Surprised there wasn’t already something like this!
I just assumed every nation has a government funded cutting edge research institute. Crazy not to. Australia has the over 100 year old csiro for example. Paid for itself many times over (eg. viruses that kill rabbits, high tech breakthroughs like wifi, selective crop and livestock breeding).
The UK used to have DERA, preceded by the DRA which itself was a merger of other agencies. DERA was part privatized into Qinetiq. Not quite a DARPA or CSIRO equivalent because very much more defence focused, but doing the work more with employees, though with strong relationships with certain universities.
The problem the UK has is it spent so long pretending to be far less sophisticated than it was that now it has become so, to the point their security at air bases is ridiculous https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx24nppdx0lo . That is the level of competence that remains in that part of their industry, and consider that in tech you basically go into videogames, finance, or defence. (Or ARM, but there are only so many people there).
idk to what extent the claim is true, but off the top of my head Britain's GCHQ discovered public key cryptography but for some reason kept it under wraps and made no use of it after WWII. It was only found out years after it was rediscovered by American researchers.
Wish the UK would have their version of the SBIR/STTR program too -- and open to all, not just Oxbridge and other elites. Mandatory small business set-asides, especially for large defense procurement, has outsized effects on innovation.
Definitely a step in the right direction for the UK, a nation that has historically been full of inventors.
One of the most important factors for ARIA’s success will be whether its leadership can protect a culture that accepts that some bets won’t pay off until after their term ends. Short-termism plagues government leadership roles, and it's exactly the kind of thing that could kill a program like this.
In other words, pick bold leaders that don't have an ego.
NPL used to do smart stuff. Daresbury also. SERC funded work I did in the 80s was a bit downstream of revolutionary. Good to try, good to fund but you have to be prepared to fail spectacularly and at great expense. DARPA has funding resiliency for that. People don't always talk about what didn't work, and cost a lot of money. The fifth generation and alvey comes to mind.
YOShInOn shows me a lot of articles on synthetic biology and one major theme is that people have figured out a lot about how gene regulation works in Eukaryotes (e.g. what that "junk DNA" does) which is going to make it possible to make much better GMOs then we've had so far. (It's not just getting a gene into a plant, it's getting that gene to be expressed vigorously)
How is that "woke"? I understand, you wouldn't want to engage in thoughtcrime. Better to label anything related to ecology as "woke" and not even engage with it.
This is nonsensical. Public debt is nothing like private debt, you can't apply prudent financial advice from the context of an individual to that of a currency issuer. The difference being that they are a currency issuer. The Bank of England is a great starting point: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
Key points:
You can't save in a currency you issue. If a state issues its own fiat currency, it does not need to save in that currency because:
- It cannot run out of its own currency.
- It can always credit accounts via fiscal or monetary operations.
- “Saving” in the conventional sense implies a constraint that doesn’t apply to sovereign issuers.
Every single pound the UK gov spends, is a brand new pound that's never existed before - NB: it wasn't collected by tax. From the Bank of England: “The central bank can create money in the form of central bank reserves by lending to the banking sector… or by purchasing assets. This money is new—it did not exist before.” https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-... - that is to say, government spending results in the creation of new money, rather than the recycling of pre-existing tax revenues.
The limits to pay attention to are real resources in the economy, not money; you can have all the money in the world but if you can't procure steel then you simply can't build that bridge.
This ARIA program’s budget is apparently only about 800 million pounds, which is a tiny fraction of UK’s overall budget of over a trillion pounds.
These types of highly speculative projects are inherently risky, making them unappealing for profit-driven investors. That’s why it’s important for non-profit organizations and governments to fund them.
Scientific breakthroughs don’t happen in a vacuum. They are the product of dedicated research requiring years of consistent funding.
Cumulative interest is a b*tch though, put that 800m into the debt.
You say the UK has a budget of a trillion, but around 70% comes from consumer spending. As consumers have been hooked on debt and hit with annual increases in every indirect tax they can think of.
If you look at the debt as a percentage of GDP or percentage of total wealth (both columns in the table, but not the default sort order) then the UK isn’t an outlier. Singapore has more external debt, for example.
A well known 'brain drain' occurs in London, where instead of doing other things like homegrown Startups, the finest minds are instead lured into banking.
You could have created a unicorn company by now my friend, but instead you are writing python code in excel, or automating regulatory submissions and investor communications or something else similar.
Alternately London draws in people who know about bond trading and such from all over the world. It's the only financial center that holds a candle to NY and the great thing is that the time zones are just close enough it's reasonable to live in one city and work the financial markets in the other city.
I consider my job to be a form of moral good: using up their budget so they don’t spend it on something nefarious. I don’t think they even know what I do.
What’s the plan then? To compete with China on battery technology by spending less money on scientific research? China at least gets the concept of a long term investment.
What's the probability of success that the UK could start a battery tech company today and compete?
The Japanese, Koreans and China have been spending billions over last decade.
The UKs second biggest industry is entertainment and thats because they lured Hollywood over via generous tax breaks.(Which Trump has sid he will be addressing).
UK needs to pay down debt, invest in education and hope the next generation of talent choose to remain in the UK and not leave for another country.
Yes, the countries that have been making the most progress on research in a given area tend to be the ones that invest more money in it. I’m baffled that the lesson to be drawn from this is that the UK should invest less than its competitors.
>He said that China and the world don't see the UK as a big player anymore. Which is true.
So what? You can see people however you want, but you still have to live with them in your world and they have a vote on what happens next. This is what Russia discovered in Ukraine, and the USA in Iraq before it. China may want to boss everyone in the world, but it can't - it can't have everything it's own way and run the world as a Marxist Leninist 1984 style nightmare, we won't allow it.
>UK has it's legacy advantages, UN permanent seat, nuclear weapons etc but the empire is long gone and it grows weaker by the year.
Well after WW2 we had 270% GDP to debt ratio and the country was bombed into bits. British industry had retooled for a war economy and there was no capital to retool meaning that the fundamental disadvantages for industries like shipbuilding where British yards were located in the wrong places on the wrong rivers became sharply plagent. I grew up in the 1970's and there were still bomb sites in London and Portsmouth then. If that was a legacy then you can keep it.
>After the war, Germany was at its lowest point and the UK squandered it's lead and fell below Germany.
I agree, we should have kept Germany as an agrarian low population country so as to dominate continental europe... oh no, wait: I just realised! That would be both evil and stupid! Instead we should have Germany develop into a liberal democracy full of enlightened well educated Germans and make sure to be good friends with them so that we can work together in the world to shape it for the common good.
>All of Europe + USA failed to bring Russia to it's knees no matter what they tried.
Or we were trying the "Germany mark 2" move, but the Russians are so stupid that they invaded Ukraine and manged to ruin themselves for the rest of the 21st century? Time will tell. Perhaps ask the guys with no hands and faces begging on the Moscow underground what they think?
>The world is changing and in the new world order UK is slipping down the ladder.
For sure, but who cares? No one serious in the UK wants to be in charge of the world and frankly that's been the case since about 1919.
What we want is to sit on our little island with our nice wind turbines and good internet and make interesting things while enjoying our gardens. I think that fundamentally that's what 99% of the worlds population would like to do but there's 1% playing "lets kill the XYZ" or "I am due the respect and tribute of the people of YZX" as if this was 1850 and no one has nuclear weapons.
You clearly don't understand how country/nation finances work, especially when you have your own currency.
It's not like a personal finance regime.
"Fiat" means "let it be". All you have to do is make sure that everyone else believes you. That is also largely the basis behind a public offering for a company.
Why is it always "Blackrock" in these borderline economic-illiterate rants? My guess is just that people see "Blackrock 7.23%" or whatever on the stockholder list of every major company, and thus reduce that Blackrock = Elders of Sion or some shit.
Surprised there wasn’t already something like this!
I just assumed every nation has a government funded cutting edge research institute. Crazy not to. Australia has the over 100 year old csiro for example. Paid for itself many times over (eg. viruses that kill rabbits, high tech breakthroughs like wifi, selective crop and livestock breeding).
The UK used to have DERA, preceded by the DRA which itself was a merger of other agencies. DERA was part privatized into Qinetiq. Not quite a DARPA or CSIRO equivalent because very much more defence focused, but doing the work more with employees, though with strong relationships with certain universities.
The problem the UK has is it spent so long pretending to be far less sophisticated than it was that now it has become so, to the point their security at air bases is ridiculous https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx24nppdx0lo . That is the level of competence that remains in that part of their industry, and consider that in tech you basically go into videogames, finance, or defence. (Or ARM, but there are only so many people there).
> spent so long pretending to be far less sophisticated than it was
Would you care to elaborate?
idk to what extent the claim is true, but off the top of my head Britain's GCHQ discovered public key cryptography but for some reason kept it under wraps and made no use of it after WWII. It was only found out years after it was rediscovered by American researchers.
Have a read about the "Tube Alloys" project, too. Precursor and seed for the Manhattan Project.
Innovate UK has been around for years https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/
And lots of other grant services and loans.
Most with very little in the way of measures of success... As will be the case with Aria I imagine.
There were large COVID scandals with funding directed to government ministers mates, how many of these get awarded to their mates too.
A step in the right direction.
Wish the UK would have their version of the SBIR/STTR program too -- and open to all, not just Oxbridge and other elites. Mandatory small business set-asides, especially for large defense procurement, has outsized effects on innovation.
Definitely a step in the right direction for the UK, a nation that has historically been full of inventors.
One of the most important factors for ARIA’s success will be whether its leadership can protect a culture that accepts that some bets won’t pay off until after their term ends. Short-termism plagues government leadership roles, and it's exactly the kind of thing that could kill a program like this.
In other words, pick bold leaders that don't have an ego.
NPL used to do smart stuff. Daresbury also. SERC funded work I did in the 80s was a bit downstream of revolutionary. Good to try, good to fund but you have to be prepared to fail spectacularly and at great expense. DARPA has funding resiliency for that. People don't always talk about what didn't work, and cost a lot of money. The fifth generation and alvey comes to mind.
What are the market incentives here? Does ARIA work like any other VC that would take equity in exchange for funding?
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Programmable plants are a thing. People who work on them are moving into the offices next door from mine
https://cropps.cornell.edu/
YOShInOn shows me a lot of articles on synthetic biology and one major theme is that people have figured out a lot about how gene regulation works in Eukaryotes (e.g. what that "junk DNA" does) which is going to make it possible to make much better GMOs then we've had so far. (It's not just getting a gene into a plant, it's getting that gene to be expressed vigorously)
Why are they moving into the office next door?
The site says they are university research.
Can't they stay in the university till a product is found from their research?
How is that "woke"? I understand, you wouldn't want to engage in thoughtcrime. Better to label anything related to ecology as "woke" and not even engage with it.
Right? This is brain rot taken to an extreme.
He just engaged with it out in the open. You're the one refusing to.
Is nature woke now, too? Why not, I guess.
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The UK is broke and in debt.
The Prime minister and Chancellor spend their time going cap in hand to BlackRock and others begging for money.
One spends money on speculative projects when they have money to spare.
>> The UK is broke and in debt.
This is nonsensical. Public debt is nothing like private debt, you can't apply prudent financial advice from the context of an individual to that of a currency issuer. The difference being that they are a currency issuer. The Bank of England is a great starting point: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
Key points:
You can't save in a currency you issue. If a state issues its own fiat currency, it does not need to save in that currency because:
Every single pound the UK gov spends, is a brand new pound that's never existed before - NB: it wasn't collected by tax. From the Bank of England: “The central bank can create money in the form of central bank reserves by lending to the banking sector… or by purchasing assets. This money is new—it did not exist before.” https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-... - that is to say, government spending results in the creation of new money, rather than the recycling of pre-existing tax revenues.The limits to pay attention to are real resources in the economy, not money; you can have all the money in the world but if you can't procure steel then you simply can't build that bridge.
You clearly know zero about money.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/28/britain-no-m...
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This ARIA program’s budget is apparently only about 800 million pounds, which is a tiny fraction of UK’s overall budget of over a trillion pounds.
These types of highly speculative projects are inherently risky, making them unappealing for profit-driven investors. That’s why it’s important for non-profit organizations and governments to fund them.
Scientific breakthroughs don’t happen in a vacuum. They are the product of dedicated research requiring years of consistent funding.
Cumulative interest is a b*tch though, put that 800m into the debt.
You say the UK has a budget of a trillion, but around 70% comes from consumer spending. As consumers have been hooked on debt and hit with annual increases in every indirect tax they can think of.
> Cumulative interest is a b*tch though, put that 800m into the debt.
Do you think that the return on investment into science is really less than 4.5% (interest rate on gilts) per year?
> You say the UK has a budget of a trillion, but around 70% comes from consumer spending.
70% of government expenditure is consumer spending??? This statement is nonsensical.
I am not familiar with UK’s debt situation and am not disputing that they may need to balance the budget.
But I don’t think the 0.08% line item for scientific research is where I’d start.
Science is already deeply underfunded despite a disproportionately large impact on society in my opinion.
It's not 0.08% in isolation, A further £20 billion a year was announced recently.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-backs-uk-rd-wi...
All I can say is that it’s really sad how politicized science has become. Oil company propaganda has really done a number on some people.
Ahh, something approximating a substantive criticism! You should have put this in your first comment.
It's not true apart from 'in debt' though.
External debt by country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_externa...
BlackRock as one example https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/blackrock-urges-uks-starmer-...
UK stock market has failed https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/are-uk-stock-markets-facin...
Now 10th in world for gdp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
Prisons declared full, shoplifting pseudo-legalised. I could go on and on.
40% of the worlds dirty money goes through UK. It's USP is now mainly money laundering
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/dirty-money-laundering...
If you look at the debt as a percentage of GDP or percentage of total wealth (both columns in the table, but not the default sort order) then the UK isn’t an outlier. Singapore has more external debt, for example.
As someone who works on money in the UK this is why I work on money in the UK.
A well known 'brain drain' occurs in London, where instead of doing other things like homegrown Startups, the finest minds are instead lured into banking.
You could have created a unicorn company by now my friend, but instead you are writing python code in excel, or automating regulatory submissions and investor communications or something else similar.
Alternately London draws in people who know about bond trading and such from all over the world. It's the only financial center that holds a candle to NY and the great thing is that the time zones are just close enough it's reasonable to live in one city and work the financial markets in the other city.
Let's see if Ilan, being thoroughly Berkeley-bred, will be able to fight the 2 predominant forms of (emergent, not emerging) akrasia in the UK:
The (Edwardian) liberal, who tolerates The Grauniad, & the (neo/classical) liberal, who tolerates the FT
I consider my job to be a form of moral good: using up their budget so they don’t spend it on something nefarious. I don’t think they even know what I do.
Watch the CCP spokesman give China's view of the UK.
It is brutal
https://x.com/LBC/status/1701292018037825571?t=WMi0Hys_vnYfj...
And the way to claw back rank on the world scene surely takes investing, and investing in science is among the best options for long term returns.
What’s the plan then? To compete with China on battery technology by spending less money on scientific research? China at least gets the concept of a long term investment.
What's the probability of success that the UK could start a battery tech company today and compete?
The Japanese, Koreans and China have been spending billions over last decade.
The UKs second biggest industry is entertainment and thats because they lured Hollywood over via generous tax breaks.(Which Trump has sid he will be addressing).
UK needs to pay down debt, invest in education and hope the next generation of talent choose to remain in the UK and not leave for another country.
Yes, the countries that have been making the most progress on research in a given area tend to be the ones that invest more money in it. I’m baffled that the lesson to be drawn from this is that the UK should invest less than its competitors.
Well, a Marxist Leninist analyses the global scene and concludes that communism is inevitable.
We've been here before.
He said that China and the world don't see the UK as a big player anymore. Which is true.
UK has it's legacy advantages, UN permanent seat, nuclear weapons etc but the empire is long gone and it grows weaker by the year.
After the war, Germany was at its lowest point and the UK squandered it's lead and fell below Germany.
All of Europe + USA failed to bring Russia to it's knees no matter what they tried.
The world is changing and in the new world order UK is slipping down the ladder.
>He said that China and the world don't see the UK as a big player anymore. Which is true.
So what? You can see people however you want, but you still have to live with them in your world and they have a vote on what happens next. This is what Russia discovered in Ukraine, and the USA in Iraq before it. China may want to boss everyone in the world, but it can't - it can't have everything it's own way and run the world as a Marxist Leninist 1984 style nightmare, we won't allow it.
>UK has it's legacy advantages, UN permanent seat, nuclear weapons etc but the empire is long gone and it grows weaker by the year.
Well after WW2 we had 270% GDP to debt ratio and the country was bombed into bits. British industry had retooled for a war economy and there was no capital to retool meaning that the fundamental disadvantages for industries like shipbuilding where British yards were located in the wrong places on the wrong rivers became sharply plagent. I grew up in the 1970's and there were still bomb sites in London and Portsmouth then. If that was a legacy then you can keep it.
>After the war, Germany was at its lowest point and the UK squandered it's lead and fell below Germany.
I agree, we should have kept Germany as an agrarian low population country so as to dominate continental europe... oh no, wait: I just realised! That would be both evil and stupid! Instead we should have Germany develop into a liberal democracy full of enlightened well educated Germans and make sure to be good friends with them so that we can work together in the world to shape it for the common good.
>All of Europe + USA failed to bring Russia to it's knees no matter what they tried.
Or we were trying the "Germany mark 2" move, but the Russians are so stupid that they invaded Ukraine and manged to ruin themselves for the rest of the 21st century? Time will tell. Perhaps ask the guys with no hands and faces begging on the Moscow underground what they think?
>The world is changing and in the new world order UK is slipping down the ladder.
For sure, but who cares? No one serious in the UK wants to be in charge of the world and frankly that's been the case since about 1919.
What we want is to sit on our little island with our nice wind turbines and good internet and make interesting things while enjoying our gardens. I think that fundamentally that's what 99% of the worlds population would like to do but there's 1% playing "lets kill the XYZ" or "I am due the respect and tribute of the people of YZX" as if this was 1850 and no one has nuclear weapons.
You clearly don't understand how country/nation finances work, especially when you have your own currency.
It's not like a personal finance regime.
"Fiat" means "let it be". All you have to do is make sure that everyone else believes you. That is also largely the basis behind a public offering for a company.
Keep up!
Smart countries always spare money for speculative research.
Do you really think governments should stop investing in the future?
Why is it always "Blackrock" in these borderline economic-illiterate rants? My guess is just that people see "Blackrock 7.23%" or whatever on the stockholder list of every major company, and thus reduce that Blackrock = Elders of Sion or some shit.
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