By now, we all know that the Prime Minister has the laudable aim of making the UK a science and technology superpower. Well, someone should tell the Home Office – and fast. The much-maligned Online Safety Bill is going through legislative ‘ping pong’ this evening, and yet many elements of it are going to have […]
What’s happening to global Britain? Last month it was revealed that the fast-track Global Talent Visa, launched in 2021 to bring the best and the brightest to the UK, has received three applications in two years. The aim of the scheme was to enable the world’s career leaders to come and work in the UK. […]
A wide range of policy wonks, academics, cryptographers, computer scientists, civil liberty activists, lawyers, and security experts have been warning lawmakers for years that the Online Safety Bill poses a threat to privacy. Concerns over the Bill’s handling of private messages have been especially pronounced, and prompted technology experts to meet with lawmakers to convince […]
It’s difficult to avoid fashionable speculation about how large language models like ChatGPT might be used by writers and businesses. Speculation is a word I chose with some care and with the one, hugely significant attribute ChatGPT can never offer – intelligence. It didn’t appear in my opening sentence because some super-sonic software tombola coughed […]
An army of ‘Little Giants’ – thousands of high-tech, state-backed SMEs – are marching out of China onto the world stage. That’s the message from a recent report by the Germany-based Mercator Institute for China Studies, outlining one of the most important shifts in China’s strategy to dominate world tech in years. No longer narrowly […]
The age of Artificial Intelligence isn’t coming, it’s here. At the Startup Coalition, we talk regularly to startups already using AI to detect cancer, sequence as yet undiscovered drugs and improve customer service. The debate is no longer if, but when, AI will have succeeded in completely transforming life as we know it. And it’s […]
Politicians are fond of reminding us that people are the ‘lifeblood of the economy’. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for good reason. In advanced economies like ours, the greatest limiting factor on growth tends to be the stock of available talent. You can have all the raw materials and capital equipment in the […]
Universities are an important source of inventions and scientific breakthroughs, especially in the UK. But for us to benefit from them, those academic breakthroughs need to be turned into the useful goods and services. That can happen in a passive way, with inventors simply leaving it to others to apply their ideas, but increasingly researchers […]
In a former life I once found myself managing an AI / machine learning (ML) team for a big American web firm. I took my colleagues round our internal customers asking whether they wanted AI/ML. ‘Oh, yes,’ they replied, ‘so badly!’. The minority wanted it because they thought if they could lift X output by […]
Electric vehicles might be marketed as the green alternative to fossil fuels, but they aren’t nearly as clean as you might imagine. For while electrification will eliminate exhaust fumes, wear and tear still creates pollution – and as England’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Chris Whitty, has warned, this can have serious health effects.. Like conventional vehicles, […]
The UK’s proud boast about being the home of European tech business doesn’t have quite the same conviction it used to. As a recent report from techUK put it, ‘over recent years we have fallen off the pace and our delivery has faltered’. For some people in the tech sector, that might be an understatement. […]
In recent weeks, the endless announcements of new capabilities, new models and new funding has upped the pace of the AI race. The burgeoning AI industry – and Britain’s place in it – is likely to become an increasingly prominent political issue, particularly as and when the technology starts to displace jobs en masse. Labour […]
Recent advances in artificial intelligence, from tools to detect cancer to managing crops, look set to disrupt and reform entire industries. But, as Rishi Sunak said this London Tech Week: while the UK has all the ingredients to be a global AI powerhouse, successfully implementing and adopting the technology long-term requires the right balance of […]
London and technology depend on each other. Last week London was ranked the world’s most high-tech city. The UK’s world-beating tech sector starts and ends with the lifeblood of London. Without London, the UK’s tech sector would be limp – without world-leading tech, London’s vibrancy would be lost. As a tech entrepreneur, both London and […]
If increasingly panic-stricken headlines are to be believed, Artificial Intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity. The Prime Minister’s advisor on AI has warned that we have just two years to protect the species, and the Center for AI Safety has published a statement signed by hundreds of AI researchers, lawmakers, academics, and industry leaders […]
When the Government published the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill in April, I was encouraged. As the Chair of Coadec – an organisation I helped found over a decade ago – I could see that a competition regime that focused more closely on the dynamics of technology-driven businesses could hugely benefit the UK startup […]
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