Science and technology’s contribution to the UK economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UK House of Lords Primer: “It is difficult to accurately pinpoint the economic contribution of science and technology to the UK economy. This is because of the way sectors are divided up and reported in financial statistics. 

 For example, in September 2024 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported the following gross value added (GVA) figures by industry/sector for 2023:

  • £71bn for IT and other information service activities 
  • £20.6bn for scientific research and development 

This would amount to £91.6bn, forming approximately 3.9% of the total UK GVA of £2,368.7bn for 2023. However, a number of other sectors could also be included in these figures, for example: 

  • the manufacture of computer, certain machinery and electrical components (valued at £38bn in 2023) 
  • telecommunications (valued at £34.5bn) 

If these two sectors were included too, GVA across all four sectors would total £164.1bn, approximately 6.9% of the UK’s 2023 GVA. However, this would likely still exclude relevant contributions that happen to fall within the definitions of different industries. For example, the manufacture of spacecraft and related machinery falls within the same sector as the manufacture of aircraft in the ONS’s data (this sector was valued at £10.8bn for 2023).  

Alternatively, others have made estimates of the economic contribution of more specific sectors connected to science and technology. For example: 

  • Oxford Economics, an economic advisory firm, has estimated that, in 2023, the life sciences sector contributed over £13bn to the UK economy and employed one in every 121 employed people 
  • the government has estimated the value of the digital sector (comprising information technology and digital content and media) at £158.3bn for 2022
  • a 2023 government report estimated the value of the UK’s artificial intelligence (AI) sector at around £3.7bn (in terms of GVA) and that the sector employed around 50,040 people
  • the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit organisation, reported estimates that the GVA of the UK’s net zero economy (encompassing sectors such as renewables, carbon capture, green and certain manufacturing) was £74bn in 2022/23 and that it supported approximately 765,700 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs…(More)”.

The Critical Role of Questions in Building Resilient Democracies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Hannah Chafetz, and Alex Fischer: “Asking questions in new and participatory ways can complement advancements in data science and AI while enabling more inclusive and more adaptive democracies…

Yet a crisis, as the saying goes, always contains kernels of opportunity. Buried within our current dilemma—indeed, within one of the underlying causes of it—is a potential solution. Democracies are resilient and adaptive, not static. And importantly, data and artificial intelligence (AI), if implemented responsibly, can contribute to making them more resilient. Technologies such as AI-supported digital public squares and crowd-sourcing are examples of how generative AI and large language models can improve community connectivity, societal health, and public services. Communities can leverage these tools for democratic participation and democratizing information. Through this period of technological transition, policy makers and communities are imagining how digital technologies can better engage our collective intelligence…

Achieving this requires new tools and approaches, specifically the collective process of asking better questions.

Formulated inclusively, questions help establish shared priorities and impart focus, efficiency, and equity to public policy. For instance, school systems can identify indicators and patterns of experiences, such as low attendance rates, that signal a student is at risk of not completing school. However, they rarely ask the positive outlier question of what enables some at-risk students to overcome challenges and finish school. Is it a good teacher relationship, an after-school program, the support of a family member, or a combination of these and other factors? Asking outlier (and orphan, or overlooked and neglected) questions can help refocus programs and guide policies toward areas with the highest potential for impact.

Not asking the right questions can also have adverse effects. For example, many city governments have not asked whether and how people of different genders, in different age groups, or with different physical mobility needs experience local public transportation systems. Creating the necessary infrastructure for people with a variety of needs to travel safely and efficiently increases health and well-being. Questions like whether sidewalks are big enough for strollers and whether there is sufficient public transport near schools can help spotlight areas for improvement, and show where age- or gender-disaggregated data is needed most…(More)”.

G7 Toolkit for Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector

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Toolkit by OECD: “…a comprehensive guide designed to help policymakers and public sector leaders translate principles for safe, secure, and trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) into actionable policies. AI can help improve the efficiency of internal operations, the effectiveness of policymaking, the responsiveness of public services, and overall transparency and accountability. Recognising both the opportunities and risks posed by AI, this toolkit provides practical insights, shares good practices for the use of AI in and by the public sector, integrates ethical considerations, and provides an overview of G7 trends. It further showcases public sector AI use cases, detailing their benefits, as well as the implementation challenges faced by G7 members, together with the emerging policy responses to guide and coordinate the development, deployment, and use of AI in the public sector. The toolkit finally highlights key stages and factors characterising the journey of public sector AI solutions…(More)”

How elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Blake Ellis, et al: “The 80-year-old communications engineer from Texas had saved for decades, driving around in an old car and buying clothes from thrift stores so he’d have enough money to enjoy his retirement years.

But as dementia robbed him of his reasoning abilities, he began making online political donations over and over again — eventually telling his son he believed he was part of a network of political operatives communicating with key Republican leaders. In less than two years, the man became one of the country’s largest grassroots supporters of the Republican Party, ultimately giving away nearly half a million dollars to former President Donald Trump and other candidates. Now, the savings account he spent his whole life building is practically empty.

The story of this unlikely political benefactor is one of many playing out across the country.

More than 1,000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups reviewed by CNN, along with an analysis of campaign finance data and interviews with dozens of contributors and their family members, show how deceptive political fundraisers have victimized hundreds of elderly Americans and misled those battling dementia or other cognitive impairments into giving away millions of dollars — far more than they ever intended. Some unintentionally joined the ranks of the top grassroots political donors in the country as they tapped into retirement savings and went into debt, contributing six-figure sums through thousands of transactions…(More)”.

AI in the Public Service: Here for Good

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Special Issue of Ethos: “…For the public good, we want AI to help unlock and drive transformative impact, in areas where there is significant potential for breakthroughs, such as cancer research, material sciences or climate change. But we also want to raise the level of generalised adoption. For the user base in the public sector, we want to learn how best to use this new tool in ways that can allow us to not only do things better, but do better things.

This is not to suggest that AI is always the best solution: it is one of many tools in the digital toolkit. Sometimes, simpler computational methods will suffice. That said, AI represents new, untapped potential for the Public Service to enhance our daily work and deliver better outcomes that ultimately benefit Singapore and Singaporeans….

To promote general adoption, we made available AI tools, such as Pair, 1 SmartCompose, 2 and AIBots. 3 They are useful to a wide range of public officers for many general tasks. Other common tools of this nature may include chatbots to support customer-facing and service delivery needs, translation, summarisation, and so on. Much of what public officers do involves words and language, which is an area that LLM-based AI technology can now help with.

Beyond improving the productivity of the Public Service, the real value lies in AI’s broader ability to transform our business and operating models to deliver greater impact. In driving adoption, we want to encourage public officers to experiment with different approaches to figure out where we can create new value by doing things differently, rather than just settle for incremental value from doing things the same old ways using new tools.

For example, we have seen how AI and automation have transformed language translation, software engineering, identity verification and border clearance. This is just the beginning and much more is possible in many other domains…(More)”.

City Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rob Walker: “The world is rapidly urbanizing, and experts predict that up to 80 percent of the population will live in cities by 2050. To accommodate that growth while ensuring quality of life for all residents, cities are increasingly turning to technology. From apps that make it easier for citizens to pitch in on civic improvement projects to comprehensive plans for smarter streets and neighborhoods, new tools and approaches are taking root across the United States and around the world. In this thoughtful, inquisitive collection, Rob Walker—former New York Times columnist and author of the City Tech column for Land Lines magazine—investigates the new technologies afoot and their implications for planners, policymakers, residents, and the virtual and literal landscapes of the cities we call home…(More)”

Emerging technologies in the humanitarian sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report and project by Rand: “Emerging technologies have often been explored in the humanitarian sector through small scale pilot projects, testing their application in a specific context with limited opportunities to replicate the testing across various contexts. The level of familiarity and knowledge of technological development varies across the specific types of humanitarian activities undertaken and technology areas considered.

The study team identified five promising technology areas for the humanitarian sector that could be further explored out to 2030:

  • Advanced manufacturing systems are likely to offer humanitarians opportunities to produce resources and tools in an operating environment characterised by scarcity, the rise of simultaneous crises, and exposure to more intense and severe climate events.
  • Early Warning Systems are likely to support preparedness and response efforts across the humanitarian sector while multifactorial crises are likely to arise.
  • Camp monitoring systems are likely to support efforts not only to address security risks, but also support planning and management activities of sites or the health and wellbeing of displaced populations.
  • Coordination platforms are likely to enhance data collection and information-sharing across various humanitarian stakeholders for the development of timely and bespoke crisis response.
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) can support ongoing efforts to comply with increased data privacy and data protection requirements in a humanitarian operating environment in which data collection will remain necessary.

Beyond these five technology areas, the study team also considered three innovation journey opportunities:

  • The establishment of a technology horizon scanning coalition
  • Visioning for emerging technologies in crisis recovery
  • An emerging technology narrative initiative.

To accompany the deployment of specific technologies in the humanitarian sector, the study team also developed a four-step approach aimed to identify specific guidance needs for end-users and humanitarian practitioners…(More)”.

Tech Agnostic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Greg Epstein: “…Today’s technology has overtaken religion as the chief influence on twenty-first century life and community. In Tech Agnostic, Harvard and MIT’s influential humanist chaplain Greg Epstein explores what it means to be a critical thinker with respect to this new faith. Encouraging readers to reassert their common humanity beyond the seductive sheen of “tech,” this book argues for tech agnosticism—not worship—as a way of life. Without suggesting we return to a mythical pre-tech past, Epstein shows why we must maintain a freethinking critical perspective toward innovation until it proves itself worthy of our faith or not.

Epstein asks probing questions that center humanity at the heart of engineering: Who profits from an uncritical faith in technology? How can we remedy technology’s problems while retaining its benefits? Showing how unbelief has always served humanity, Epstein revisits the historical apostates, skeptics, mystics, Cassandras, heretics, and whistleblowers who embody the tech reformation we desperately need. He argues that we must learn how to collectively demand that technology serve our pursuit of human lives that are deeply worth living…(More)”.

It is about time! Exploring the clashing timeframes of politics and public policy experiments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ringa Raudla, Külli Sarapuu, Johanna Vallistu, and Nastassia Harbuzova: “Although existing studies on experimental policymaking have acknowledged the importance of the political setting in which policy experiments take place, we lack systematic knowledge on how various political dimensions affect experimental policymaking. In this article, we address a specific gap in the existing understanding of the politics of experimentation: how political timeframes influence experimental policymaking. Drawing on theoretical discussions on experimental policymaking, public policy, electoral politics, and mediatization of politics, we outline expectations about how electoral and problem cycles may influence the timing, design, and learning from policy experiments. We argue electoral timeframes are likely to discourage politicians from undertaking large-scale policy experiments and if politicians decide to launch experiments, they prefer shorter designs. The electoral cycle may lead politicians to draw too hasty conclusions or ignore the experiment’s results altogether. We expect problem cycles to shorten politicians’ time horizons further as there is pressure to solve problems quickly. We probe the plausibility of our theoretical expectations using interview data from two different country contexts: Estonia and Finland…(More)“.

Discounting the Future: The Ascendency of a Political Technology

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Book by Liliana Doganova: “Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Liliana Doganova’s book sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.

Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalization of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain…(More)”