Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, there is surely general agreement of the worthwhileness of ARIA’s goals. What is less clear is whether the small, stand-alone administrative construct conceived in the Bill is optimal, or indeed necessary, for achieving these goals, especially given the multi-layered and complex structure for science governance that already exists.

Not long ago, we had the major reorganisation of science funding that led to UKRI, introducing a layer of administration above the established research councils, such as the MRC. We have also had Innovate UK, and this year two high-level advisory bodies have been set up to oversee all this, adding yet another layer to the hierarchy. Surely we should be cautious about establishing another entity before these changes are bedded in and prove their worth. As the Minister said, 50 times more funds are spent on existing institutions than are envisaged for ARIA. The priority should surely be to ensure the maximum efficiency and minimal bureaucratic problems in these other organisations.

Confidence and high morale drive creativity, innovation and risk-taking. This is true in blue-skies science and equally true in the often greater challenges of the development of new products or businesses. A motive for ARIA is the perception that existing institutions cannot offer this, but the best institutions still do—I am lucky to work in one. But even in these privileged environments, there are dark problems ahead. My younger colleagues seem even more preoccupied with grant cuts, proposal writing, job security and suchlike. Prospects of breakthroughs will plummet if such concerns prey unduly on the minds of even the best young researchers. Worse still, the profession will not then attract the most ambitious talent from the next generation, nor draw in foreign talents. Many of us worry that the UK’s traditional strengths are consequently in jeopardy.

However, these negative perceptions can be reversed. I will mention two specific gripes that can be addressed. The first is that bodies that allocate public funds focus on ever more detailed performance indicators to quantify the output. This has the best of intentions, but its actual consequences are often the reverse: to constrain long-term thinking and prevent even a minority from having the privilege of fully focusing on long-term problems. The second bugbear is the REF, which is not only burdensome for universities but offering perverse incentives to researchers that discourage risk-taking.

The difference in pay-off between the very best research and the merely good is, by any realistic measure, hundreds of per cent. What is crucial in giving taxpayers enhanced value for money is maximising the chance of the big breakthroughs by backing the judgment of those with the best credentials and supporting them appropriately. Research universities do this and should be cherished. They benefit the nation through direct knowledge transfer from their labs to industry and through the quality of the students they feed into all walks of life. Moreover, high-profile academics can seize on a promising idea from anywhere in the world and run with it. Let us not forget that, despite the UK’s strength, at least 90% of the best ideas come from the rest of the world.

Despite these strengths, our universities are not always the most propitious environments for projects that demand intense and sustained effort. Dedicated laboratories such as the LMB are, in some contexts, preferable. Indeed, our national strength in biomedical sciences stems from the existence of laboratories allowing full-time long-term research, which is getting ever harder in today’s universities. Moreover, UK government funding is massively supplemented by the Wellcome Trust, the cancer charities and a strong pharmaceutical industry. To ensure effective exploitation of new discoveries, research institutions must be complemented by organisations, whether in the public or private sector, that can offer adequate manufacturing capability when needed. This fortunate concatenation certainly proved its worth in the recent pandemic. Government and private laboratories are crucial in health, plant science and energy. We may need more of them, and also more innovative ways perhaps of ensuring that IP generated here is optimally exploited.

However, given this complex ecology, do we need an ARIA organisation to achieve ARIA’s aims? This does not seem clear. ARIA’s proponents think that UKRI’s bureaucratic features are chronic—that we must be fatalistic about this and offer a lucky few the chance to bypass it. Indeed, UKRI has a very broad mission and is working hard to reduce bureaucracy, but much of it is imposed by government regulations. Can the Minister tell us why there could not be within UKRI a separate fund for supporting some projects in the ARIA style via a ring-fenced part of its budget that was less constrained by Cabinet Office and Treasury controls, which slow things up and constrain experimentation in funding allocation mechanisms? Could the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, a pan-UKRI programme, also achieve some of ARIA’s goals if bureaucratic constraints on it were loosened?

Finally, retaining our scientific standing is crucial. The UK will decline economically unless it can ensure that some of the key creative ideas of the 21st century germinate here and, even more, are exploited here. Unless we get smarter, we will get poorer.

Square Kilometre Array Observatory (Immunities and Privileges) Order 2020

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Monday 14th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister’s statement should surely be welcomed and uncontroversial. I have no specific involvement to declare, but as Astronomer Royal I am probably one of the few Members of this House familiar with the SKA. I will therefore supplement what the Minister said by outlining for a few minutes the project’s international significance, why the UK’s central role is especially welcome and why this decision has broader long-term benefits extending beyond the science itself.

Astronomy is the grandest environmental science. We are trying to discover the whole “zoo” of objects the cosmos contains—galaxies, stars, planets, black holes, et cetera. Just as Darwin showed how we and our biosphere evolved from the first life on the young earth about 4 billion years ago, we are trying to go back further and trace how the solar system and all the atoms in it emerged from some mysterious beginning nearly 14 billion years ago.

We can also learn new basic physics by observing phenomena where nature has, as it were, created conditions and done experiments we could never simulate in the lab. Within a decade, incidentally, we can observe planets around other stars to check whether they might harbour life. This subject has become a “big science” advanced by international consortia—indeed, in optical astronomy the European Southern Observatory, to which we in the UK belong, has a world lead. It has the biggest and best optical telescope currently and the one now being built will also be a world-beater.

Moreover, other kinds of radiation, not just optical but radio waves, reveal just as much as visible light. Indeed, much of the gas in the universe is hydrogen and radiates only in the radio band. Ever since the 1950s, the UK has been an international leader in radio astronomy, not least because radio waves are not stopped by clouds and rain.

However, there is a fundamental constraint. To get a sharp image of the radio sky would require a dish far bigger than those at Jodrell Bank and elsewhere—literally miles across—which is obviously out of the question. But there is another way to get sharp images. The radiation gathered from an array of separate dishes can be combined to create a map of the radio sky as sharp as a single radio dish the size of the earth.

The SKA exploits this amazing technique, which incidentally was first developed by Martin Ryle in Cambridge in the 1960s. It will comprise hundreds of dishes, with a total surface area of a square kilometre—hence its name—but these dishes will be spread over a large geographical region. Perhaps the biggest challenge, to which the Minister alluded, is the huge computer power needed to combine and process the data flow from all the dishes in the array.

Such an array cannot be built in Britain. It needs large, open and sparsely populated areas. After years of international discussion, two optimal sites were found in the southern hemisphere which have scientific and geopolitical advantages. Half the array will be concentrated in remote pastoral areas of Western Australia, though some outlying dishes in that array will spread right across the continent.

The other half will be in South Africa, centred in a region of the Northern Cape known as the Karoo. Nearly 200 dishes will be concentrated in a region 100 miles across, but some outliers will spread further away into eight other African countries: Ghana, Zambia, Madagascar, Botswana, Namibia, Kenya, Mauritius and Mozambique. South Africa is already a major player in astronomy, having prioritised it for decades. To quote the relevant South African Minister:

“We are determined to ensure the success of what will be the first ever large global research infrastructure hosted in Africa”.


Participation in the SKA project has significantly strengthened South Africa’s data science capabilities, enabling it to close the gap with developed economies.

So much for the background. The SKA hardware is concentrated in two southern countries, but 15 or more nations are contributing, so it needs a governance structure established through international treaties similar to those governing two other sciences that require costly international facilities and multinational partnerships: CERN, the particle accelerator in Geneva, and the European Space Agency. I should add that the SKA is about 10 times cheaper than CERN.

The global headquarters will be the legal entity responsible for constructing and operating the telescopes in the southern hemisphere. The convention was signed, as the Minister said, in 2019 by Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the UK. Other member nations plan to join and contribute financially and via their expertise.

It is fitting that the world’s future largest radio telescope, the SKA, will have its headquarters at Jodrell Bank—a site recently granted UNESCO world heritage status to mark its pioneering contributions to radio astronomy and the iconic telescope, now called the Lovell Telescope, which was once the world’s largest single dish in radio astronomy. Lovell’s great telescope, incidentally, was commissioned in the 1950s. It has had several updates and is now more than 60 years old, but it is still probing cosmic objects whose very existence was unknown when it was built and, by looking at pairs of neutron stars, conducting some of the most precise tests of fundamental physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Likewise, there is every hope that the SKA will, via periodic upgrades which will deploy computational power beyond today’s conceptual horizon, spearhead cosmic exploration throughout much of the 21st century. It is a benign project that will have a special role in stimulating IT and data-handling in Africa and in the other member countries. It will benefit all participating states, and their number is likely to grow. It is therefore especially welcome for the UK to have a pivotal role, which will be a technological boost to us in this country as well as a boost to our international collaboration. We should surely welcome this decision today.

Science Research Funding in Universities (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB) [V]]

Our research universities are major assets because of the collective expertise of their faculties and the consequent quality of the graduates they feed into all walks of life. They are a seedbed for new ideas, some of which have major potential impact, but our top institutions will not retain their standing unless they continue to attract top talent from this country and abroad. Some nerds—I am one of them—will become researchers come what may but a world-class university cannot survive on just these weirdos. It must attract a share of ambitious young people with flexible talent—the kind who are savvy about their options and increasingly associate academia with uncertain prospects, bureaucracy and undue financial sacrifices, as measured by this report.

Even if we continue to generate 10% of the world’s best science, 90% of clever new ideas still germinate elsewhere, so we should not overfocus. The system as a whole must retain enough across-the-board expertise to sustain a “watching brief” across all global science, and thereby seize on a new idea from anywhere and run with it.

Achieving the social and economic benefits of research is a prolonged process. The inventors of lasers in the 1960s used ideas that Einstein had developed decades earlier; they could not themselves foresee that their invention would be used in eye surgery and in DVDs. Likewise, the pay-offs from, for instance, quantum computing and graphene still lie ahead.

Research universities are not optimised to spearhead long-term R&D, especially when they are constrained by perverse incentives such as the REF. That is why it is good that they are embedded in an ecosystem of small companies, NGOs and so on; that is why the catapult centres were set up. Government research establishments provide, in some areas, valuable long-term programmes. Indeed, such establishments already exist for fusion research, biomedicine and environmental science, but we need more. For instance, the new Faraday Institution for battery research—a welcome step—could be the nucleus of a larger venture, meshing public and private funds and encompassing other energy technologies.

There is an especially compelling case for prioritising energy R&D. Without innovation, we will not meet our 2050 net-zero target, but that in itself cuts global emissions by less than 2%. It is more important that these innovations could have a benign multiplier effect and perhaps accelerate the developing world’s efforts to leapfrog to clean energy. Then—I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, would approve of this—we would reduce global emissions by far more than 2% and help the developing world.

Likewise, our leadership in plant science could facilitate the switch to the sustainably intensive agriculture that is needed to feed the world’s 9 billion people by 2050. It is hard to envisage a more inspiring challenge for young scientists than providing food and energy for the developing world. We need to ensure that these scientists are educated, motivated and supported. Our schools, universities, and high-tech businesses—supplemented by national laboratories—must all match the international best if we are to prosper.

Space Science and Technology

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, the Americans committed 4% of the federal Budget to Apollo. Had that level of spend been sustained, there would have been footprints on Mars by now. But once that race against the Russians was won, there was no imperative to sustain that massive effort, so Apollo remains, half a century later, the high point of manned spaceflight.

However, space activity has burgeoned. We depend routinely on orbiting satellites for communication, satnav, environmental monitoring, surveillance and weather forecasting—and for science. NASA’s budget remains much larger than that of the European Space Agency, but it is mostly spent sustaining America’s pre-eminence in manned flight. On the unmanned front, we should proclaim more loudly that ESA has parity. The successes of Rosetta, Planck, Gaia and Copernicus—all strongly involving the UK—fully match what NASA has achieved. We can be proud of Europe’s publicly funded space effort and should remain key players.

In parallel, the Government should foster commercial projects, supporting launch sites and research and development. They should also promote educational ventures—this is where Leicester and the Open University deserve special mention. We must not forget the influence on young people of such enterprises. Space is second only to dinosaurs in fascinating the young. In coming decades, the entire solar system will be explored by fleets of tiny automated probes, interacting with each other like a flock of birds. Robotic fabricators will construct in space solar energy collectors, telescopes and industrial-scale structures.

Will there be a role for humans? The practical role for them gets ever weaker with each advance in robots, sensors and miniaturisation. It is therefore hard to justify massive funding by taxpayers. Manned spaceflight should be left to privately funded adventurers prepared to participate in a cut-price programme far riskier and far cheaper than western nations could impose on publicly supported civilians. The phrase “space tourism” should be avoided. It lulls people into believing that such ventures are low risk. If that is the perception, the inevitable accidents will be traumatic. These exploits must be sold as dangerous sports or intrepid exploration. By 2100, thrill seekers in the mould of Sir Ranulph Fiennes may have established bases on the moon and Mars. Elon Musk of SpaceX says he wants to die on Mars, but not on impact. We should cheer on these enthusiasts.

We should never expect mass emigration from the earth. Here I disagree with Musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking. It is a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from the earth’s problems. Coping with climate change is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic. There is no planet B for ordinary, risk-averse people. We must cherish our earthly home.

Climate Change

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, climate science is intricate, but despite the uncertainties it offers two messages that most agree on. First, even within the next decade or two, regional disruptions to weather patterns and more extreme weather will aggravate pressures on food and water and enhance migration pressure. Secondly, under a global “business as usual” scenario we cannot rule out, later in the century, really catastrophic warming and tipping points triggering long-term trends like the melting of Greenland’s icecap, rendering some regions uninhabitable. There are diverse views on the policy response to these messages. Some economists apply a “standard” discount rate and in effect write off what happens after 2050. They therefore assign lower priority to combating climate change than to shorter-term ways of helping the world’s poor. But others argue that standard discounting is inappropriate here and that we should pay an “insurance premium” now to protect future generations against the worst-case scenarios.

As a parenthesis, I would note that there is one policy context where an essentially zero discount rate is applied, and that is to radioactive waste disposal, for which the depositories are required to prevent leakage for 10,000 years. That is somewhat ironic, given that we cannot plan the rest of our energy policy even 30 years ahead. Consider this analogy. Let us suppose that astronomers had tracked an asteroid and calculated that it would hit the earth in 2100, 80 years from now—not with certainty but with, say, a 10% likelihood. Would we relax and say that it is a problem that can be set on one side for 50 years? People will then be richer and it may turn out that it is going to miss us anyway. I do not think we would. There would surely be a consensus that we should start straight away and find ways to deflect it or to mitigate its effects.

The pledges made at the Paris and Poland conferences are a positive step, but they are not enough , especially if there is an aim to limit the expected temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. The recent report of the Energy Transmissions Commission, co-chaired by Adair Turner, was bullish about achieving the requisite global transition to zero carbon within 40 years. An extra investment of $900 billion per annum would be needed globally. That is a stupendous figure but it is only 0.6% of world GDP over the next four decades. However, that is still of course a massive challenge. Politicians will not gain much resonance by advocating unwelcome lifestyle changes now when the benefits accrue mainly to distant parts of the world and are decades in the future.

Achieving the energy transition will require accelerated R&D into all forms of low-carbon energy generation and other technologies where parallel progress is crucial, especially storage—batteries, compressed air, pumped storage, flywheels, et cetera—sequestration and smart grids. This scenario offers a win-win option for the UK. Implementing our Climate Change Act is important, although it will cut global emissions by less than 2%. But we produce more than 10% of the world’s best scientific research, and we can strive for a global lead and aspire to make far more than a 2% difference to energy R&D.

Solar and wind are front-runners, but other methods have geographical niches. One of ours is tidal energy. Our topography induces especially large-amplitude tides on Britain’s west coast. We should therefore explore tidal barrages and lagoons. Because of intermittency in sun and wind, the long-term goal should be continental-scale DC grids carrying solar energy from Morocco and Spain to less sunny northern Europe and east-west to smooth peak demand over different time zones—perhaps all the way along the belt and road to China.

It is surely worth while for the UK, given its traditional expertise in nuclear energy, to explore a variety of fourth-generation concepts, which could prove cheaper, more standardised and safer than existing nuclear designs. The faster these clean technologies advance, the sooner their prices will fall so that they become affordable to, for instance, India, where the health of the poor is now jeopardised by smoky stoves burning wood and dung, and where there would otherwise be pressure to build coal-fired power stations. It would be hard to imagine a more inspiring goal for our young engineers than to spearhead improved clean and affordable energy.

How can the long-term global goal of a low-carbon world get sustained political traction? How can it compete for political attention with urgent local issues? It can happen, just as other social attitudes have been changed in the past, if individuals with mega-influence can mould public opinion. I have two examples. The papal encyclical Laudato si’ had huge impact, eased the path to consensus at the Paris climate conference in 2015 and gained the Pope a standing ovation at the UN. This week our great secular guru, David Attenborough, has espoused the climate cause at Davos.

The young are far more activist, unsurprisingly, as they can hope to live to the end of the century. Their campaigning is welcome. Their commitment gives ground for hope. To give a parochial instance, I was especially pleased when some of our Cambridge students took an initiative that led to setting up the APPG for Future Generations. Today’s actions—or inactions—on environment and energy will resonate centuries ahead. They will determine the fate of the entire biosphere and how future generations live. We in this country can genuinely take a lead.

Artificial Intelligence (Select Committee Report)

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I add my appreciation of this timely and balanced report and welcome the chance to debate it here today. Machine learning, enabled by the ever-increasing number-crunching power of computers, is a potentially stupendous break- through. It allows machines to gain expertise, not just in game playing but in recognising faces, translating between languages, managing networks, and so forth, without being programmed in detail.

Moreover, AI is still at the baby stage compared to what its proponents expect in coming decades. Twenty years ago, few people envisioned the extent to which smartphones and IT have now changed the pattern of our lives, so it would be rash to predict how transformative AI could be in the next 20 years. Already, AI can cope with complex, fast-changing networks, such as traffic flows or electric grids. It could enable the Chinese to gather and process all the information needed to run an efficient planned economy that Marx could only have dreamed of. In science, its capability to explore zillions of options could allow it to find recipes for better drugs or for material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at ordinary temperatures.

But the implications for society, as we have heard, are already ambivalent. If there is a bug in the software of an AI system, it is currently not always possible to track it down. This is likely to create public concern if the system’s “decisions” have potentially grave consequences for individuals. If we are sentenced to a term in prison, recommended for surgery or even given a poor credit rating, we would expect the reasons to be accessible to us and contestable by us. If such decisions were entirely delegated to an algorithm, we would be entitled to feel uneasy, even if presented with compelling evidence that, on average, the machines make better decisions than the humans they have usurped.

Integration of databases by AI systems has an impact on everyday life and will become more intrusive and pervasive. Records of all our movements, our interactions with others, our health, and our financial transactions will be “in the cloud”, managed by a multinational quasi-monopoly. The data may be used for benign reasons—for instance, for medical research—but its availability to internet companies is already shifting the balance of power from Governments to the commercial sector.

There will also be other concerns—about privacy, for instance. Are you happy if a random stranger sitting near you in a restaurant or on a train can, via facial recognition, identify you and invade your privacy, or if fake videos of you become so convincing that visual evidence can no longer be trusted, or if a machine knows enough about you to compose emails that seem to come from you? The report rightly raises concerns about these matters.

A report published in February, prepared with input from my colleagues at Cambridge and Oxford, was entitled The Malicious Use of AI: Forecasting, Prevention and Mitigation. Its focus was on the near-term, and it highlighted three concerns: AI could allow existing types of cyberattack to be achieved with less effort, and therefore by more actors; by use of, for instance, co-ordinated drones, AI could facilitate physical attacks, and cyberattacks could occur on the software of driverless cars; and AI could allow more effective targeting of misinformation, denial of information, surveillance and so forth. Overall, the arms race between cyber- criminals and those trying to defend against them will become still more expensive and vexatious with the advent of AI.

The academic and commercial communities now speak with one voice in highlighting the need to promote “robust and beneficial” AI, but tensions are already emerging, as AI moves from the research and development phase to being a potentially massive money-spinner for global companies.

The committee’s report emphasises the incipient shifts in the nature of work—an issue addressed in several excellent books by economists and social scientists as well as by the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, and others today. Clearly, machines will take over much of the work of manufacturing and retail distribution. They can replace many white-collar jobs: routine legal work, such as conveyancing; accountancy; computer coding; medical diagnostics and even surgery. Many professionals will find their hard-earned skills in less demand. In contrast, some skilled service sector jobs—for instance, plumbing and gardening—will be among the hardest to automate.

The digital revolution generates enormous wealth for an elite group of innovators and for global companies, but preserving a healthy society will surely require redistribution of that wealth. There is talk of using it to provide a universal income. But it is surely better when all who are capable of doing so can perform socially useful work rather than receiving a handout. Indeed, to create a humane society, Governments should vastly enhance the number and status of those who care for the old, the young and the sick. There are currently far too few of these people, and they are poorly paid, inadequately esteemed, and insecure in their positions. It is true that robots can take over some aspects of routine care, but old people who can afford it want the attention of real human beings as well. Let us hope that we never get to a situation when we accept automata as substitutes for real teaching assistants reading stories to children with proper human empathy of the kind the noble Lord, Lord Reid, emphasised.

Not only the very young and the very old need human support: when so much business, including interaction with government, is done via the internet, we should worry about, for instance, a disabled person living alone, who needs to access websites online to claim their rightful government benefits or to order basic provisions. Think of the anxiety and frustration when something goes wrong. Such people will have peace of mind only when there are computer-savvy caregivers to help the bewildered cope with IT, to ensure that they can get help and are not disadvantaged. Otherwise, the digitally deprived will become the new underclass. Caring roles provide more dignified and worthwhile employment than the call centres or warehouses where jobs have been lost. Does the Minister think that it is possible to use the earnings of robots, as it were, to achieve Scandinavian-level welfare where the demand for carers is fully met?

Even if we have machines that can, effectively, interact with the real world, this will not be enough to ensure that they have human empathy. Computers learn from a “training set” of similar activities, where success is immediately “rewarded” and reinforced. Game-playing computers play millions of games; computers gain expertise in recognising faces by studying millions of images. But learning about human behaviour involves observing actual people in real homes or workplaces. The machine would feel sensorily deprived by the slowness of real life and would be bewildered. Only when this barrier can be surmounted—and perhaps it never will be—will AIs truly be perceived as intelligent beings, and if that happens, their far faster “thoughts” and reactions could then give them advantages over us.

Many experts think that the AI field, like synthetic biology, already needs guidelines for “responsible innovation”. Moreover, the fact that AlphaGo Zero achieved a goal that its creators thought would have taken several more years to reach has rendered DeepMind’s staff even more bullish about the speed of advancement. But others, like the roboticist Rodney Brooks—creator of the Baxter robot and the Roomba vacuum cleaner—argue that these projections will remain science fiction for a long time. Be that as it may, it is crucial to be aware of the potential of artificial intelligence, even though real stupidity will always be with us.