The UK’s ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency) has always been big on ambition and — at its inaugural summit in London this week — went even bigger on inspiration.
Ditching the usual British bashfulness for full-fledged techno-optimism, attendees were encouraged to ask themselves: “What could you work on that might change the world?”
On stage: people figuring out how to create new materials on the moon; a man whose long-term mental health issues were resolved in part thanks to neurotechnology; and a woman trying to bring transplant surgery into the 22nd century. In the room: Big Tech researchers, professors, government policy advisors, VC investors and startup founders.
The mood is hugely — and unusually — upbeat, led by the buoyant figures of Ilan Gur, ARIA’s (American) CEO, and Matt Clifford, its (British) chair. “We’re a hopeful bunch here,” said Gur. Academics are usually a lot more sceptical, VC Hampus Jakobsson observed to me; ARIA’s somehow “created the scaffolding to allow people to be optimistic”.
It’s also looking like it will succeed in one of its key goals, its chair and CEO were at pains to point out: attracting world-class talent. “An early indicator of success is being this magnet for talent,” said Gur. Just one of its eight new programme directors (who hail from renowned institutions like CERN and Stanford) is from the UK, and at drinks, I overheard as many American accents as I did British.
“One of the hardest things to find is people who want to go big,” said Arati Prabhakar, former DARPA director, on-stage Tuesday morning. And that is now possible in the UK, said another American on stage, Seth Bannon, who leads deeptech company builder 5050 (which is part-funded by ARIA). Four of the world’s top research universities are based here, he pointed out. “The UK feels like a spring that’s fully wound and ready to be unleashed.”
Aside from all the mind-boggling science, there’s been a lot of talk of how the US government is attacking a culture of academic innovation that it’s fostered for almost a century — and what the UK, and Europe, can do to seize the opportunity that offers them.
“It is a downer,” said Prabhakar. Americans have a saying, she said: “We just wish we could live in precedented times.”
But it’s also a call to action. “These are times that call us to build towards a different kind of future, a better kind of future that works for people,” she added, a nudge for anyone in the audience considering a leap into a more entrepreneurial life. “Transformational change is the most fun thing that any of us could ever have the chance to participate in.”
The summit is also a well-timed reminder of what fantastic innovation could unlock for the UK government, ahead of finance minister Rachel Reeves’ spending review in June, which will set department budgets for the next few years.
When founded in 2023, ARIA received £800m from the tax payer (a privilege nobody on the team seems quick to forget) to fund its first four to five years. Half of that capital has now been committed — and the team will be hoping that its funder, DSIT, the government’s technology department, gets a hefty allocation to continue supporting it.
Do early signs suggest that the government should do so?
“If you could steal the world’s best talent, wouldn't that be worth infinite amounts of capital?” Jakobsson told me. “If I was running the UK, I’d do it.”
In a promising sign, the UK’s tech minister Peter Kyle took the mic to emphasise how important investing in innovation is to the government. “We’ve put our money where our mouth is,” he said, pointing out that in the last budget, amid spending cuts, the country’s R&D budget got an 8.5% uplift.
“My job is to empower the system so those people with outlier ideas can rise to the top,” he said — and he wants that to happen ASAP. “I’m on a countdown to be reshuffled or fired,” he joked.
“So let’s all be in a rush, and get across a line on this stuff.”
Not everyone needs to be a fan of those outlier ideas, he added. In his first fortnight on the job, he said, he received a submission from ARIA about a geoengineering project looking at how to reflect sunlight in order to cool the atmosphere. The recommendation, he said, was to distance himself from it “for understandable reasons”. He declined.
“We have to go out there and explain to the country that the government is doing stuff that's very high concept…,” he said. “That we’re thinking very deeply about what happens in the world if everything goes wrong. That’s the hallmark of a government doing serious things.”
