Norway Isn't Keeping Up

Norway is falling behind in the global tech race while politicians argue about wealth tax. Norwegian companies invest less in research than Spotify, we're failing to attract talent, and we've lost control of our digital data. We desperately need a real technology debate – the future is at stake.

This is Kludder of the week!

It's been almost exactly five months since I started up Kludder. Curiosity about technology, and the joy I find in writing, became the driving force behind it all. It's been with a mixture of concern and fascination that I've watched how technology is becoming an ever-larger part of our lives. And gradually I realised how prominent technology is in the political picture. Nations have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the technology race.

It's imprecise to portray technology as something new in the global picture. We've experienced space races, and this week it's 80 years since the atomic bombs fell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and destroyed lives for several generations to come. That was technology, too. Terrible technology.

But tech that we ordinary people make use of has taken up more space. Who would have thought that Facebook would become a breeding ground for disinformation and influence? That the same company today is throwing salaries of over a billion dollars at AI researchers? Or that Jeff Bezos, who started up the online shop Amazon, would also buy up the newspaper The Washington Post and become an important backer of the American president?

Suddenly the apps we swiped and shopped on have turned into big-time politics. And it's continued like that, at increasing pace right up to today. The tech giants stood on the front row when Donald Trump became president. One can think what one likes about them standing behind Trump. But the fact is that they stood there, a clear symbol of the power technology companies have built up.

Wrong Focus

Now the parliamentary election is approaching (for the record: I'm a parliamentary candidate for Venstre). But the technology debate is nowhere to be seen. Yesterday we could read the headline in Dagens Næringsliv: "Norwegian business is not suited for the future".

Abelia is the national association for knowledge and technology enterprises, and they're the ones behind the statement. Every year they take stock of the adaptability of Norwegian business. Now Abelia can reveal that Norwegian companies don't spend money on research and development. In fact, the streaming service Spotify spends more on research and development than the ten largest companies on the Oslo Stock Exchange combined.

But the headlines elsewhere are about wealth tax. You can roughly divide the political spectrum by looking at which parties want to remove the wealth tax and which want to keep it. That this very debate takes up so much space, at a time when Norway's adaptability and competitiveness is weakening, is in itself a symptom of why Norway ends up falling behind.

We also struggle to attract foreign talent. There Norway could learn from several countries that have introduced so-called tech visas designed to make it easier to employ foreigners with expertise, - Øystein Søreide, Managing Director of Abelia to Dagens Næringsliv.

What Will It Take?

Occasionally exciting thoughts emerge about how Norway can step up when it comes to competitiveness. For we must honestly admit; Norway isn't in the top tier today. One of these exciting thoughts comes from professor emeritus at NTNU, Knut Anton Mork.

Mork proposes that Norway uses a small portion of the oil fund to build an international elite university in Norway. The universities in the USA are under pressure, and Europe wants to bring over researchers. Does Norway dare to think the thought of going to the forefront? To become the new research Klondike? It shouldn't be completely utopian to think that Norway sets aside billions to build the world's best university, and in that way attract bright minds who establish themselves here in the country. It can create ripple effects and create a research and innovation environment that we've never had before. Strong academic environments are attractive for businesses and their workplaces.

What I'm proposing is to build a new university city with buildings for auditoriums, laboratories, data centres, offices and housing for internationally leading professors and budding professors. - Knut Anton Mork in Dagens Næringsliv.

Digital Sovereignty

Commentator in Morgenbladet, Lena Lindgren, has written an interesting essay about Norway's digital sovereignty. Lindgren believes we don't have control over where the data of Norwegian citizens is stored.

Neither we nor the government have an overview of how the data is stored, or what it's used for. - Lena Lindgren in Morgenbladet.

She poses the question of whether national sovereignty and a real democracy can exist without digital sovereignty. It's this type of question that must be raised in a debate about technology, and how Norway can strengthen its position. Because there's a heap of exciting ideas put forward by people like Mork and Lindgren, or the organisation Abelia. The global security policy is serious. The data about you and me is extremely valuable for advertisers as well as authoritarian and anti-democratic regimes - I'd very much like to hear what our politicians in Parliament are doing to protect our digital footprints.

Next week it's Arendal Week. Then the digitalisation minister Karianne Tung will encourage us all to jump on the AI train, and not be left standing on the platform. The encouragement is good, for according to Abelia, Norwegian businesses are lagging behind in adopting artificial intelligence, cloud services and robotics. But we need to have several thoughts in our heads at once.

The digitalisation minister wants to make Norway the world's most digitalised country by 2030. But what will it cost us to reach the goal?

The debate about wealth tax overshadows everything else in what should have been a super-exciting debate about digitalisation, use of technology and protection of our personal data. For the fact is that Norway is seriously falling behind in a global economy:

• Norwegian businesses invest less in research and development than is done elsewhere in the Nordic region.
• We need more people to develop new digital solutions.
• Our digital data is more lucrative than ever, and then we must take action to protect it.
• Norwegian businesses must embrace new technology to a much greater degree than is done today.

If we direct our gaze towards this, then we can finally get an exciting technology debate.

ChatGPT-5 is Here

It's been on the cards for a while, but today OpenAI launched its new version of ChatGPT, ChatGPT-5. The company claims that GPT-5 is "generally intelligent" and can answer you like a doctoral expert on most topics.

OpenAI says that the new version hallucinates to a lesser degree than GPT-4, and that ChatGPT is now becoming even better at tasks within coding.

No more fun

I remember a time when Google got attention for having a play slide at their office. Apple employees got all meals covered and other tech companies lured with unlimited holiday. That time seems to be over. In this article from the New York Times you get a good insight into how the times - and the perks - have changed for employees in Silicon Valley. On the other hand; when you're lured with salaries of several hundred million dollars, perhaps it's alright that lunch is no longer free.