How Can We Restart the Economy?

The economy is in freefall, the UK is a dying country. We can all see that. But how do you turn it around?

Well, the usual answer is to invest in New Technology. The UK did that with computers back in the 80s and although most people didn't realise it at the time, there was a surge of economic activity that propped up the country. 

Back then if you look at the sales of home computers in the 80s, that was an industry that didn't exist in the 70s, that blossomed into a billion pound industry. Games design companies sprouted up, the home computers were built in the UK, the peripherals like printers were built here too. 

But greed took over. The corporates moved in. Games design teams were bought up by bigger and bigger corporations and ruined, computers started to be made abroad and then consoles became faster and better at playing games and now all the hardware is built abroad. So are the peripherals.

The people that were given enthusiasm for computers, that became freelance IT contractors were stooped by the Blair governments IR35 tax laws.

It all went corporate in the 90s.

But how do you create a boom like that again? If you look around, what emerging technology is there that could possibly create such a boom again?

The government is talking cheap talk about A.I. being the next big thing. But A.I. is already here. The big corporate players are established. The technology has emerged. So how could the U.K. harness such technology?

The government talk big about A.I. but they are just jumping on a bandwagon with buzzwords. They don't understand the technology, they don't understand what it could be used for, they don't even understand the requirements to harness such technology.

A.I. requires huge amounts of energy to function. So where is that energy going to come from? Our power generation capacity is at an all time low. I predict this winter will be the first to feature controlled blackouts because energy production won't keep up with demand. Octopus energy is already advising EV owners that they should only charge their EVs for 6 hours overnight. 

So if we are on such a knife edge energy capacity-wise, how the fuck does the government think they can run the vast processing centres required for A.I. and if we move to the next stage of A.I. Artificial General Intelligence, that requires a quantum level step up in energy supply, where is that coming from?

The government has green lit the production of Small, Modular Reactors. Small-Scale Uranium fusion rectors similar to those used in Nuclear Submarines. But they have exactly the same issues of waste disposal as normal sized Uranium Fission nuclear reactors.

The talk by the government about A.I. just shows the incompetence of the cabinet. Buzzwords without substance will not save the country. Understanding technology and catching a strand of tech before it emerges and being a world-leader in it demands intelligence, investment and careful management. 

There are really only a small number of technologies that could give us the boost we need.

Both are in energy generation. The first is Fusion power, although I think this is a dead dog because there are several players involved in this already. Again, the best minds from our universities are being poached abroad to help the private sector develop fusion reactors. 

The second is safe, clean nuclear power. the first thing that springs to mind would be Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) or Thorium reactors where fission is produced with less deadly nuclear products than current nuclear reactors. MSRs could be the stopgap to produce cheap safe energy while fusion stays decades in the future.

The challenges of MSRs are the temperatures involved and the highly corrosive products being used. The theory has been confirmed, it's just a matter of engineering to get an MSR to work for any length of time. We're good at engineering, so why can't we invest in that as a nation?

Oh yeah, we can't manufacture the alloys required to handle the heat and the corrosive elements. We don't have a manufacturing industry any more capable of creating the alloys required to make a MSR. If we outsource the manufacture abroad, then we create competition that has the ability to copy the technology and use it themselves.

Yeah, I guess we're fucked then.