The UK research AI strategy has promised £1.6 billion, giving British science enough money for a supercomputer, several laboratories and one biscuit priced by committee.
UK Research and Innovation has published its first AI strategy, with the money directed towards artificial intelligence over the next four years. The plan says AI will support health, clean energy, public services and other areas where Britain hopes the future will arrive carrying the correct form.
Its six priorities include better technology, transformed research, new skills, economic growth, trustworthy AI and data infrastructure. This is an ambitious attempt to make machines clever, useful and safe while persuading universities, businesses and government departments to agree on what the word useful means before the next meeting.
Dr Ada Maybe, who keeps a notebook because it never requests a software update, laughed at the announcement. “AI can find patterns,” she said. “I hope it can find the missing projector cable. That would be a national breakthrough.” The cable remains fictional. The institutional dependence on meetings is not.
The strategy promises support for doctoral training, research software engineers, data scientists and ethics specialists. Britain is therefore building a workforce that can understand an algorithm, improve an algorithm and explain to an algorithm why its request for another consultation has been rejected. This is progress, provided the rejection form is available in the right portal.
Some of the spending has a practical destination. Up to £137 million is earmarked for AI enabled scientific discovery, beginning with drug research and new treatments. Another £36 million will upgrade the University of Cambridge’s DAWN supercomputer for work including healthcare and environmental modelling. At last, the nation’s computers will have the power to process astonishing quantities of information before someone asks where the password was written down.
That is the delicate comedy of the strategy. Ministers describe a machine age capable of transforming medicine and public services, while research institutions still make ordinary people hunt through shared folders for the final version of a document called final. AI may soon recognise disease, model the climate and accelerate discovery. It will also encounter a spreadsheet named final final use this one and learn that humanity has hidden its greatest challenge in plain sight.
The UK research AI strategy has asked science to be brilliant, responsible and commercially useful. It has given the future £1.6 billion and a list of priorities. Now all Britain needs is an artificial intelligence capable of finding the save button before another strategy is needed to locate it.
Source: Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and UK Research and Innovation.
