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UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#11

Post by dageshi »

libertine wrote: post #8
toyg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so positive. There is potential for this to become just another way to channel pork to friends and cronies. Which, considering the track record of the current executive, is probably the most likely scenario. I'm all for DARPA-like initiatives, but when it comes to taxpayers' money we should have decent accountability mechanisms.

Usually these initiatives should be extremely transparent, and they're the exact opposite. That's not good. A current example is the covid 19 vaccine contracts, which were multi billion dollar/euro/pound deals, with accelerated research and approvals, and so far only one contract was made public. It is specially concerning when some vaccines were developed with public funding.

It doesn't matter.

Genuinely, the only thing that mattered was working, safe vaccines as quickly as possible. Whatever government paid is absolute peanuts compared to the costs associated with locking down economies let alone the lives potentially saved.

Covid19 was and is a crisis, you may well have a point in terms of other initiatives in this space, but with covid all that mattered was finding a solution as quickly as possible.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#12

Post by motohagiography »

I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community.

As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around people applying, and it will just become another grant vehicle for academics in the publish-or-perish regime, and instead of "making something people want," in the venture model, it means, "find things nobody else understands well enough to care about." To people outside of it, it will look a lot like corruption.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#13

Post by throwaway0a5e »

libertine wrote: post #8
toyg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so positive. There is potential for this to become just another way to channel pork to friends and cronies. Which, considering the track record of the current executive, is probably the most likely scenario. I'm all for DARPA-like initiatives, but when it comes to taxpayers' money we should have decent accountability mechanisms.

Usually these initiatives should be extremely transparent, and they're the exact opposite. That's not good. A current example is the covid 19 vaccine contracts, which were multi billion dollar/euro/pound deals, with accelerated research and approvals, and so far only one contract was made public. It is specially concerning when some vaccines were developed with public funding.

>Usually these initiatives should be extremely transparent, and they're the exact opposite

The downside is that when they're too transparent politics gets involved and you can't study touchy things because people don't want the risk of conclusions they don't like.

Imagine the uproar if the navy said they think asbestos PPE might be less lethal than what it's protecting you from in some circumstances so they were planning on researching it. Congressmen would get involved. They'd grandstand and make all sorts of sound bites for the cameras. And the research wouldn't get done or it would have to be neutered in order to get done. Look at the political football that is women's PT requirements for the armed forces for a more mild real world example.

Of course, if there's no transparency involved the risk is MK-Ultra type crap which is bad too.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#14

Post by marcus_holmes »

Why is the government spending tax money on creating new technology with huge risk? Surely this is something that investment funds should be doing, with the investors appopriately aware of the risks?

Who is going to benefit from any discovered new tech? Are the benefits going to be socialised, or is it just the risk?

If it was supporting pure research - finding great researchers and freeing them from the grant treadmill - I'd be supportive, but this doesn't sound like that.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#15

Post by jokethrowaway »

First the European fund and now this.

The last thing I want is for my taxes is to go into venture capital. Especially if it's run by the government.

I wonder what's the best place where to run to, to escape this trend. Maybe South America or South East Asia?

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#17

Post by jdavis703 »

motohagiography wrote: post #12

I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community. As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around pe…

The internet came out of a US government funded “advanced research projects agency.” It took decades before VCs monetized that research.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#18

Post by rkangel »

pjc50 wrote: post #6
mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

That’s great. Removing a platform for people that say, in hindsight, ‘it was obvious that was going to fail’ is a step in the right direction. If western societies insist on outsourcing R&D through misguided tax laws, they have no idea the amount of harm they are doing to the next generation of young people (who will be subservient to the innovating countries that were smarter in their policies).

> the innovating countries that were smarter in their policies Such as? Are "we" now going to say the state is better at innovating than the private sector? Under what conditions? (I'm inclined to believe that it could work - it was after all the model that gave us Concorde - but there are also a lot of ways in which it could go wrong and I absolutely do not trust the government with a track record of bunging corrupt…

I think you are going to want a mix of both.

The miniaturisation and cost reduction of electronics achieved as a result of continual investment by the phone industry is almost miraculous. A lot of innovation has happened to fit a supercomputer into your pocket.

The WWW example in a sibling comment is a great example of the contrasting sort. It benefits humanity as a whole, and would be very unlikely to be invented privately. We want more decentralised technology solutions - really standards rather than products - and government research have a different set of incentives that might make them better placed to deliver that sort of innovation.

That said, I work in telecomms. A large number of self interested telecomms companies have got together and agreed standard over the years (this is obviously not unique to telecomms), including making patents available (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...). The technology is not decentralised, but it is interoperable.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#20

Post by LinuxBender »

jdavis703 wrote: post #17
motohagiography wrote: post #12

I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community. As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around pe…

The internet came out of a US government funded “advanced research projects agency.” It took decades before VCs monetized that research.

Most of the tech industry in fact came out of that government funded research. I bet half of the people working for In-Q-Tel [1][2] and similar gov VC funded companies don't even understand that relationship. I should add that even if a company is not listed, it does not mean some of the VC funding did not come from one of the gov VC's.

[1] - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/in-q-tel/recent_inve...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel [note] not every company is listed

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