Science and technology policy is back. A new Department for Science, Technology, and Innovation has just been set up. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency is hiring programme managers to deliver their work. The Chancellor is using ChatGPT to write the introduction to his speeches. But ambitions need to be raised, along with delivery.
Science and technology have been the driving force of progress for much of our modern age. Our accomplishments allow us to live longer, healthier lives, to travel across the world and into space, and to generate food and energy at scale.
But too much of political debate is on competing visions of the past, rather on the future.
Our new paper published by Tony Blair and William Hague, “A New National Purpose” is an attempt to cut through traditional divisions and offer a new path forward for the UK.
It is an attempt to bring about a generational shift in our thinking and ensure the UK leaps from an old world that is disappearing to the new one ahead.
To bring Britain into the 21st century, some of proposal we put forward include:
A government-led general-purpose AI systems, enabled by the required supercomputing capabilities, that can augment broad swathe of public service delivery.
A tech-enabled national health infrastructure that brings interoperable data platforms into a world-leading system that can reduce ever-increasing costs by being more efficient.
An Advanced Procurement Agency with a specialised mandate to find opportunities for public-sector innovation, procure promising solutions, and manage their deployment and testing, will help to de-risk some of the high-risk, high-reward projects, such as carbon removal.
We also look at how the state should treat data as a competitive asset, build a greater appetite for risk and speed of innovation, and crowd-in world-leading expertise from outside government to inform direction.
We want to challenge the orthodoxy and ideology of our politics today, to put forward a practical agenda that we can build upon. For most people, traditional divisions around the market versus the state are not important. This vision aims to break through the rancour and put forward an optimistic vision for the future. Please do read and help us develop this into an idea we can all get behind.