UK's DARPA Clone Faces Tough Test as Govt Considers Funding
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The UK's ambitious efforts to mimic the wild success of US research and security outfit DARPA has just a few months to prove its worth, a parliamentary committee heard yesterday.
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency, or ARIA, was announced in 2021, but was not formally established until January 2023. A product of the Conservative Boris Johnson's post-Brexit government, the agency is designed to fund transformational research, with a so-called high risk, high reward approach.
However, Lord Drayson, aka Paul Drayson, electric world land speed record holder and member of the Lords Science and Technology Committee pointed out this week that while Aria's initial 800 million ($1 billion) funding would see it through to the end of the 2025/26 financial year, the Labour government is set decide on any future spending next spring, when it announces the multi-year spending review, setting out plans for 2026-27 to at least 2028-29.
Drayson said the Committee was supportive of Aria and wanted it to succeed, but questioned how it would secure its further when the government is set to decide its future well before its Parliamentary review, due in 2033.
[...] But last month, UK finance minister Rachel Reeves was forced to raise taxes and consider spending cuts in her budget as she struggled to balance the government books, boost the economy, and minimize public debt.
In such a climate, political leaders must weigh up the public's appetite for funding high-risk research with no immediate returns.
Before the Lords' committee, Clifford said: "We recognize that Aria, over the long run, has to provide great value for money, just as any use of public funds needs to, but that that value for money will obviously be measured in a different way, with a different risk appetite, and over a different time frame from the way that many other uses of public funds would. That's why we're so keen to establish core ideas about what failure and success mean for ARIA, what proportion of our programs we expect to succeed, because what we don't want to do is end up in a situation a couple of years where people say, 'When [the] ARIA program failed, does this mean Aria is failing?'"
[...] Aria is often seen as the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the Conservative "Vote Leave Brexit" campaign and, later, chief advisor to former prime minister Boris Johnson. Reports suggested his WhatsApp handle once said: "Get Brexit Done, then Arpa (Darpa's predecessor)."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.