The Graveyard of Good Intentions

In 2015 the UK governing party had put in its winning election manifesto a commitment to make the UK a global leader in 5G. But when the time arrived for the technology to be rolled out, the UK was not a global leader in 5G. In fact it was not even in the running. It seemed important to me for there to be a deep investigation as to why. Otherwise, the same policy errors would only be repeated in the next Government high tech initiative. I had this flash of inspiration that the UK now sat on a uniquely valuable data set pair – there now existed the policy detail behind the outstanding GSM success and the policy detail behind the dismal 5G failure. In other words two high technology initiatives with a similar goal of global success, in the same field, involving broadly the same set of players but with diametrically opposite outcomes. So, the research was to discover what policy elements existed in the first that were absent in the second and vice versa. This would isolate the policy differences that determined success or failure of large government infrastructure initiatives.

Having achieved this for GSM and 5G, the next step was to see if the result worked on other Government high technology initiatives. We had the bold ambition to apply it to the Government’s just published AI opportunities Action Plan. That too carried a government ambition of UK global leadership. Our shocking discovery was that the lessons from the dismal 5G failure…had not been learnt. To make this claim public we had to be absolutely sure. So we developed a method for harnassing three independent AI Platforms with highly efficient error suppression.

What came out of all the research were ten golden rules, set out in our book, that any government high technology initiative had to comply with to stand any chance of success.