Richard Jones – Page 2 – Soft Machines, by Richard Jones

AI and the manufacturing firm of the future

How will artificial intelligence change the world of manufacturing? Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has no doubt that the effect will be transformational [1]:

“If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.”

It’s difficult to know what to make of this vision. Taking it at face value, it seems to represent a profoundly unimaginative view of the future, in which there is a straight replacement of workers in factories by humanoid robots. Factory automation has developed hugely since my brief period as a production line worker in 1980, but this hasn’t occurred by a one-for-one replacement of people by robots.

Most people have seen pictures of modern car factories, with robot arms carrying out repeated operations like welding with great precision. But, as Tim Minshall explains in his excellent book on manufacturing [2], robots are just one example of the many devices that can carry out physical operations in an automated factory. If you are automating a chemical factory, you don’t do it by getting a humanoid robot to open the valves and stir the tanks. The most sophisticated factories that currently exist – the chip fabrication facilities that produce the GPUs that underpin AI, as well as the CPUs in our phones and computers – are almost entirely automated. In the fab, a silicon wafer goes through hundreds of complex process steps without being handled by a human – but the robots that move the wafers from tool to tool run on wheels, not legs.

So is Altman just saying that automation makes capital goods cheaper, and that leads to a self-reinforcing process of increasing productivity? That’s certainly true, but it’s a process that is neither new, nor having much to do with large language models or generative AI.

Ownership, Control, National capability: learning lessons from the UK’s nuclear new build debacle

In 2013, I visited the Headquarters of Hitachi in Tokyo, with Sheffield University’s VC, Sir Keith Burnett. Sheffield had recently built the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Centre (NAMRC) – part of the High Value Catapult Network, funded to support the UK’s ambitious new nuclear build programme at the time. Our mission was to try and persuade Hitachi that NAMRC could help them build a UK supply chain and develop the nuclear skills they would need to deliver their project of building two new nuclear reactors at Wylfa, on Anglesey. The last nuclear power station to be built in the UK, Sizewell B, was finished in 1995; in the intervening years much national nuclear capability in the nuclear sector had been lost, and, at a time when there were high ambitions for the UK’s new nuclear build programme, NAMRC had been established to help rebuild that national capability.

In Tokyo, we met the head of Hitachi’s nuclear division, and the head of Hitachi Europe. We were very courteously received (perhaps helped by the presence of the UK’s Ambassador to Japan, who had been helpful in facilitating the meeting). We had a very interesting discussion about their reactor design – the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor – and their ambitions for rolling out this technology across the world. But on our primary mission, in the most polite way, we were completely rebuffed. It was Hitachi’s technology, the UK government wasn’t paying for it, so why would they want our help to build a UK supply chain? They had a perfectly good one of their own.

In the event, Hitachi is not going to build any new nuclear reactors in Wylfa, or anywhere else in the UK. In 2019, Hitachi mothballed its plans, definitively pulling out in 2020, citing a failure to reach a financially satisfactory agreement with the UK government. It seems highly likely that, in making this decision, Hitachi reflected on the experience of the UK’s first new nuclear project, the two European Pressurised Water Reactors (EPRs) being built at Hinkley Point C, in Somerset – a dismal story of cost overruns and long delays.

UK Science in a post-liberal world

I took part in a panel discussion at the Royal Society last Thursday 20th November, with the topic ‘The future role of the state in a changing R&D landscape’. Here is a slightly expanded version of my opening remarks. My intention was to be provocative; other more optimistic views are available (and were presented by the other panel members).

The UK has seen a long period of consensus about the role of the state in the R&D landscape – and that consensus has actually been very positive for academic science. I think it’s not improbable, even quite likely, that this consensus will come to an end in the next few years. This will have huge consequences for the R&D landscape, potentially very negative, and I think it’s really important that we start to think this through.

The consensus

There’s been a great deal of continuity in UK science policy over the last twenty years. The 2004 10 Year Science and Innovation Investment Framework set out the foundations of an approach that has persisted through governments of different flavours, overseen by a series of influential science ministers – from Lord Sainsbury, through Lords Willetts, to Lord Vallance.

This is fundamentally a supply side science policy, with a focus on correcting market failure. Government supports basic science, ensures a pipeline of skilled people (including through skilled migration), and supports commercialisation of university research. There’s been some gradual change – a bumpy path to a more explicit industrial strategy since Mandelson’s return to government in 2008, to the current fully developed version. But the basic assumptions remain the same.

The consequences have been significant real terms increases in government R&D budgets, and a system dominated by research in universities.

Auguries of a breakdown

Why might we think this consensus is at risk? If we look internationally, we see the USA, often seen as the natural partners of the UK in science as in other areas, we see direct attacks on the autonomy of funding agencies, and on the position of leading research universities.

Good reasons and bad reasons for supporting manufacturing (and some uncertainties)

Manufacturing industries make a direct contribution to the UK economy worth about 8% of GDP; this has roughly halved since 1990. The UK has deindustrialised more than other wealthy developed nations; in Germany and Switzerland manufacturing still accounts for 18% of GDP. Amongst the fast-growing economies of East Asia, Korea has a manufacturing share of 24% of GDP and Singapore 16%. The world’s manufacturing behemoth is China, where manufacturing accounts for about 25% of its large and rapidly growing economy. The rise of China as a huge manufacturer and exporter mirrors the deindustrialisation of the USA, where the manufacturing share has fallen to 10% [1]. Rebuilding US manufacturing was an explicit policy goal of the Biden administration, while Trump promises “a new era of American manufacturing dominance”, and this is a key motivation for Trump’s tariff policy[2]. There is less consensus in the UK that manufacturing should be a larger share of the economy [3]; I think it should be, but recognise that many reasons advanced for this are wrong. This post is my attempt to separate good reasons from bad, and to highlight some areas of uncertainty.

It’s about value, not jobs

Clearly in the bad category is nostalgia for old-fashioned factory jobs – we should support manufacturing for the value it creates, not for the number of low level jobs it makes. Overall, as shown in my first plot, manufacturing has above average productivity, though there are marked differences between subsectors [4]. Continue reading “Good reasons and bad reasons for supporting manufacturing (and some uncertainties)”

Sheila Howell Jones (1934-2025)

Sheila Jones, my mother, died on Friday 31 October 2025. Born and raised in West Wales, she spent much of adulthood in England, as a primary teacher in a variety of schools. She returned to Wales when her husband, Robbie Jones, became a priest in the Anglican Church in Wales, finally moving to Derbyshire to be close to her son’s family.

Sheila Jones, née Lewis, was born in the Pembrokeshire village of Letterston. Her father, John Lewis, was one of thirteen children of Arnold and Alice Lewis. Arnold Lewis was an agricultural merchant – and, by all accounts, something of a domestic tyrant. He assigned careers to all his sons; John was to be a priest, and was sent to train in St David’s College, Lampeter. Rebelling against this, John dropped out of theological college to become a Conservative Party activist.

The Economics Nobel, Joel Mokyr, and the UK’s changing landscape of innovation

This year’s Nobel Prize was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, for their work on the relationship between technological innovation and economic growth. The press release credits them with having “having explained innovation-driven economic growth”, which I think overstates the case – there is much that is not yet understood about the relationship between innovation and economic growth. But the importance of their contributions is not in doubt – and it’s particularly welcome that both Mokyr and Aghion have laid out their arguments in fascinating and accessible books. What makes the award particularly timely is that we are now in a period where economic growth has notably slowed, despite apparently continuing technological progress. As the press release states, “perhaps most importantly, the laureates have taught us that sustained growth cannot be taken for granted”.

What makes a manufacturing superpower?

Some reflections on Breakneck: China’s quest to engineer the future by Dan Wang.

Dan Wang’s new book on China is rightly getting great reviews. It’s a compelling read, engagingly written, reflecting both the author’s deep understanding of China’s developing economy, and his personal sympathy with the Chinese nation. It is admiring of Chinese achievements over the last couple of decades , while being entirely clear-eyed about the deficiencies of the political system and its human costs.

The big idea behind the book is to compare and contrast the two great powers of the world today – China and the USA, summarising that comparison in a neat formula. For Wang, China is the Engineering State, while the USA is the Lawyerly Society – and from that contrast, the complementary strengths and weaknesses of the two nations can be derived.

What kind of state is China? According to Wang, it is a “Leninist Technocracy with Grand Opera tendencies”.

Another Modern Industrial Strategy

This is a slightly expanded version of an article published last week in Research Professional – The latest industrial strategy has made choices

Last week’s Industrial Strategy Policy Paper is the latest chapter in the chequered history of UK Industrial Strategies. For nearly three decades after Thatcher’s ascent to power, the UK’s strategy was not to have an industrial strategy, which was a concept associated with money-losing supersonic airliners and cars with square steering wheels. But that conventional wisdom has been challenged by a global financial crisis and nearly two decades of economic stagnation, so after a number of stops and starts over the last decade, a fully developed Industrial Strategy has now arrived. Continue reading “Another Modern Industrial Strategy”

The civic university in hard times

Universities in the UK at the moment are broke and unloved. In these circumstances, the temptation is going to be to withdraw to “core business” – teaching students, and for research intensives, doing the kind of research that pushes the institution up the international league tables, to attract the overseas students whose fees prop the whole system up. In a period of retrenchment, it might be tempting for managements to see supporting the role of universities in their communities as a dispensable luxury. I think this would be a profound mistake.

This isn’t to understate the difficulty UK universities find themselves in. Around three quarters of them are expected to be in deficit next year, and about a hundred are now actively restructuring or making staff redundant. This follows a 40% real terms erosion in fees for home students, and a business model, reliant on growing overseas student numbers, which has become both politically unpopular and exposed to geopolitical risk. The latest proposal – of a levy on international student fees – is both another financial blow, and a symbol of the way universities find themselves on the wrong side of culture war discourse. What’s quite clear is that, whatever recognition there might be in government of the university sector’s troubles, the sector is simply not a high priority for a government facing difficult issues on all sides. Continue reading “The civic university in hard times”