Live data from Hacker News

UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

bloomberg.com

1–10 of 129 posts

Re: UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

#2
Reading between the lines, this is actually one of the side-goals of the zombie Online Safety Bill. Require all apps with user-created content to use a UK-approved 'identity provider' for age verification, and only issue approval to a handful of home-grown companies. Et voila, a whole thriving tech /sector/ where the UK can legitimately claim to be world-leading, even if they did invent the whole thing out of whole cloth and pointlessness.

Re: UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

#3
Reading between the lines of his quote, my guess is he's angling for some cash from the government, by securitizing the tech sector. It won't work, because the treasury feels that spending money, like eating people, is always wrong. It won't cost any politicians anything when the bits and pieces of the UK tech sector go down the pipes, because their fortunes rest entirely on house prices, and the opinions of the fine people at Sky News. So expect another ten years of meaningless and toothless 'initiatives', sound and fury, signifying nothing, while the UK continues into another decade of death spiral.

Re: UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

#4
It sounds to me like he doesn't actually say that. In the article:

>The UK has “no chance in hell” of becoming technologically sovereign

Well which is it, having our own Tech champs or being technologically sovereign?

Because they're totally different things. To be honest I'm not sure any country apart from China stands any chance of becoming technologically sovereign. Like what does that mean? Do we need to mine our own Lithium, do we need to build our own foundries, are we planning on building a competitor to ASML to source machines to build our foundries? And look at Oil prices, the UK isn't massively dependent on Oil and we have our own resources but we still got absolutely slammed by the war in Russia because we operate in a global market. So do we need our own Lithium mines and export controls to stop them being bid up on the international market when there's some exogenous event?

Re: UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

#6

It sounds to me like he doesn't actually say that. In the article: >The UK has “no chance in hell” of becoming technologically sovereign Well which is it, having our own Tech champs or being technologically sovereign? Because they're totally different things. To be honest I'm not sure any country apart from China stands any chance of becoming technologically sovereign. Like what does that mean? Do we need to mine our…

No nation, anywhere on the planet, is by itself technologically sovereign. The ability to get by in the world is a cooperative venture for everyone, even the US. What makes first tier technological nations different is the alliances of which they are active contributing members. Those alliances make trade flow smoothly and securely. That is what creates prosperity in an interconnected world.

That is especially important in evaluating China's ability to achieve technological first tier status. China has one formal alliance. It is with North Korea. This is remarkable. China cannot rely on Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, nor even any country with a land border with China as an ally. China's neighbors are threatened by China, are hostile to China, or are just extremely wary of China. China's navy cannot project power beyond the island nations off China's coast.

China's position and prospects are less advantageous than it seems to many people.

Re: UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

#8
For newcomers ARM cpu was/is designed in the UK ... Say nothing about Alan Turing who first conceived of how digital computation can happen using hardware then went on to help design and build one of the first computers and yes he coded it to use a Bayesian algorithm... Not to mention Thomas Bayes, De Morgan, Charles Baggage and Boole of boolean logic fame just for starters

Re: UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

#9
I don’t know anything about ARM, but is the IP ownership a big deal compared to the manufacturing?

My first reaction was to think I’d do everything possible to keep ARM as a domestic company, but does it even make a difference if they don’t actually produce (ex:) CPUs? I can’t run my workload on IP.

The expertise is worth something though. We’ve seen that in Canada with companies like Nortel. Once those companies are gone, the local expertise quickly follows and you become dependent on a foreign company, which is regulated by a foreign government, for part of your critical infrastructure. It’s extremely short sighted IMO and most people don’t even realize what’s being lost.

Post reply on HN