I will enjoy reading the details but on the surface ... good, well done -> UK and Japan agree historic free trade agreement - gov.uk/government/new…
X : Do you agree with brexit?
Me : Always have done. It's not an easy path but if UK can manage to engineer trade deals with US and China, if UK uses state aid to encourage development of industries particularly around areas that are industrialising (hint ... use a map) ...
Me : i.e. follow the same path as China, special economic zones focused on encouraging startups in areas that are industrialiing then an internal game of last man standing before pushing the winners onto a global market ... rinse and repeat ...
Me : ... then we will be fine. In fact, far better than fine, it could well become a golden age and worth a few broken eggs along the way.
X : What about the vaccine moonshot?
Me : Tricky. If done in the right way, it could be about industrialisation of an important space ...
Me : ... but it has to be about industrialisation, climbing the value chain on the right (see China or Amazon). The danger is we fall into the trap of genesis (the novel and new) rather than take the Amazon like approach.
Me : It's a bit like Space. If the partial acquisition of OneWeb is used to focus on industrialisation of space then it'll be fine. If the focus and attitude becomes building novel and new, then it'll be a white elephant. I am alas, not filled with confidence by this Government.
X : Don't you think the vaccine moonshot is about industrialisation and mass scale?
Me : It could and should be. But if we start talking developing novel technology ... it's a bit like PPE when we should be focused on industrialisation not building novel ventilators.
Me : It's a problem with creative industry where people want to reinvent the existing into the novel and new rather than focusing on industrialising the pre-existing (as per Amazon, China).
It's about attitude i.e. rather than pioneering space, we should aim to make it boring.
Me : Which brings me back to that trade deal. There is some obvious good headlines i.e. ban on data localisation but at the same time things which raise concerns i.e. new protections for UK creative industries. This is why the details will matter.
X : State aid is allowed under EU rules.
Me : Sure, for research. But what we need is to encourage the industrialisation of pre-existing technology and that would count as interference in a pre-existing market. But I'm unconvinced the UK approach is really that nuanced.
Me : mix of innovation funds to encourage research into the uncharted space plus moonshots focused on industrialising specific areas (including use of special economic zones to encourage startups to do that job) is the right way to play in my book. Not all state aid is the same.
If UK gets this right, then brexit will be a boon. If UK gets this wrong and these moonshots become a bonanza of the creatives then it will be a bust.
Well, at least we get to find out if Dominic has a bit of Deng Xiaoping about him. Not exactly filling me with confidence.
X : UK is all about creative industries.
Me : Our history isn't. What put Great into Great Britain is the same as what makes Amazon and China great - the boring. We used to be great at turning the novel and new into boring - the industrial revolution, the age of electricty etc.
So, if we can make vaccines boring, if we can make Space boring, if we can make Robots boring, if we can have a motto of "putting the boring into everything" then UK has a decent shot. If we rely on creative industries and creative finance ... we're in a lot of trouble.
X : What's your gut feel?
Me : Right now? I suspect we're going to double down on creative and build a whole bunch of Theranos' with not a single Amazon among them. That's why the details matter about the trade deals, the moonshots etc.
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Those born in the 1890s experienced electrification, telephone, radio, television, nuclear age, penicillin, two world wars, commercial flight, computer age and a moon landing. By the 60s we had AI, VR and 3D printing.
Today, we have the internet / www and have improved stuff.
Is it me, or is human progress slowing down? Great breakthroughs, moments of change, and radical transformations seem like a thing of the past. What we call "revolutions" in industry today seems mostly a marketing slogan.
If you think back to 1957 and the Mark I Perceptron machine that was built at Cornell, then consider the changes in the previous 60 years ... you can't help but think they would be bitterly disappointed with how slow we have progressed in the following 60 years.
We will be entering a phase in which the US high-tech industry (including the military complex) is highly dependent upon China, whilst China is not dependent upon the US.
For those who doubt how clear the intentions were ... go read Made in China, 2025.
China's government made its intentions evident in 2015. The US sabre rattling of sanctions reinforced that purpose whilst the US essentially continued with a misguided "market knows best" policy.
A couple of prompts with Claude 3 creates a Wardley Map for economic sovereignty in the defence space.
Not bad at all -
On par with political, military and defence folk I've spoken to. I'm also finding I can have a reasonable discussion about mapping with Claude 3.onlinewardleymaps.com/#clone:XvHskIi…
It's not perfect but it's not bad. There's more I want to interrogate Claude over ... i.e. the link to secure sourcing, the positioning of some components etc. But it's almost good enough that I can start a discussion over strategy and investment.
Anyway, upshot is that Claude 3, from my perspective, has left ChatGPT4 in the dust. Of course, I'll use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to cross-compare for now but if I do start building anything more complex then the obvious path is AWS Bedrock which gives me Mistral etc.
dX: What is the single most significant problem facing AI today? Safety? Lack of skills? Inertia?
Me: Overinflated expectations by the business.
dX: You don't think AI will become widespread?
Me: Of course, it will; industrialised components are rapidly becoming cost of doing business. Don't confuse that with expectations. There will be an awful lot of disappointed businesses hoping it would create some advantage.
dX: I don't understand.
Me: Imagine you're just finishing off your plan for how AI will revolutionise your business. Six months for budget approval, one year to build team, 18 months to deliver something ... that's 3 years from now. Any advantage you thought of is long gone.
For those who don't know, I'm working increasingly on and with Glamorous Toolkit - ... I have become fascinated by our willingness to blame humans for problems that are created by our toolsets ...gtoolkit.com
... I saw this last night at Cloud Camp. Apparently, the issues with understanding, explainability and observability in AI are down to humans' inability to deal with complex environments... no, they're not. The problem is with the tools and the type of tools we are creating ...
... we've imported concepts from a physical world where tools are constrained by physics - hence a hammer is a hammer, a drill is a drill - into a world without such constraints. Rather than building contextual tools, we've built constrained tools.