Technology, Science and the Environment.

[davieG]

Government shelves £1.3bn UK tech and AI plans

Zoe Kleinman
Technology editor, BBC News

The new Labour government has shelved £1.3bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned.

It includes £800m for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further £500m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI.

Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget.

The Conservatives said that under its leadership, the department had underspent.

Those affected have been notified by Secretary of State Peter Kyle.

"The government is taking difficult and necessary spending decisions across all departments in the face of billions of pounds of unfunded commitments," said DSIT in a statement.

"This is essential to restore economic stability and deliver our national mission for growth."

It added that it remained "absolutely committed" to building technology infrastructure in the UK.

"As a point of fact, at the time the election was called, ministers had been advised by officials that the department was likely to underspend its budget for the current financial year," said shadow secretary Andrew Griffith.

"Our commitment in government to science, research and innovation including UK leadership on AI was outstanding."

The future of the Edinburgh exascale supercomputer is currently unclear.

There are only a small number of the immensely powerful machines in the world, with an earlier version housed in Bristol.

The new funding was announced in October last year and Edinburgh University had already spent £31m building housing for it.

It was considered to be a priority project by the previous government.

The machine would have been 50 times faster than any current computers in the UK, the university said at the time.

“Exascale will help researchers model all aspects of the world, test scientific theories and improve products and services in areas such as artificial intelligence, drug discovery, climate change, astrophysics and advanced engineering,” it says on its website.

A spokesperson for the university told the BBC that it "has led the way in supercomputing within the UK for decades".

"[It] is ready to work with the government to support the next phase of this technology in the UK, in order to unlock its benefits for industry, public services and society," they added.

Last week, DSIT announced that Matt Clifford, who was one of the organisers of the inaugural AI Safety Summit held at Bletchley Park in November 2023, had been asked to draw up an action plan for identifying new "AI opportunities".

The tech sector is generally considered to be a valuable part of the UK economy and therefore important for growth.

In a recent report, the tech network Tech Nation gave it a market value of $1.1 trillion (£863bn) in the first quarter of 2024.

[BKLFox]

[leicsmac]

Yep, pulling the plug on practically any tech investment project like this one is a mistake. They almost always return on their investments, often several times over.

 

A misstep from the new government.

 

 

[Daggers]

It's what is going to happen when you have had two Tory chancellors who spent money they didn't have and promised money they weren't going to get.

 

We spent £4billion on unusable PPE in the first year of Covid - maybe we should get that cash back to pay for stuff like this?

[leicsmac]

1 minute ago, Daggers said:

It's what is going to happen when you have had two Tory chancellors who spent money they didn't have and promised money they weren't going to get.

 

We spent £4billion on unusable PPE in the first year of Covid - maybe we should get that cash back to pay for stuff like this?

Yeah, the trap may well be obvious, but thanks to my own vested interest I think it should have been ignored tbh. These projects so end up paying for themselves, both financially and societally.

[Daggers]

39 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

Yeah, the trap may well be obvious, but thanks to my own vested interest I think it should have been ignored tbh. These projects so end up paying for themselves, both financially and societally.

Is there a reason universities can't do it privately then? Edinburgh seems to be in a healthy position to self-fund if it needed to do do via loans or investment.

[leicsmac]

1 minute ago, Daggers said:

Is there a reason universities can't do it privately then? Edinburgh seems to be in a healthy position to self-fund if it needed to do do via loans or investment.

800 mill is still a hell of a chunk of change though - would be 5 years EBITDA spending from them on that and nothing else.

 

I'm hopeful that they'll get the money through other means and this project will still run, but I'm hoping that cental government will still look to back tech projects like this where at all (really at all) possible.

[davieG]

[SpacedX]

3 minutes ago, davieG said:

A job to know where to start busting and debunking the mythology present in this. 

Edited 6 August by SpacedX

[davieG]

2 minutes ago, SpacedX said:

A job to know where to start busting and debunking the mythology present in this. 

I nearly added I don't know how true any of this is but hoped it would get some feedback on reality.

[SpacedX]

11 minutes ago, davieG said:

I nearly added I don't know how true any of this is but hoped it would get some feedback on reality.

Some of it is, but there is a lot of fanciful nonsense surrounding the man to be found on the internet. AC generation and transmission technology, yes, absolutely - but tp claim that he was the sole person working on it is false. "Death ray"...sure about that?

 

He was also an atrocious businessman. Where this meme portrays him as some altruistic benefactor for the good of humanity he was very eager to make money himself, but in a series of disastrous deals. sold many of his patents to Westinghouse. He was however driven by innovation and invention and ploughed back the money into his work. He failed to see the importance of the business of invention. He did not create any money making inventions after that, and eventually the money ran out.

Edited 6 August by SpacedX

[Sampson]

Interesting explanation which helps a topic I’ve always struggled to get my head around about how time is probably just a trick of the brain. The more I learn about how the universe works the more and more I’m convinced that it’s impossible for humans to have free will. Whether the universe is random or deterministic I don’t know but I can’t see a way how our brains aren’t just governed by the same forces as everything external to them are. 

Edited 6 August by Sampson

[Izzy]

3 hours ago, Sampson said:

Interesting explanation which helps a topic I’ve always struggled to get my head around about how time is probably just a trick of the brain. The more I learn about how the universe works the more and more I’m convinced that it’s impossible for humans to have free will. Whether the universe is random or deterministic I don’t know but I can’t see a way how our brains aren’t just governed by the same forces as everything external to them are. 

I wrestle with this daily but probably not on as deep a level as the likes of you and LeicsMac.

Some days I’m convinced it’s all been mapped out for us in advance and I feel fatalistic, but then I get lazy and just wait for things to happen.

Then other days I’m convinced we’ve got free will and it’s all about taking action and ‘making things happen’ through hard work and personal responsibility.

And while I’m lost in my head thinking about all this, I watch and admire people who just live in the moment and find joy in the here and now.

 

 

 

[Sampson]

17 minutes ago, Izzy said:

I wrestle with this daily but probably not on as deep a level as the likes of you and LeicsMac.

Some days I’m convinced it’s all been mapped out for us in advance and I feel fatalistic, but then I get lazy and just wait for things to happen.

Then other days I’m convinced we’ve got free will and it’s all about taking action and ‘making things happen’ through hard work and personal responsibility.

And while I’m lost in my head thinking about all this, I watch and admire people who just live in the moment and find joy in the here and now.

 

 

 

Absolutely. I often wrestle with the opposite too, that free will is the scarier option - that if it’s all pre-planned or random and the universe is so huge then we have no control over it and all our mistakes, no matter how huge, don’t even register on the universal scale and will all be forgotten within a blink of an eye after we die anyway so may as well make the most of the ride while we’re here and accept our mistakes and faults, no matter how big. But then if it’s free will, we have a conscious responsibility to society which we have to uphold, which is kind of scarier to live up to in a way. 
 

Kurzgestadt (the channel I posted which is a great science YouTube channel), also posted something similar about how sometimes feeling small and meaningless can help set you free 

 

 

[leicsmac]

https://spacenews.com/chinese-rocket-stage-breaks-up-into-cloud-of-more-than-700-pieces-of-space-debris/

 

HELSINKI — A Chinese Long March 6A rocket’s upper stage has fragmented into a cloud of over 700 pieces of space debris, adding to concerns about long-term orbital safety.

 

China launched the Long March 6A rocket Aug. 6 from Taiyuan spaceport carrying a first batch of 18 flat panel Qianfan (“Thousand Sails”) satellites to 800-kilometer-altitude polar orbit.

 

The rocket’s upper stage, having been modified for restarts to deploy multiple satellites, was then noted to have created a field of at least 50 pieces of debris Aug. 7 by Slingshot Aerospace, a space-tracking and data analytics firm.

 

Well, that's not great.

[Daggers]

On 06/08/2024 at 13:33, Sampson said:

Absolutely. I often wrestle with the opposite too, that free will is the scarier option - that if it’s all pre-planned or random and the universe is so huge then we have no control over it and all our mistakes, no matter how huge, don’t even register on the universal scale and will all be forgotten within a blink of an eye after we die anyway so may as well make the most of the ride while we’re here and accept our mistakes and faults, no matter how big. But then if it’s free will, we have a conscious responsibility to society which we have to uphold, which is kind of scarier to live up to in a way. 
 

Kurzgestadt (the channel I posted which is a great science YouTube channel), also posted something similar about how sometimes feeling small and meaningless can help set you free 

 

 

Welcome to my nihilistic world...

 

 

[SpacedX]

The Perseids peak tonight and tomorrow night. Try to find an area that has a wide view of the sky, away from light pollution (challenging in itself unless you live in the countryside), look in an Easterly direction and be mindful that peripheral vision is more sensitive under low-light conditions than central vision. Over the years I have been fortunate to have witnessed the most brilliant displays, including a fireball which is possibly a once in a lifetime event. The Perseids have bigger particles than a lot of other meteor showers. 

[Free Falling Foxes]

Liquid water found on Mars.

[SpacedX]

11 hours ago, Free Falling Foxes said:

Liquid water found on Mars.

Mid crust - and so not accessible, but in addition to minerals, terrain, and features such as ancient dry lake beds and deltas it provides more confirmation what the climate was once like before Mars lost its atmosphere. if the water-rich layer now detected deep below the surface were to prove to be consistent around the entire planet, there would be enough water to fill these ancient oceans in spite of that lost into space through evaporation. 

[The Bear]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/16/china-generating-enough-clean-energy-match-uk-entire-electricity-output

 

The Chinese don't do things by halves. Fair play to them. If only other world leaders were as decisive as them.

[leicsmac]

2 hours ago, The Bear said:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/16/china-generating-enough-clean-energy-match-uk-entire-electricity-output

 

The Chinese don't do things by halves. Fair play to them. If only other world leaders were as decisive as them.

Just goes to show how different governmental systems are better (or worse) at dealing with different problems and there is no one size fits all solution for policymaking going forward, despite some folks saying one system or another is always better than the others. Adaptation (thanks Darwin) in this and other areas is the only method of survival going forwards.

 

The Chinese approach to necessary long term projects like this one is something the rest of the world could learn from.

[dsr-burnley]

3 hours ago, The Bear said:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/16/china-generating-enough-clean-energy-match-uk-entire-electricity-output

 

The Chinese don't do things by halves. Fair play to them. If only other world leaders were as decisive as them.

If only the Chinese could match the UK's record on cutting down fossil fuels.  You'd think from the tone of the Guardian article that the UK wasn't interested in cutting fossil fuel power generation.

 

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-electricity-from-fossil-fuels-drops-to-lowest-level-since-1957/

 

Edited 17 August by dsr-burnley

[leicsmac]

34 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

If only the Chinese could match the UK's record on cutting down fossil fuels.  You'd think from the tone of the Guardian article that the UK wasn't interested in cutting fossil fuel power generation.

 

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-electricity-from-fossil-fuels-drops-to-lowest-level-since-1957/

 

Is there a reason to suspect that they're not (willfully), as opposed to being slightly behind the curve compared to the UK and closing fast?

 

YMMV, but speaking personally I think the Grauniad is rather reflecting on the tone of both complacency ("we don't need to worry about climate change, the biggest contributors are elsewhere") and apparent superiority complex ("of course we're doing better than those *insert term for non Western country here*, and we always will") that does manifest itself in at least some talking heads on this particular matter in the UK and in other "democratic" nations.

 

The Earth doesn't care at all about our political systems apart from as a tool to make this right, after all. One world or no world.

Edited 17 August by leicsmac

[dsr-burnley]

11 hours ago, leicsmac said:

Is there a reason to suspect that they're not (willfully), as opposed to being slightly behind the curve compared to the UK and closing fast?

 

YMMV, but speaking personally I think the Grauniad is rather reflecting on the tone of both complacency ("we don't need to worry about climate change, the biggest contributors are elsewhere") and apparent superiority complex ("of course we're doing better than those *insert term for non Western country here*, and we always will") that does manifest itself in at least some talking heads on this particular matter in the UK and in other "democratic" nations.

 

The Earth doesn't care at all about our political systems apart from as a tool to make this right, after all. One world or no world.

I agree that China and India were bound to be behind the curve re. fossil fuels.  It would be completely unreasonable for the UK (and other rich nations) to expect the poorer, expanding nations to remain poor to preserve our lifestyle.  They were bound to expand fossil fuel usage dramatically.  

 

It's the tone of the Guardian article that irks me.  That newspaper seems to have an ambition to fit the character in Gilbert and Sullivan's little list song, who praises every country but his own.

[leicsmac]

31 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

I agree that China and India were bound to be behind the curve re. fossil fuels.  It would be completely unreasonable for the UK (and other rich nations) to expect the poorer, expanding nations to remain poor to preserve our lifestyle.  They were bound to expand fossil fuel usage dramatically.  

 

It's the tone of the Guardian article that irks me.  That newspaper seems to have an ambition to fit the character in Gilbert and Sullivan's little list song, who praises every country but his own.

...and China are learning from that equally rapidly, much more so than the West did (sadly India, not so much).

 

It's a fair point about the tone, but I'm minded to point out again that there is no room for nationalist rivalry on this particular matter anyway. This is not a fight just one side can "win", and if too many places think that, everyone loses, including them.