group is calling for the classification to be re-evaluated. So why does your brain feel like mush after spending hours on your phone? It might be its effect on your attention span.

Canada’s struggle to produce world-class publicly traded tech companies

For tech startups in Canada, the first 18 months of the pandemic looked like the start of a new era. There was a burst of 20 tech IPOs on the TSX, compared with an average of just one IPO on the exchange a year since the 2000s. But that run ended in late, 2021, and it now looks like an anomaly driven by the same gold-rush mindset of the original dot-com boom. Almost half of those 20 companies have now gone private, delisted or been taken over. While experts say some of those start-ups were underdeveloped and shouldn’t have gone public to begin with, the other problem is that many were underappreciated by Canadian investors. It’s a trend that’s likely to continue, report Tim Shufelt and Sean Silcoff, as more start-ups look instead to foreign investors and acquirers. And without more world-class, publicly traded tech companies, experts warn Canada’s economy will continue to fall behind other major economies.

Can you spot the difference between AI-generated videos and the real thing? Take our quiz

It wasn’t that long ago that AI-made videos looked like nightmarish acid trips with little attachment to reality. One of my favourites was born out of the prompt “Will Smith Eating Pasta”, which featured an unhinged alienesque Will Smith shovelling fistfuls of noodles into his mouth. But in the past few months, the tools that make AI videos have seen astounding leaps in quality, to the point where it’s increasingly difficult to tell the difference between fakes and the real thing.

As reporter Joe Castaldo and visuals editor Patrick Dell explain, AI-generated video tools use models that are trained to predict what the next frame in a sequence will look like. This is the same ability that will help autonomous vehicles anticipate how cars and pedestrians will move a few seconds into the future or how a robot arm knows how to grab and move objects. If you want to see just how far AI-made videos have come, test your AI-detection skills with this quiz.

What else we’re reading this week:

How Google Forms became the hottest new dating app (Dazed)

Hackers poison Google search results by spreading malware as spoofed VPN solution (CyberNews)

Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal is out to prove surveillance capitalism wrong (Wired)

Adult Money

I am one of a few lucky individuals who have a dedicated space for a home office, so I feel extra guilty that the room is so neglected. Furnished with a mish-mash of pieces bought from Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji, the room also doubles as overflow storage for seasonal clothes and a decades-worth of old magazines, newspaper clippings, concert ticket stubs and other paper ephemera I cannot bear to toss. I have attempted to make it more stylish – I have a vintage bookcase with pretty ornate trim and a couple framed prints from artists I like – but everything still looks a bit blah against the dull yellow walls that I’ve never painted.

The Globe recently spoke with Toronto designer Olivia Botrie about how to make your home office feel cozy, not only as a way to foster productivity, but to create a place you actually want to hang out in. “If you have the choice to work from home, you want it to feel like home,” she said. “Lean into that fact and enjoy it – you’re not trying to recreate a cubicle.” Honestly, a standard cubicle would probably be an improvement on my current setup. While the room could eventually use the full HGTV-style makeover treatment, I’m going to start small: a fresh coat of paint.

Culture radar

In David Cronenberg’s new film, an entrepreneur dabbles in death tech

The Toronto International Film Festival is back and with it another collection of highly-anticipated movies and potential superstar sightings. One film that caught my eye is David Cronenberg’s new film, The Shrouds, which is having its North American premiere at TIFF. The somewhat autobiographical film follows an entrepreneur who, while grieving the death of his wife, devises a high-tech cloth that lets loved ones watch their deceased family members decompose in real time. The company is called GraveTech, naturally.

Although the concept is very Cronenberg, it’s not that far off from the realm of possibility. A burgeoning sector of “death tech” start ups are disrupting the billion-dollar funeral industry by offering direct-to-consumer cremations or create legal wills online.

More tech and telecom news:

Corus Entertainment gets extension to restructure debt

Toronto ranks fourth in North American tech talent, driven by demand for AI skills, report says

U.S. antitrust trial targets Google’s digital ad business