‘The Right’ tends to ignore that the high tech market ecosystem depends on government funded basic science… Almost every significant element of things like the iPhone were first developed by basic science funding. He adopts the position of economists such as Mariana Mazzucato in arguing that market innovation cannot be left to market forces alone:
#29 On the referendum & 4c on Expertise: On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy1Ĭummings wants to recreate the conditions of ARPA and PARC in a new British R&D agency and wants the state to pay for it. If you trust people, you do not micromanage them and how they spend money.
#BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH NAME MUNGER HOW TO#
They provided ambitious long-term funding to scientists, avoided unnecessary bureaucracy and chased high-risk, high-reward projects - On the referendum #26: How to change science funding post-Brexit [updated with comment by Alan Kay So how can we create new industries quickly? A clue lies in a small number of institutes that produced a strikingly large number of key advances… There are simple rules of thumb about how great science arises, embodied in such institutes. They recruited extremely talented and driven scientists who were then trusted to self-organise and get on with things however they thought best, with generous long-term funding and minimal bureaucracy. Cummings identifies the root cause of their extraordinary inventiveness as organisational. Cummings is deeply inspired by the Palo Alto Research Cente (PARC), Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and Bell Labs - three organisations which in their original iterations were fantastically fruitful: providing in a short span of years the transistor, the internet, graphical user interfaces, laser printing, the modern personal computer, object-oriented programming and other such revolutionary innovations too numerous to list. This obscure pledge, which surely says absolutely nothing to any normal voter, can only be explained by the Cummings factor.
Some of this new spending will go to a new agency for high-risk, high-payoff research, at arm’s length from government. An autonomous research agency inspired by the foundations of Silicon Valley As these little sentences look likely to shape the future of Britain, and as I’ve seen absolutely no coverage of them in the media, I thought they’d be worth highlighting and connecting up with the Cummings thoughts that appear to have conceived them, so that you too, if you are as weak as I, can be troubled by thoughts that you should not have. Imagine my shock on discovering that key elements of his agenda have found their way into innocuous looking corners of the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto. Deeply depressing, but at least I wouldn’t need to confront any troubling thoughts deviating beyond the boundaries of my Remain bubble of moral acceptability. In this framework the referendum question might as well have read “too much foreign? yes/no”. Whatever Cummings might personally want, the Brexit we were getting was a pointlessly damaging one - Britain shooting itself in the foot, oblivious and indifferent to the collateral damage, and drunk on a nationalist cloud of magical thinking - lately mashed together with a Conservative Party experimenting with a little “cops & nurses” populist borrowing. I kept my affinity secret and took comfort from the total absence of Cummings’ ideas in the election campaigning. I read most of this blog in September - my interest piqued by the media commentary of Cummings as the Rasputin of the new Boris premiership - and was disturbed by how persuasive it was, and how different from all the other Brexiteer arguments I’d heard, and rejected, over the last three years. What’s strange is that, beyond “change”, the Cumberbatch Cummings is unable to express what he actually wants, whereas the real-life Cummings kindly provides us with a ten-zillion-word blog in which he lays out in enormous detail precisely what he wants.
In Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War, Dominic Cummings is presented as a ruthlessly effective strategist and organiser, filled with a desire to heave the British establishment off its rails, and prepared to utilise very dubious tactics to achieve that.
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