ARIA, the UK's Bet to Build Scientific Revolutions | Hacker News Reader

ARIA, the UK's Bet to Build Scientific Revolutions

asimov.press

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).

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.

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.

And the High Explosive Research project, where they did it again after the Americans cut them off the tech developed at Los Alamos.

If we're chucking in on these, which seems to be the case, also Black Arrow; the UK's nascent space programme which in 1971 put a satellite into orbit (which is small beans now but in 1971 was still a serious achievement) and was then cancelled because the US said they'd give the UK discount pricing on their own launches, and then when it was cancelled the US said "Ha! Suckers! Of course you're not getting a discount!" (accounts of this may vary)

I think the UK might be the only country that developed, and then fully abandoned, its own capability to launch satellites. Now being slowly recreated, fifty years later.

Admirable but ultimately I suspect this will come to nothing. Sadly government attention is fleeting, R&D is far, far, down the list in terms of the national priorities (NHS is always top, the national religion with fanatical supporters). Take nuclear power for instance. The world has about 800 research/test reactors. About 250 are currently in-use. 0 of them are in the UK. This kind of statistic can be repeated over and over for any given area of research. I no-longer believe the barriers are financial, it is the regulatory ones that are hardest to remove. Goes for any physical endeavour here. Be it furnace or foundry, reactor or rocketry.

The UK is not fundamentally incapable of building anything at the moment. It is absolutely astonishing to see this once great superopower in a slowly but steady collapse.

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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