IT Essentials: Capital control

Government-funded research plays an important part in tech developments

Should we be this comfortable handing responsibility to private firms?

An idea has been running through my head for some time, but it's only since reading John Leonard's excellent coverage of this week's UK and Ireland SAP Users' Group (UKISUG) meeting that I've managed to put it into (possibly controversial) words:

Why are we allowing private companies to dictate innovation?

Governments shouldn't be directly responsible for tech developments. No Downing Street sub-committee would ever have launched something as risky as Amazon Prime, or taken a punt on its own large language model; but agencies like DARPA in the USA, or the newly launched home-grown ARIA, can, should and do.

Funded research is an important part of technology development, and tends to come earlier in the innovation process than the private sector. For that reason, it too often gets overlooked while 'big bang' developments like ChatGPT and the metaverse get the headlines.

Modern technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual spaces and blockchain will shape the world; but they're based on elements first funded through the public sector, before private firms jumped in at a sniff of profit.

Private funding has an important place in moving research towards a commercial reality. However, private organisations should not be both research centres and arbiters of future developments.

Take OpenAI as an example. Although a non-profit, its lofty goal - 'Creating safe AGI [(artificial general intelligence)] that benefits all of humanity' - being under any private company should concern all of us. What if a country disagrees with how the US-based OpenAI sees 'benefitting all of humanity'? Or its methods don't align with how another region believes the technology should be built? Why are we okay with a private firm having so much influence over a world-shaping technology?

We could say the same for Meta and the metaverse, or AWS and the cloud. And the truth is, organisations to shape these technologies safely and under firm scrutiny already exist: they are called governments.