The Milltown Tech Policy Conversation #1: the Deep Tech Edition, with Sarah Hunter
For tech policy professionals, it's no longer enough to understand the political debate. While policymakers in the UK and Europe finalise a first wave of platform regulation, emerging technologies and geopolitical shifts are fundamentally reshaping the global conversation between governments, the public, academia, civil society, the media and technology companies.
How, in this environment, can companies harness public policy as a tailwind? How can they build products that will meet regulatory standards in years to come? And how can they play a positive role in shaping policy that supports innovation and competition while preventing harm?
We’re launching this newsletter to try and answer these questions - with the help of some of today’s most influential and interesting tech policy thinkers. Each month we’ll deep dive into a theme, starting with deep tech.
We’re sharing this inaugural issue with you as a leading tech thinker and friend of Milltown. If you would like to receive this monthly via Substack, subscribe below. Or if there’s a topic or question you’d like us to cover, hit reply.
In this issue:
The Conversation: Sarah Hunter, ARIA and NESTA Board Member and former Global Director of Public Policy at X, the moonshot factory
The Milltown POV: on the common policy challenges facing deep tech companies.
Mark your diaries: in July we’ll be launching a report, in partnership with Clifford Chance, on how - in the absence of regulation - companies can develop and use AI responsibly. Read more below and join our roundtable discussions.
The Conversation: Sarah Hunter on deep tech
Sarah Hunter sits at the intersection of public policy and breakthrough technology and science. She is a Board Member at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), the UK funding agency set up with a mandate to “create new capabilities that can benefit the UK and advance human progress”. She previously spent over a decade leading public policy at X, the moonshot factory, including 7 years as its Global Director of Public Policy. She is also a Board member at NESTA, the UK’s leading social innovator.
In this interview, Sarah gave us her views on how governments are using policy to support innovation and how deep tech companies should think about their policy strategies.
Highlights:
Industrial policy is back. The radical actions of rule breakers - Trump’s anti-China policies and Brexit - opened the door to interventionist policy. The rulebook has been thrown out and we're left with a blank sheet of paper where industrial policy has to be part of the UK’s answer. But we haven't acted on it in such a radical way - yet.
We’re entering a new era of collaboration between governments and deep tech companies. One of the biggest challenges of deep tech is the fact that changing physical systems and infrastructure is hard. It takes time, people and partnerships. Software industries are not good at this, and venture funding cycles don't suit it. We are entering an era in which deep tech companies are increasingly going to seek government help. This is a big shift from the time of software companies telling governments to back off and let them innovate.
Governments can still support deep tech while budgets are tight. They should (amongst other things) use procurement to support innovation. Government agencies spend billions of dollars acquiring technologies and it is an opaque and cumbersome process. I think we might see some progress in the procurement of climate tech solutions by US states and cities, which is where a lot of Inflation Reduction Act money is going to be spent.
There is a risk that over-regulation of AI will shut down beneficial new models. One of the most frustrating things about the generative AI debate is that other AI models will be able to address climate change and discover new forms of chemistry - it won’t be ChatGPT. We have to guard against a rush to regulation that shuts down new models under development because we’re scared of disinformation from ChatGPT.
Talent should be the first consideration for governments seeking to develop effective tech policy. It’s no accident that Taiwan is a case study of effective tech policy and Audrey Tang is the digital minister. If you can get the people at the top to hire the right people then the policy they make, and the way they interact with the public, will be transformed.
There will be scope for companies to partner with ARIA. Our first priority is to hire Programme Directors, who will define which missions we’ll focus on and where we put the R&D money. Once those Programme Directors have identified their missions, tech companies and corporates working in those spaces should come and talk to us, because there's a real opportunity to experiment and partner with us.
READ FULL INTERVIEW HERE
The Milltown POV
Semiconductors, autonomous vehicles, climate tech solutions, biotech, robotics, quantum and yes, AI - while the policy outcomes needed for each technology are distinct, if you’re a policy professional working at a deep tech company, odds are you’ll face these challenges:
Government partnership and collaboration is a necessity, not a nice-to-have. You need permission or investment to build (fabs, clean energy power plants, data centres) or you need government to invest in infrastructure (EV charging, connections to the National Grid) or you need to safely test your product with people (autonomous vehicles, large language models, robotics) or you need the government to pass policies that will stimulate demand in order to unlock private investment (carbon removal).
Timelines are long and products are complex. Government policy can stimulate demand as well as investment, effectively making (or breaking) new markets. Years in advance of having a product, deep tech companies need to start laying the groundwork so that policy can act as a tailwind rather than a headwind. But deep tech companies have an uphill struggle to communicate their product, vision and strategy to policymakers - they need to demonstrate they are solving a problem that is both hard and sufficiently large to require their solution. Often, their product is unique, or creates a new market that didn’t exist previously.
Governments have different values. Convincing governments to invest, buy and regulate favourably requires the right narrative that taps into the aspirations and worldview of each government at any point in time. At the moment that can be summarised (simplistically) as: US is anti-China and pro-jobs; UK focused on jobs and status on the world stage; Europe is keen to protect its businesses and values against a perceived US threat. In each of these three jurisdictions, policymakers are oscillating between defending their own values and aligning as allies against China / Russia (e.g. the US-EU Trade and Technology Council).
The challenges here are big, but so is the opportunity for policy professionals who are experts on their company’s tech and can leverage their understanding of the policy landscape within cross-functional teams.
Mark your diaries: forthcoming Milltown Partners and Clifford Chance report how companies can build and use AI responsibly
In the wake of ChatGPT, companies have rushed out enterprise and consumer products at lightning speed, and leading thinkers have raised important questions about how to mitigate AI’s potential harms. So we decided to conduct some research into views on how companies should develop and use AI products responsibly.
Do people support the use of oversight boards? Do they believe companies can responsibly open source AI models for testing? What type of labelling and transparency helps build trust? How do they think companies should be tackling bias and copyright issues? We’ve tested this and more through focus groups with policy informed members of the public in the UK, US and Germany.
We’ll be delivering the findings this summer, initially at closed door roundtables for responsible AI and policy leaders. If you would like to attend or know someone who might, please reply to this email.
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