The New-Tech Exhibition 2026, Israel’s international trade show for the hi-tech and electronics sector, ran June 30–July 1 at the Expo Tel Aviv fairgrounds. The show paired its usual exhibition floor with four parallel conference tracks, each running a full day of back-to-back sessions in its own hall.

Hall C1 — Opto-Tech: The Annual Electro Optics Conference

Focused on photonics, quantum optics, and imaging. Sessions included organic photonic neuromorphic devices from the Holon Institute of Technology, mid-infrared SPAD imaging from Tel Aviv University’s Femto-Nano Laboratory, quantum computing and QKD research from Ben-Gurion University’s Center for Quantum Science and Technology, and SWIR-to-visible up-conversion for AR devices.

The debate about robots and employment tends to resolve into two camps: displacement catastrophism and productivity optimism. Both camps miss the more tractable and more dangerous question, which is not whether jobs disappear but where the disruption lands and how fast it arrives.

The GAO’s 2026 horizon report is notably careful here. It does not predict net job loss. It identifies three possible outcomes — new roles created, human workers augmented toward higher-skill tasks, direct substitution — and acknowledges that the balance between them depends heavily on the pace of workforce transition. Speed matters as much as magnitude. A twenty-year labor market shift that allows retraining and sectoral adjustment is a different policy problem from a five-year shock.