Think, for a moment, on Britain’s state capacity: that is, the ability of the government to get shit done. I doubt you would give it full marks. But there are two ways, really, to look at this situation. Recall the dress that was thought, simultaneously, to be blue-black and white-gold. In the same way, we can take two different views of British state capacity. One is that it is withering on the vine, and the other is that it is a garden of low-hanging fruit.
The second perspective is the pragmatic one. We live in an orchard of opportunity. There are plenty of opportunities to reimagine how government systems could be improved. And there are plenty of entrepreneurial people whose talents, if applied to those opportunities, might quite easily elicit those improvements.
I play a small role in the Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA), which was founded early last year. Our thesis is that British technoscientific progress is hindered by excessive bureaucracy, the celebration of prestige over potential and, relatedly, the misallocation of exceptional talent. These are difficult problems to solve, but we think that it would be a good start to build a cross-disciplinary community of innovators and let them loose on big technical challenges.
With this in mind, we have been organising a string of hackathons through which innovators can address those challenges. Our hackers have tackled speculative new technologies; the brain-scanning of AIs; and, most recently, perhaps the hardest problem of all: rebooting British state capacity. Or rather: revelling in the orchard of opportunity. It is conventional in the tech sphere to view startups as the best route to improving society via innovation, but many members of the SoTA community believe building for the government, or working on tech beneficial to the national interest, to be an equally promising pathway.
Likers of state capacity might be pleased to know that the government was willing to offer our innovators some problems to solve. My SoTA colleague Jamie Croucher, who focuses in his day job on rebooting defence capabilities, led the way. 10 Downing Street, along with some of the biggest government departments, including the Treasury, the Home Office, and the Ministry of Defence, issued him with challenges that our hackers were invited to choose from. Could they make British digital infrastructure more resilient? Could they use emerging technologies to map objects and vessels in the sea? Could they make passwords obsolete?
The challenges continued. Could hackers automate particularly troublesome elements of bureaucracy – without requiring a major IT overhaul? Could they use satellite data to guide the placement of new houses? Could they build pandemic readiness dashboards?
Over a frenetic weekend in the London office of a startup accelerator, several dozen hackers set about the government’s challenges. As hackathon veterans will know, these events traditionally end with the contestants demonstrating their products in front of their rivals and a panel of judges.
It might take two decades (or more) for any government, or a series of governments, to build a high-speed rail line. But two days is enough for nimble operators to make some progress on smaller problems. One hacker rustled up ‘Bobby’, an LLM-powered interface for crime data. Ask Bobby what sort of crime to expect in a given postcode, and he will give you an accurate answer in natural language. Another group explained their plan for using backscattering, via which light or sound is reflected back whence it came, to monitor the seafloor surrounding critical infrastructure such as the undersea cables that connect us to the internet.
But the judges awarded their prizes to a trio whose bronze-medallist was ‘A1 Voice’, an AI voicemail for NHS hospitals. In one stroke, its creator relieved hospitals of the burden of managing thousands of incoming calls per day. Silver went to ‘DVSA reimagined’, a new way of managing the tortuous process that is getting a driving licence, and gold went to ‘Treasury busters’. This winning team produced software that can facilitate and automate the writing of ‘business cases’, and other forms of evaluation of prospective government projects, that have to be submitted to the Treasury and customarily cost millions.
So productive were our hackers that government officials are meeting several teams in order to discuss their ideas further. Perhaps there might be hope for the high-speed railway lines of the future. (And if you were disappointed to miss out on the hackathon just gone, you can find details of our next events here.)
Naturally, we at SoTA experience a selection effect when speaking to people in British science and technology. But even accounting for that effect, something seems to have changed in the past couple of years. There is more audible frustration with how things are going for the country, and there is more visible willingness to pitch in. It is no longer seen as morally low-status to work on defence, and there is more talk of people in tech doing ‘tours of duty’, as my SoTA colleague Jamie has put it, in government departments that might have a use for their skills. It’s about time; that garden is very overgrown.
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