Science and Technology: Economy

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, for his fine introduction to this debate and add a welcome to our very well qualified new Minister who will reply to the debate. I am sure he would agree that the prospect of a scientific career should remain attractive to enough of our young talent and that our research institutions should remain attractive to foreign talent. I shall comment briefly on these issues, especially in a global context.

Some people will become academics, come what may —the nerdish element, of which I am one—but UK science cannot survive just on them. It must attract a share of young people who are savvy about their options and ambitious to achieve something distinctive by their 30s. They increasingly associate academia with years of precarity and financial sacrifices, which is not what they want.

A further off-putting trend is the deployment of ever more detailed performance indicators to quantify outputs and the labour involved in preparing grant applications with diminishing chances of being funded. The so-called REF is very damaging in discouraging high-risk and long-term projects. Confidence and high morale drive creativity, innovation and risk-taking, whether in science or entrepreneurial activity. We need to support excellence. The difference in pay off between the very best research and the merely good is by any measure hundreds of per cent, so what is most crucial in giving taxpayers enhanced value for money is not the few per cent of savings that might be made by improving efficiency in the office management sense; it is maximising the chance of the big breakthroughs by attracting top talent, backing the judgment of those with the best credentials and supporting them appropriately.

We cannot confidently predict how, when or whether a specific research project will pay off intellectually, still less whether its applications will offer social or economic benefits. To ensure that we effectively exploit new discoveries, research institutions must be complemented by organisations in the public or private sector that can offer adequate development and manufacturing capability when it is needed. This fortunate concatenation certainly proved its worth in the recent pandemic. It is imperative, likewise, that nations should foster expertise in agriculture, energy, climate and the cybersphere.

We should also welcome the growing mobility among scientifically advanced countries in North America, Europe and Asia. One exemplification of this is that three of the greatest US-based companies—Microsoft, Google/Alphabet and IBM—now have Indian chief executives. But this mobility offers little consolation to the least developed countries. They face daunting challenges in retaining their all too few highly trained people and even more in attracting them back. We in the developed world should surely be uneasy and feel an obligation to redress this loss. Of course, Africa’s predicament is worse. About half its health workers want to leave and their departure can be ill afforded. It is doubly tragic if, after moving to a developed country, doctors find that they are not accredited and become cab drivers. It is just as bad in all the other specialities that African nations require if they are to develop their potential. The poorest nations need to engage their diaspora communities, encouraging those with expertise to at least make regular visits back home.

Wealthier nations should take some responsibility too. A cost-effective form of aid would be to establish in Africa and elsewhere centres of excellence, with strong international links, where ambitious scientists could work in less dispiriting conditions, perhaps via linkages with foreign experts. They could then fulfil their potential without emigrating and strengthen tertiary education in their home country as well as working with other countries on the challenges of health, clean energy, and intensive agriculture on which their future depends. Let us hope that as a way of providing aid in a cost-effective and distinctive way, the Foreign Office and the department can collaborate on this goal.

King’s Speech

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, ideally, crucial sectors such as education and science should be governed by a bipartisan consensus that offers long-term stability. In depressing contrast, turbulence in the Government has triggered unstable policies and a rapid churn of Ministers. The UK risks getting further from, not closer to, being a science superpower. To reverse this trend changes are needed in schools, higher education and R&D.

In our schools, attainment levels are poor compared to nations in the Far East and northern Europe. In particular, there are too few good science teachers. Young children display enthusiasm and curiosity, often focused on dinosaurs and the cosmos—blazingly irrelevant to their lives, but fascinating—but they are starved of the inspirational teaching that could channel this enthusiasm.

There are three things that can be done. First, we should ensure that conditions are good enough to retain excellent schoolteachers and that their pay level is appropriate for practitioners of a serious profession. Secondly, we should encourage mature individuals to move into teaching from a career in, for instance, research, industry or the Armed Forces. Thirdly, we should make optimum use of the web to supplement and individualise what the teacher can do.

At university level, our international rankings are higher but there is a systemic weakness. The missions of our universities are not sufficiently varied. They all aspire to rise in the same league table, one that gives more weight to research than to what matters to potential students. What should worry us in particular at the moment is the financial pressure that current students are under: the fact that they cannot find affordable accommodation near campus and need to do time-consuming part-time work to support themselves. Universities and the public should expect a full-time commitment from those enrolled on three-year degree courses, but that requires that they are properly supported.

Indeed, there may well be a shift away from full-time three-year degrees. Everyone should have the opportunity to re-enter university or technical education, maybe part-time or online, at any stage in their lives. This path could become smoother, even routine, if there were a formalised system of transferable credits across the whole system of further and higher education. The Government’s lifelong entitlement to support, to be taken à la carte at any stage in life, is a good step forward.

Another problem is that the post-16 school curriculum is too narrow. An especial downside is that those who have been turned off science drop it at 16 and thereby foreclose the chance to qualify at 18 for high-quality university courses, so we should welcome the broad support for some kind of British baccalaureate.

It is shameful that we in this country are losing the professionals to staff ourselves and high-level technical expertise, so we should listen to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and strengthen high-level technical education. Degree programmes should be valued by the graduates and geared to job prospects, that is true, but that need not necessarily be related to the salaries. To give one example, if a fine arts degree gives a gifted and committed artist the expertise to follow their avocation, even if their earning is just a living wage, that is surely an outcome to be welcomed.

Of course research is a distinctive activity in most universities, but the encroachment of audit culture and other pressures is rendering our universities less propitious environments for research projects that demand intense and sustained effort. Dedicated stand-alone labs may become preferable, although there is a downside in so far as they reduce contact between talented researchers and students. Indeed, the UK owes its strength in biomedical sciences to its famous labs that allow full-time long-term research, with government funding massively supplemented by the Wellcome Trust, cancer charities, and a strong pharmaceutical industry.

There is a serious concern that academia itself is becoming less alluring as a career. Some people will become academics come what may—the nerdish element, of which I guess I myself am one—but a world-class university system cannot survive just on those. It must attract to its faculty a share of young people who are savvy about their options and ambitious to achieve something distinctive by their 30s. These people increasingly associate academia with years of precarity and undue financial sacrifice. Indeed, the declared rationale for setting up ARIA was to get round the problem by fostering long-term blue-skies research and freedom from bureaucracy in a fashion not available elsewhere in the system. That is fine, but surely it would have been a far higher priority to render less vexatious the bureaucracy of UKRI, whose budget is 25 times higher than what is envisaged for ARIA.

The effective exploitation of new discoveries is an imperative. Universities and research institutes must be complemented by organisations, in the public or private sector, that can offer adequate development and manufacturing capability. This concatenation certainly proved its worth in the recent pandemic. It is likewise imperative that the UK should foster expertise not only in the biological sciences but in energy, climate and the cybersphere—indeed, in all the fields needed to tackle global challenges. We have traditionally suffered from a lack of venture capital to bring things to market, but I worry that our ability to attract and retain mobile academic talent—students and professionals—is now at risk. We have been fortunate with regard to ESO, but it is an unwelcoming deterrent that, as has been mentioned, someone with a family who wants a global talent visa has to fork out more than £20,000.

I shall mention an enlightened recent contribution to these debates, a report co-authored by Tony Blair and the noble Lord, Lord Hague. They call for the creation of a science and tech policy and delivery unit that is

“independent from vested interests and status-quo forces, and able to devise, drive and unblock a reform agenda”.

That is needed, they say, to end the situation whereby

“the Treasury strongly micromanages science and technology spending and is the de-facto controller of the UK’s national R&D strategy”.

Their report advocates measures to reduce the level of audit imposed on universities and argues for the reform of technology transfer offices to encourage more university spin-offs. They say that UKRI should be restructured and there should be new hubs for regional development and

“a network of research institutes tasked with securing our lead in established competitive areas like synthetic biology and AI”.

I thought it was appropriate to listen to those two dormant ex-politicians on a day when many are celebrating the recycling of another of their number as the Foreign Secretary.

Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, the seemingly superhuman achievements of AI are enabled by a greater processing speed and memory storage of computers compared to flesh and blood brains. AI can cope better than humans with data-rich, fast-changing networks—traffic flow, electric grids, image analysis, et cetera. China could have a planned economy of the kind that Mao could have only dreamed of.

However, the societal implications are ambivalent here already. In particular, how can humans remain in the loop? 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.

AI systems will become more intrusive and pervasive. Records of our movements, health and financial transactions are in “the cloud”, managed by multinational quasi-monopolies. The data may be used for benign reasons—for instance, medical research—but its availability to internet companies is already shifting the balance of power from governments to globe-spanning conglomerates.

Clearly, robots will take over much of manufacturing and retail distribution. They can supplement, if not replace, many white-collar jobs: accountancy, computer coding, medical diagnostics and even surgery. Indeed, I think the advent of ChatGPT renders legal work especially vulnerable. The vast but self-contained volumes of legal literature can all be digested by a machine. In contrast, some skilled service-sector jobs—plumbing and gardening, for instance—require non-routine interactions with the external world and will be among the hardest to automate.

The digital revolution generates enormous wealth for innovators and global companies, but preserving a humane society will surely require redistribution of that wealth. The revenue thereby raised should ideally be hypothecated to 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, and they are poorly paid, inadequately esteemed and insecure in their positions. However, these caring jobs are worthy of real human beings and are far more fulfilling than the jobs in call centres or Amazon warehouses which AI can usurp. That kind of redeployment would be win-win. However, AI raises deep anxieties; even in the short-term, ChatGPT’s successors will surely confront us, writ large, with the downsides of existing social media: fake news, photos and videos, unmoderated extremist diatribes, and so forth.

Excited headlines this year have quoted some experts talking about “human extinction”. This may be scaremongering, but the misuse or malfunction of AI is certainly a potential societal threat on the scale of a pandemic. My concern is not so much the science-fiction scenario of a “takeover” by superintelligence as the risk that we will become dependent on interconnected networks whose failure—leading to disruption of the electricity grid, GPS or the internet—could cause societal breakdowns that cascade globally.

Regulation is needed. Innovative algorithms need to be thoroughly tested before wide deployment, by analogy with the rigorous testing of drugs which precedes government approval and release. But regulation is a special challenge in a sector of the economy dominated by a few multinational conglomerates. Just as they can move between jurisdictions to evade fair taxation, so they could evade regulations of AI. How best can the UK help to set up an enforceable regulatory system with global range? It is good news that the Government are tackling this challenge already.

Finally, society will be surely transformed by autonomous robots, even though the jury is out on whether they will be “idiot savants” or will display wide-ranging superhuman intelligence—and whether, if we are overdependent on them, we should worry more about breakdowns and bugs or about being outsmarted, more about maverick artificial intelligence than about real stupidity.

Science and Technology Superpower (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and the committee staff. I will venture a few words on schools, universities and R&D. Ideally, these crucial sectors should be governed by a bipartisan consensus that offers long-term stability. In depressing contrast, turbulence in government has triggered unstable policies, a rapid churn of Ministers and the proliferation of committees.

Attainment levels in our schools are poor compared to nations in the Far East and northern Europe. In particular, there are far too few good science teachers. There are three things that can be done: ensuring that conditions are good enough and pay levels are appropriate for practitioners of a serious profession; encouraging mature individuals to move into teaching from a career in research, industry or the Armed Forces; and making better use of the web and distance learning.

Our international rankings are higher in higher education, but there are some worrying trends. Academia is becoming less alluring. Some people will become academics, whatever happens—the nerdish element, of which I am one—but a world-class university system cannot survive just on them. It must attract a share of young people who are savvy about their options and ambitious to achieve something distinctive by their 30s. They increasingly associate academia with years of precarity and undue financial sacrifices.

A further off-putting trend is the deployment of ever more detailed performance indicators to quantify outputs, and the labour involved in preparing grant applications with a diminishing chance of success. This pressure gives two perverse incentives to young academics: to shun high-risk research and to downplay their teaching. Indeed, the declared rationale for setting up ARIA is to foster “long-term”, “blue-skies” research and freedom from bureaucracy in a fashion not available elsewhere in the system. It should surely be a higher priority to render less vexatious the bureaucracy of UKRI, whose budget is 50 times higher than ARIA’s.

In the UK, research is still strongly concentrated in universities—not so in France and Germany—but the encroachment of audit culture and other pressures are rendering universities less propitious environments for research projects that demand intense and sustained effort. Dedicated, stand-alone labs may become preferable —although there is a downside, as they reduce contact between talented researchers and students. Indeed, the UK owes its strength in biomedical science to its famous labs, which allow full-time, long-term research, with government funding massively supplemented by the Wellcome Trust, the cancer charities and a strong pharmaceutical industry. To ensure effective exploitation of new discoveries, these institutes must be complemented by organisations that can offer adequate development and manufacturing capability. This fortunate concatenation certainly proved its worth in the recent pandemic. We likewise need this in energy, AI and other crucial technologies.

One should welcome Paul Nurse’s recent report, whatever one’s views of his earlier report that created UKRI—and the web of new committees that it embedded into. However, our ability to attract and retain mobile academic talent, and our ranking as a destination of choice by those people, is now at risk. I will not reiterate the overwhelming case for rejoining the ERC, but there is now an international market for the best students as well: they are academic assets and a long-term investment in international relations. To retain its competitiveness as a “destination of choice” for mobile experts, despite the setback of Brexit, the nation must remove impediments and raise its game. Ways of doing this are a key theme of our committee’s report.