Soft Machines, by Richard Jones – Science, innovation policy, economic growth, nanotechnology

Winds of change for UK science policy

The Conservative Party plans to cut funding for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) by 20%, amounting to £6 billion over three years, reallocating the funding to military drone procurement, according to a report in Research Professional. Julia Lopez, Shadow DSIT Minister, says “we need to focus our remarkable British scientific and technological capabilities more explicitly on defence”.

We’re seeing a two-decade old cross-party consensus around science funding now breaking down. It’s notable that UKRI was a creation of the 2015 Conservative Government, with a funding increase balanced with the explicit goal of bringing the UK’s R&D programme more directly under government control. The R&D spending plans of the current government are essentially those it inherited from the 2020 Conservative Government. But, as its leader Kemi Badenoch has taken to saying, the Conservative Party is under new management now.

As I wrote a few months ago in my piece UK Science in a post-liberal world , the old consensus was for an essentially supply-side science policy, with government support focused on basic science and the support of commercialisation of university research, leading to a national R&D system dominated by research in universities to a degree that is unusual internationally.

A changing environment puts this consensus under strain. We’ve seen the return of energy geopolitics on a grand scale, a rapidly deteriorating international security situation, and potential disruption from AI. The failure of the UK economic model – with flat-lining productivity growth and huge regional economic disparities – can’t any more be ignored. National politics has fractured, with the Conservative Party overshadowed by a Reform Party bringing US-style culture war politics to the UK, and Labour threatened by a Green Party suspicious of corporate power.

Trust in science has not yet, in the UK, become politically polarised on the scale that’s currently seen in the USA. But a recent report on public trust in science, commissioned by the Wellcome Trust and carried out by the public opinion research agency More In Common, carries some warning signals. Amongst the British population, trust in science is becoming more qualified, and more uneven across the population. The most disaffected segments of the population – what More in Common call “Dissenting disruptors” and “Sceptical Scrollers” – are the most sceptical. Falling trust in science is associated with a more general pessimism about progress stalling, with worries about falling personal living standards and poor public services. Significant minorities believe that science is too closely associated with particular social and political causes, or too strongly swayed by the interests of their funders.

The latest threat to UKRI from the Conservative Party should be considered as part of a movement towards a post-liberal populism, as the Conservatives react to the threat from Reform. The wider environment here is a growing realisation that the UK does need to act on rebuilding its infrastructure, on building a sustainable and affordable energy system, and on rebuilding its defences.

How should the scientific community react to this new world? The Wellcome/More in Common report has a number of sensible recommendations, in two broad categories. Firstly, we need to do more to demonstrate the ways in which science and innovation does lead to improvements in peoples’ lives, focusing in particular on those sections of the population for whom those impacts seem the most remote. Secondly, we need to appreciate the diversity of perspectives and circumstances of people across the UK, many of whom (not entirely unreasonably) see science as remote, pursued by people with very different attitudes and backgrounds to them.

I would go further, though. We do need to face the facts that the drivers that are putting the science funding consensus under strain are real. We do need to demonstrate that scientific research really can be translated into higher living standards, better public services, sustainable and affordable energy, and security in a dangerous world. And we need to be clear that, if necessary, we’ll do things differently to deliver those goals.

As I described in my post UK science policy in transition, necessary changes to how UKRI organises research funding, in response to this new environment, are now happening. These will make a much clearer delineation between basic research, research to support national priorities like life sciences and defence, and support for the economy through helping innovative companies grow. If we are going to maintain political and wider public support for science, we must remember that “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.

The place of UK business in the global R&D scoreboard

My last post looked at the growth in UK government support for R&D over the last decade. But if we are interested in restoring economic growth (as we should be, given the ongoing economic stagnation that the UK has been suffering), it’s R&D carried out by businesses that is more immediately relevant in terms of its direct effect on productivity growth, through the development of new, high value goods and services, and through making existing processes more efficient. This post takes a look at R&D done by UK-owned businesses, taking a snapshot in the year 2024.

First, I’ll pose two similar-looking questions. First, how much R&D do UK-owned businesses do? Second, how much R&D is done by businesses in the UK?

The best answer we have to the first question – how much R&D do UK-owned businesses do? – is £32.1 billion. This comes from the EU R&D scoreboard, which uses publicly available data to list and rank the world’s top 2000 R&D performing companies. According to the scoreboard, the world total of business spending on R&D from these 2000 companies in 2024 was £1.2 trillion, so the share of this total done by UK companies is about 2.7%.

For the second question – how much R&D is done by businesses in the UK? – we turn to the ONS’s survey of Business Enterprise R&D, the BERD survey. For 2024, this gives a total business R&D spend of £55.6 billion.

The UK’s big bet on science and technology

Between 2015 and 2023, UK government direct spending on research and development increased by 22% in real terms, and the current government plans a further 12% increase by 2029. If one includes the subsidy for private sector R&D represented by the R&D tax credit (and one should) the total real terms increase in government support for R&D is even larger. From the low point of austerity, in 2011, to 2023, the real terms increase was 65%, a remarkable – and, perhaps, little appreciated – figure in the context of difficult fiscal circumstances faced by those governments. Underlying this increase is a broad consensus about the importance of R&D for economic growth, and the need for the state to invest in R&D, to correct the market failure that means that the private sector will invest less in R&D than is societally optimal.

Given this economic motivation for investing in R&D, it’s inevitable that people will ask whether the increase in government spending on R&D has resulted in a measurable increase in economic growth. So far, the answer seems to be that it hasn’t, with the UK’s economic stagnation continuing well into its second decade. This is an important context for the changes in science policy I discussed in my earlier post – UK science policy in transition. The question that’s going to be asked is, when is the UK’s big bet on science and technology going to pay off?

UK government spending on R&D since 1986, expressed in real (inflation corrected) terms. Sources: spending out-turns: UK government statistics, reduced to constant 2023 £s using GDP deflator. Plans: 2025 Comprehensive Spending Review, corrected for anticipated inflation using OBR inflation predictions.

AI and the problems of protein folding

The problem of predicting protein structure from sequence has been definitively solved by the AI programme AlphaFold, winning a well-deserved Nobel prize for its developers. But structure prediction is just one of at least four different problems of protein folding. Here I introduce four different problems of protein folding: protein structure prediction, the nature of the protein folding transition, the role of proteins that don’t fold at all, and the importance of protein misfolding, particularly for diseases like Alzheimer’s disease.

The most important contributions yet made by machine learning and artificial intelligence to science so far are unquestionably DeepMind’s AlphaFold programmes for protein structure prediction, for which Demis Hassabis & John Jumper won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2021 (shared with David Baker, for closely related work). Proteins are linear macromolecules; each type of protein has a unique one dimensional sequence of amino acids. For many proteins, this 1d sequence encodes a unique three dimensional structure, and it’s this 3d structure which underpins the function of the protein in the operations of the living cell. AlphaFold takes the 1d sequence of a protein and predicts the 3d structure. This is the problem of protein structure prediction, outstanding for half a century, now definitively solved by AI.

UK science policy in transition

The way the UK government funds science is currently in the midst of a major transition, with the creation of a much more direct link between the priorities of the government of the day and the kind of research that it funds. A few months ago I wrote about the likely prospect of a breakdown of a long period of consensus in UK science policy – UK Science in a post-liberal world. I’m not sure whether the current changes are best thought of as the first manifestation of this breakdown of consensus, or as an attempt to make those changes in the system that are necessary to preserve it. Here I make a first attempt to set these changes in context.

Some history

UK governments have recognised the need for the State to fund scientific research since the late 19th century, and some of the principles underpinning that were articulated early in the 20th century. One innovation of that period was the Research Council – conceived as a body standing slightly apart from government, largely managed by expert scientists. The first of these was the Medical Research Council, established in 1920 as a body incorporated by a Royal Charter. Subsequently, other research councils, covering other fields of science – and social science and the humanities – were established on the same principles, and various reorganisations have taken place, but the basic model remained in place until 2017.

It is important, however, to understand that for most of this period the research supported by Research Councils amounted to only a small fraction of total government R&D. Most of this took place with the direct support of government departments, such as those responsible for agriculture, for defence and military procurement, and for atomic energy, often in government research laboratories. Going into the 1980’s, when the UK was one of the most R&D intensive countries in the world, less than 15% of government funded R&D was supported by the research councils.

Rock climbing and the economics of innovation (revisited)

The rock-climber Alex Honnold is in the news again, thanks to his live, televised ascent of a skyscraper in Taiwan. This gives me an excuse to recycle this post from October 2019. Here I explain that just because Honnold climbs without a rope, that doesn’t mean that his achievement doesn’t rely on technological progress over many decades, contrary to the claim of a well-known economist.

The rock climber Alex Honnold’s free, solo ascent of El Capitan is inspirational in many ways. For economist John Cochrane, watching the film of the ascent has prompted a blogpost: “What the success of rock climbing tells us about economic growth”. He concludes that “Free Solo is a great example of the expansion of ability, driven purely by advances in knowledge, untethered from machines.” As an amateur in both rock climbing and innovation theory, I can’t resist some comments of my own. I think it’s all a bit more complicated than Cochrane thinks. In particular his argument that Honnold’s success tells us that knowledge – and the widespread communication of knowledge – is more important than new technology in driving economic growth doesn’t really stand up.

The film “Free Solo” shows Honnold’s 2017 ascent of the 3000 ft cliff El Capitan, in the Yosemite Valley, California. The climb was done free (i.e. without the use of artificial aids like pegs to make progress), and solo – without ropes or any other aids to safety. How come, Cochrane asks, rock climbers have got so much better at climbing since El Cap’s first ascent in 1958, which took 47 days, done with “siege tactics” and every artificial aid available at the time? “There is essentially no technology involved. OK, Honnold wears modern climbing boots, which have very sticky rubber. But that’s about it. And reasonably sticky rubber has been around for a hundred years or so too.”

Hold on a moment here – no technology? I don’t think the history of climbing really bears this out. Even the exception that Cochrane allows, sticky rubber boots, is more complicated than he thinks. Continue reading “Rock climbing and the economics of innovation (revisited)”

Anglofuturism and the Shock of the Old

As the UK endures the second decade of its crisis of economic stagnation, a loose group of commentators, activists and think-tanks have emerged to argue that this stagnation isn’t inevitable, and to call for more houses and infrastructure to be built, for energy to be cheaper and more abundant, and for a restoration of the technological optimism of earlier times. It’s not an entirely homogenous movement – some call themselves “Anglofuturists”, others organise under the banners of “progress” and “abundance”. As I wrote a year ago in my piece “Taking Anglofuturism seriously”, I am sympathetic to some of the goals of this movement. I agree that our economic stagnation isn’t inevitable and that the UK’s physical infrastructure needs upgrading, I regret the failure of recent new nuclear build plans, and I think that technological innovation is a key driver of productivity growth. Yet to me there seems to be a gap in the movement between willing the ends and identifying the means, with the suggested remedy all too often coming down simply to calls to deregulate more and reform the planning laws.

There is perhaps a lesson from history here, emphasised by some comments the historian David Edgerton made in a podcast last week. The kind of nation that Anglofuturists call for looks rather like what was delivered by post-war British governments between 1950 and 1980. Then, the UK was one of the most R&D intensive economies in the world, with a cross-party consensus that technological innovation would deliver economic growth. Despite persistent national soul-searching about a ruling-class trained in the humanities, a number of scientists and engineers rose to powerful and influential positions. The world’s first nuclear power station was designed and built in just four years, following which there was a large-scale roll out of nuclear power stations. A national capability for launching satellites was developed (and subsequently abandoned). This period saw the construction of most of our current motorway network, and, as my plot shows, new houses were built at a rate that has never since been matched. In this sense there is a certain retro quality to Anglofuturism, a harking back to a time when the UK seemed to look to the future with technological self-confidence.

The decline of UK industry wasn’t caused by high energy prices, but they’re a big problem now, for what’s left of it

Energy prices in the UK have dropped back from the heights they reached following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but they remain high, both by historical standards, and in comparison with other nations. This is undoubtedly putting big strain on energy-intensive industries like chemicals and steel production, in turn putting pressure on the UK’s wider manufacturing sector. Manufacturing is already a smaller part of the economy in the UK compared to other nations, as I discussed here a few months ago.

Left axis: manufacturing share of the UK economy by GVA. Dashed line: Data from Bank of England, Millennium of Macro Data. Dotted line: Data from ONS 2025 Blue Book. Right axis: Index of industrial energy costs, excluding climate change levy, corrected for inflation with GDP deflator. Source: DESNZ.

Yet it would be a mistake to blame high energy prices for the historical decline in the importance of manufacturing. My plot compares the manufacturing share of the economy by value with an index of the real cost of energy for industry. It’s clear that manufacturing has been declining in importance in the economy for more than half a century. What’s interesting, though, is that the decade with steepest relative drop was between 1995 and 2005. Far from being a period of high energy prices, this was a period when energy prices were low and falling.

Putting fusion power on the UK grid

The UK government has a very ambitious plan for nuclear fusion, which I don’t think is widely enough known about. The plan is to build a pilot nuclear fusion plant able to deliver electrical power to the grid by 2040 – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP). The project was launched in 2019, and the current government has guaranteed funding for it at the very significant level of £500m a year for five years.

At a time when many people from different political positions agree that a big problem of the UK state is its inability to deliver big projects, this is a huge investment to build state technological capacity.

This post is a brief introduction to the STEP project. Nuclear fusion does generate some reflexive scepticism – we all know the jokes: “it’s twenty years in the future, and always will be”. I want to get beyond that, while still being realistic about the huge challenges this programme faces. I’ll describe some of the technological and engineering issues, and the approaches being proposed to overcome them.

The enduring appeal of superintelligence, superabundance, and eternal life

On “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity”, by Adam Becker.

“More Everything Forever” is well-written, scientifically authoritative, and quite fair to the protagonists, who get plenty of space to speak for themselves. But it’s decisive and convincing in its conclusions: some of the richest and most influential men in the world are motivated by a set of beliefs that are frankly unhinged – and it’s on the basis of these beliefs that resources on a huge scale are currently being allocated.

In 2005, I was invited to a “Foresight Vision Weekend” in San Francisco, to talk about my view that nanotechnology should be more like biology, rather than the mechanical engineering-inspired vision of Eric Drexler. There, I met some of the luminaries of transhumanism – Eric Drexler, Aubrey de Grey, Josh Hall, Ralph Merkle – but despite the general cordiality of my reception, it was uncomfortable to be amongst a large congregation whose belief system I didn’t share. The prevailing view was very much that a brisk engineering approach would soon lead, via Drexlerian nanotechnology, to a world of extraordinary material abundance, in which disease and old age would have been eliminated, and humanity would have merged with, or been surpassed by, intelligent machines. Accelerating technological change was about to change everything – “The Singularity was Near”, to quote the title of an influential and best-selling book by Ray Kurzweil. What struck me was the range of participants at the meeting – some were the kind of enthusiasts that some at the time dismissed as “bloggers in their mothers’ basements”, but amongst them were dot com millionaires, senior figures from the military-industrial complex, and the odd congressman.

It’s this world, 20 years on, that Becker describes. The world he describes is now more influential and politically dominant than I could ever have imagined. Where in 2005, there were dot com millionaires, now there are individuals commanding hundreds of billions of dollars, directly influencing the most powerful government in the world, and where in 2005 there were congressmen, now there is a Vice-President. The “Silicon Valley worldview” is approaching hegemonic status amongst the people who matter … or think they ought to be the only people who matter. And the Singularity remains at the centre of this world view – what Becker calls “the ideology of technological salvation”.

This ideology comes with variations, but all of them have in common three principles. They assume that all human problems can be reduced to problems of technology, and that solving those technological problems will be immensely profitable. But profit is not enough – an important feature of these worldviews is that they offer their adepts transcendence through technology, allowing them to break through human limitations like ageing and death [1].