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The Alan Turing Institute has failed to develop modern AI in the UK

• cs702 3y ago
  Quoting Rich Sutton, who wrote the perfect response some years ago: "The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. The ultimate reason for this is Moore's law, or rather its generalization of continued exponentially falling cost per unit of computation. Most AI research has been conducted as if the computation available to the agent were constant (in which case leveraging human knowledge would be one of the only ways to improve performance) but, over a slightly longer time than a typical research project, massively more computation inevitably becomes available. Seeking an improvement that makes a difference in the shorter term, researchers seek to leverage their human knowledge of the domain, but the only thing that matters in the long run is the leveraging of computation. These two need not run counter to each other, but in practice they tend to. Time spent on one is time not spent on the other. There are psychological commitments to investment in one approach or the other. And the human-knowledge approach tends to complicate methods in ways that make them less suited to taking advantage of general methods leveraging computation."[a] The very smart folks at the Alan Turing Institute are learning firsthand how bitter the lesson can be. --- [a] http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
  • diego_moita 3y ago
    Funny plot twist: the pioneer on leveraging computation on neural networks is actually a British: Geoffrey Hinton, living in Canada. Btw, Rich Sutton was born in the U.S. but renounced his American citizenship, becoming Canadian.
    • NalNezumi 3y ago
      And a MORE funny story is,(according to an coworker of mine, whose PhD supervisor was a friend to Hinton) that when Hinton was looking for university to conduct his work in, he was rejected by the UK universities which was his first choices. So ended up in Canada. So the plot twist comes with a bit of irony!
      • mafribe 3y ago
        Yes, Hinton was on a temporary position at the University of Sussex (IIRC, the Centre for Cognitive Science) for a while, but was not offered a permanent academic position there when he applied.
    • fulafel 3y ago
      Also, the history of the the underlying advances is a lot more international than current popular telling of the history lets on. See eg https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/scientific-integrity-turing-award-deep-learning.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/scientific-integrity-turing...
  • adventured 3y ago
    Along that line re Moore's Law, the biggest clear advantage the US has in regards to AI, is: Nvidia, AMD, Intel (and obviously particularly Nvidia up to this point, although AMD and Intel are producing some potent GPUs). The reason the US was able to pull off a leap forward via OpenAI or LLaMa, is due to having Nvidia as basically a national treasure, but it's an integrated whole, the US has all the components necessary and the ecosystem that produces all the components (including talent, thought process, money, start-ups, pay scale (to lure talent)). The Europeans have never lacked for the brains side of being able to do it, certainly. Until they fill out the rest of the ecosystem they won't be able to really compete in AI (they'll lag far behind, with lots of blaming and empty promises big government projects). And China is its own worst enemy these days, all we need is for Xi to remain in power indefinitely and he'll throttle their potential as a global competitor. The US is close to locking up another round in the tech wars, riding on the same approach that has served it so well since WW2. Hopefully our do-something legislators are hands off long enough (ie don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory).
    • cs702 3y ago
      > including talent, thought process, money, start-ups, pay scale (to lure talent) ...and a culture of risk-taking and ambition to change the world.
      • adventured 3y ago
        Yeah I tried to cover that with the start-ups implication. The US has that in spades in regards to aggressively funding start-ups by the zillions when a new tech inflection hits (whether software, Web, mobile, cloud and now AI). The VCs always go overboard, which is ideal (billions in destroyed capital is meaningless compared to producing the next Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc).
        • cs702 3y ago
          Couldn't agree more!
    • reedciccio 3y ago
  • ragnese 3y ago
    As someone with no knowledge of the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence, I wonder how much of recent AI stuff is due to "true" Moore's Law (GPUs and such getting much faster/cheaper), and how much is due to the data version of Moore's Law (web-scale data farming/storage to "teach" LLMs and such).
    • cs702 3y ago
      Making use of more data requires more compute (e.g., longer training, more powerful hardware, or both).
      • TremendousJudge 3y ago
        At this point I'm not sure progress is due to Moore's Law as stated originally (cheaper compute) than it is due to companies just spending more on compute. Effect is the same for now, but with a clear limit.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • jmole 3y ago
    I think the problem is actually worse than the article implies, because there are two things being leveraged here: compute and data. Short-term improvements made by domain-specific AI result in better outputs than more general AIs, ceteris paribus. But these better outputs can then later be fed back into more powerful general purpose AIs, and consuming the data*compute product from the domain-specific models is a very effective way to train domain-specific behavior. Today, we see this in reverse – people are training smaller models based on outputs from GPT-4. However, I expect that we'll start to see more and more training going the opposite direction in the future: Domain-specific generative models will be used to build scenarios for large general-purpose AIs to train against. Here's a concrete example – image diffusion models are really bad at physics, so you can't tell one to draw a person upside down, because it's not well-represented in the dataset, and if you force it to with something like controlnet you typically get a disfigured and horrific image. So obviously diffusion models are not the best long-term solution for image generation. But how do you get this concept of "upside down" into an AI model? Well, maybe you add some kind of neat segmentation technique that involves using several diffusion models and rotating and stitching together their outputs. Great, you made an upside-down generator. Now, you generate 100,000 images of "upside down" people, and the next advance in image generation AI can come along and learn that concept with ease thanks to the larger data set that it has. So it's not just that "more compute wins", it's more like: not only does more compute wins, it wins even more because short-term improvements feed directly into the data pipeline that enables it to win.
  • luplex 3y ago
    At least in the field of computer vision, there seems to be lots of algorithmic progress too. The algorithms improve every 9 months by an amount equivalent to a doubling of compute budget. https://epochai.org/blog/revisiting-algorithmic-progress https://epochai.org/blog/revisiting-algorithmic-progress
    • version_five 3y ago
      Also, while it gets lost in the foundation model stuff, a major trend in computer vision is toward smaller, high quality datasets. Arguably CV had its V1 llm moment years ago with models trained on imagenet, which produced amazing general results but weren't good enough for much specific stuff. If you look at what, e.g. Andrew Ng was talking about last year, there was a big emphasis on "small data" and getting good datasets.
    • famouswaffles 3y ago
      The bitter lesson isn't really "algorithms bad", "don't try different approaches", "don't innovate" or "only work on models with massive compute". The heart of the bitter lesson is "don't try to codify "insight" into the process". It's basically the age old "you don't know what you don't know". The Transformer is kind of a perfect example. It boasts algorithmic improvements over RNNs and LLMs are by far the best performing take on language modelling ever. And yet the architecture itself has basically no breakthrough from understanding language itself. It's an improvement over standard RNNs but not really because of any new found insight or implementation on language itself. Basically trying to cram human high level instincts/insights into the process of solving a problem doesn't work better than giving a general architecture tons of data and letting it figure that all out by itself.
      • FeepingCreature 3y ago
        I'd argue it's even "you don't know what you do know." We cannot codify what we don't understand, and while we understand and can verbalize some parts of our thinking, others, maybe even the great majority, are hidden from us. We just get a feeling.
      • 3y ago
  • xtracto 3y ago
    The EU+UK need a project like the large hadron collider but for AI: Develop a really really large computational infrastructure that allows researchers to study AI experiments with technology that may be 20 or 30 years far away from being commoditized.
    • dr_dshiv 3y ago
      They are doing that for quantum computing. But 20 years is about right. It seems like Netherlands completely missed the boat on LLMs, too… but I don’t blame them. I just hope they pivot quickly.
  • dr_dshiv 3y ago
    Let’s be honest, though—very, very few people expected large language models to be so ungodly effective.
    • clueless 3y ago
      is this really true?
    • readthenotes1 3y ago
      Perhaps many many many more people would have made the bet on LLM versus NFTs or virtue signalling with “Data as an instrument of coloniality: A panel discussion on digital and data colonialism”, right?
• arethuza 3y ago
  Not to be confused with the Glasgow-based Turing Institute which did do some very cool stuff back in the 1980s/1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute Founded by Donald Michie who worked at Bletchley Park! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Michie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Michie
  • DonHopkins 3y ago
    I worked at the Turing Institute in Glasgow in the summer of 1992, and just recently ran into an old colleague who was one of the original founders, who confirmed a funny story I'd heard: Donald Michie once overheard his secretary explaining to someone over the phone how to pronounce his name, in a thick Scottish accent: "It's Donald, as in Duck, and Michie, as in Mouse." He was so pissed off, he refused to speak to her for a month! ;) The Turing Institute put on the First Robot Olympics in September 1990 (check out the cool retro robot photos!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Robot_Olympics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Robot_Olympics My favorite photo is the walking pizza box fascinating the kids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Robot_Olympics#/media/File:Cardiff_Robot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Robot_Olympics#/media/Fi...
    • arethuza 3y ago
      One of my favourite's was the name of the C to PostScript compiler PDB - being Glasgow: "Pure Dead Brilliant". Edit: I never did use it, I'd got quite happy writing PostScript!
• diego_moita 3y ago
  And the rest of the world goes, "meh..." This is part of a trend: the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution lost most of it's manufacturing industry, the nation that once championed free trade is cloistering itself on Brexit, the inventors of football (a.k.a. soccer) are falling behind on the World Cup, the nations that once were vassals to the British Empire are drifting away from the Commonwealth, and Scotland ... Well, it kinda looks like Great Britain is becoming less Great each passing decade. In World War I, four empires collapsed: czarist Russia, Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian and the British Empire. The Austrians already accepted it. The Russians and Turks are refusing desperately to accept it. The British didn't even notice it.
  • mym1990 3y ago
    A decade(s) of poor leadership in an era of fast moving technology will do that!
    • throw_pm23 3y ago
      That may be the case, but a simple reversion to the mean may also be sufficient explanation. If everyone plays in a globalised (more or less) even playing field, then sooner or later they catch up and the initial lead will matter less.
      • mym1990 3y ago
        Its likely both, no one stays on top of the world forever, and globalization did well to level some playing fields!
  • justrealist 3y ago
    That's a pretty simplistic view re: Turkey. Turkey did become irrelevant after WWI, but is far more of a power today than it was 30 years ago, and given the relative dysfunction of the neighborhood, it's only going to get stronger.
  • meroes 3y ago
    The UK in the 1880s to now is a very large decline in world power. It might be the largest decline while remaining intact of any nation. In that respect it’s actually doing well
• version_five 3y ago
  Not focusing on LLMs isn't a major sin imo, if I was donating money to an institute I'd rather they were doing something unique than churning out another also-ran llm. Researchers have diverse interests and expertise, and the field has way more depth than the current thing, it's not obviously bad they were working on other stuff. That said, if the examples he gives of what they were working on are representative, it implies they are spending their time chasing trends instead of doing fundamental research and chased the wrong ones. I'd suspect they re doing more than what was implied though.
  • martingoodson 3y ago
    Of course there are pockets of good work, like in any research institute. It's difficult to point to anything really pushing the envelope in AI research though. You have any evidence to the contrary?
• ninth_ant 3y ago
  For the benefit of innovation it actually pays off when some organizations work on alternatives to the dominant model. What if LLMs become stagnant and some other approach is needed, perhaps in tandem with it? Work that seems irrelevant today may become useful then. I’m not saying that their approach is this, just that failure to produce a LLM doesn’t necessarily equal an embarrassing failure.
  • martingoodson 3y ago
    The failure to do any meaningful work related to the most important breakthrough in AI ever is objectively bad.
    • version_five 3y ago
      That doesn't follow from anything. Research is part methodical slog, part lottery, maybe a pinch of intelligence. A few labs won the short term lottery here, and most researchers explored stuff that didn't get headlines. (And to be fair, OpenAI built a great product that catapulted lab research into popular view). There might be some argument on other metrics - publications, students trained, lectures, recognition, whatever, that show this institute is lagging. But not being part or llms implies nothing about their success or failure.
    • mnd999 3y ago
      LLMs are not the most important breakthrough in AI ever, in the same way the NFTs are not the most important breakthrough in digital commerce ever. It's just a load of hype to generate big funding rounds. At least there's no cartoon apes this time around.
      • extasia 3y ago
        The transformer architecture is arguably the most important breakthrough in NLP, and language is the predominant mode of communication between humans, so I fail to see how its "just a load of hype" Could you name a bigger breakthrough in AI?
• deleted 3y ago
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• coastermug 3y ago
  It looks like they recognise this failure “ In 2023 that purpose remains unchanged, but we are reassessing our founding assumptions and setting a course for the next five years”. Quite what that course is, remains to be seen. My personal experience is that the UK loves giving out funding to established/safe organisations that it knows won’t cause a (positive or negative) splash. I’ve seen very few UK government initiatives funding genuinely small organisations, but of those that I’ve seen, they have been well executed.
• owlbite 3y ago
  If its anything like other UK government research bodies I've interacted with in the past, they started off with pay significantly below market rate for salaries and then failed to even hit inflation with pay raises due to UK government policies. Any fund injections are one-time capex for headlines and never any new recurrent funding for keeping the lights on, paying the staff or funding the research. The fact that these places produce any decent research is more a testament to the dedication of the staff (who have often been there since before the several decades of penny pinching which drove them into the ground) than anything the government does.
  • roncesvalles 3y ago
    That's the first thing that came to my mind as well. UK tech salaries are notoriously low. Let this be a harbinger for the rest of the industry -- you can "get away" with paying far below market for talent, but you make yourself vulnerable to getting generationally leapfrogged like this because the cutting edge work in your art is happening under someone else's roof.
• deleted 3y ago
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• everyone 3y ago
  Does anyone else think the Turning test is a bit silly and outdated now? Like ChatGPT could probably pass it yet it is clearly not intelligent.
  • version_five 3y ago
    Yes I said something similar recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35861837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35861837
  • voakbasda 3y ago
    Most humans can pass it and are clearly not intelligent.
    • bbor 3y ago
      A question only someone who frets way to much about AI would ask: are you serious? Or is this just a "other people are dumber than I am" joke? Would be very interested to hear your stance, if the former :)
      • voakbasda 3y ago
        Partly serious, from the perspective that the goalpost for "clearly" acknowledging AI have been raised every time the previous goalpost was achieved. Presently, we have LLMs that converse better than most humans, but most people still say they are not artificial intelligence. In that regard, I think it fair to say that the criteria for acknowledging AI now effectively exceeds the criteria for being a human. In situations like the Turing Test, I'd wager most humans would already comes across as inferior in conversation as compared to our best LLMs. If the LLM is not intelligent yet it still appears more intelligent than us, then it seems mathematically that our intelligence must be zero (or less).
        • bbor 3y ago
          Very cogent, thanks for the response! I definitely agree. My simple solution to this question is to go back to Turing himself, who designed his test with explicit goal of avoiding terms like "intelligence" in favor of more meaningful ones, like "similarity" or "capability". Anyone who says that GPT(4) isn't intelligent when it's turning out long, well-reasoned essays on demand seem a little stubborn, IMHO...
• bbor 3y ago
  So this article could be summarized as "man who has running a DL company for 12 years suggested that a government institution fund DL more, and is mad that they aren't"? Disregarding the dash of woke==bad. Certainly a valid opinion, but these comments seem to be treating it as much more objective than I take it to be. Substantively, this just seems ludicrously short-sighted. If all investment was focused on the most recent AI model to have success, DL wouldn't exist. I'm definitely saving this article for the day in the near future when people realize, hey, maybe the entire field of AI & cognitive science wasn't just wasting time for the last 70 years, and maybe those ideas will also be carried on the rising tide of Moore's Law.
  • khazhoux 3y ago
    Is this the woke==bad part? > Their top piece of content was “Data as an instrument of coloniality: A panel discussion on digital and data colonialism”. Do any AI specialists think this work is going to push the bleeding edge of AI research in the UK? Because I think that speaks directly to his point and has nothing to do with woke wars.
    • version_five 3y ago
      I'd say that's a pretty clear example of why woke==bad. The title reads like something that was made up by the Onion in an attempt to mock a charicature. This kind of garbage draws attention away from actual research.
      • khazhoux 3y ago
        That’s not a fair assessment. Just because this study is not useful in the technical advancement of the field, does not mean that studying social issues is worthless (“woke is bad”). Just that that research should happen somewhere else.
        • version_five 3y ago
          It's my perception of this social justice stuff that it infects everything, because it's somehow become a magic wand that give people power over others. The whole point in this example is that resources from what is ostensibly an computer science research institute is working on fringe left political issues. It wouldn't be ok if they studied "intelligent design" or whatever the current far right is up to either, but politics has managed to infiltrate research so we're all forced to deal with cuture war stuff instead of working on computer science.
• matthew9219 3y ago
  Glassdoor indicates that the Alan Turing Institute pays senior research associates $49,015 per year, senior project managers $48k, and senior research fellows the same. I wasn't able to identify any roles there that paid above $50k/year. Is it any surprise that when you hire people with PhDs and you pay them less than bartenders that you don't get the best people? Those people go to Google or Microsoft and make 10x as much.
  • coastermug 3y ago
    Bartenders do not earn £50k in the UK. £50k is considered an above average wage, albeit PHDs can earn far more working elsewhere.
    • matthew9219 3y ago
      In Seattle, my girlfriend made $65k last year cutting hair for dogs. She has a college degree, but no PhD, but doesn't use the college degree. I made $350k. I have a college degree in computer science, but no PhD. Why would any top talent take a job at 50k?
      • coastermug 3y ago
        UK vs USA. You’re not wrong at all though. It’s also very interesting the lack of salary transparency that exists in the Uk. If you don’t poke your head around London, you can be blissfully unaware of the salaries that are available in Finance and broader tech scene in London. Given that many great UK universities exist outside of London, there will be PHDs who are unaware or don’t care about what they could be earning.
        • nonethewiser 3y ago
          > UK vs USA That's the point though
      • lowbloodsugar 3y ago
        Because they are unwilling to emigrate to the USA.
• waffletower 3y ago
  "It’s concerning that none of the projects mentioned in this document, or indeed any other major open source AI project, arose in the UK." I believe this statement is at least partially incorrect. StabilityAI is a London, UK based company, and several of the researchers directly involved in the development of Stable Diffusion are UK citizens. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stability-ai https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stability-ai
  • martingoodson 3y ago
    That's a good point. Thank you. Officially the open source model was released by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s CompVis lab. I agree that's something of a technicality.
  • whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    As pitiful as the Turing institutes contributions are from this article, the fact it doesn't mention that throws the entire article into question.
  • _Wintermute 3y ago
    And AlphaFold was developed across the road from the Turing Institute.
• feintruled 3y ago
  This is a bit like the CIA totally failing to spot the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union.
• m4rtink 3y ago
  I guess this is karma at play, given what Britain did to Alan Turing ?
• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  Didn't the UK basically have that with DeepMind until Google bought them out? I'd suspect DeepMind would be a fantastic competitor to OpenAi today had they not sold.
  • extasia 3y ago
    Deepmind are still based in London. In fact they're pretty near to the Turing Institute HQ.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  The sadder thing is that someone was once enamored by this institution enough to care. Maybe this is good for the UK taxpayers and parliament to know. I don't think the rest of us - or anyone - should spend any more energy on this. Most publicly funded institution engaged in an affinity grift. News at 11. Stop funding it, the end.
• testemailfordg2 3y ago
  1) Need of society 2) Necessity for survival 3) Individual determination 4) State priorities I think one can trace back most of the inventions in human history, to be an outcome of a scenario where more than one reason above is true. So going by this, even if we had a determined individual in the Alan Turing institute, but none of the remaining three scenarios were true, his chances of success are slim in comparison to his counterparts at other places like Canada or the US. Look at china and you can easily find an environment where a determined individual under state priorities gets funding abd support for critical technologies. Probably now the state priorities will change and in future you can expect some new breakthroughs happenning in the institute as well.
• currymj 3y ago
  the criticism of the Alan Turing Insitute's past failure to become a world-leading AI research institution may be fair, I don't know if they really missed an opportunity or not. however after this, it's a somewhat confusing post if you click the links, because after criticizing the government for not being willing to focus on LLMs, he links to a press release about 100 million pounds being devoted to training LLMs. it's unclear to me what the objection is to this project, or what is meant by "open source" that is different from a normal publicly funded government research project.
  • martingoodson 3y ago
    Sorry for not being clear enough. The point is that this £100M is very likely to be spent on the Turing Institute since it seems to suck up all AI funding in the UK. It will therefore likely be wasted.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• nonethewiser 3y ago
  Europe is great at making laws but not much else.
  • LightBug1 3y ago
    How's that chlorinated chicken tasting these days?
• karaterobot 3y ago
  But they are kilometers ahead of everybody else on predicting what prices NFTs sell for, and understanding the role of coloniality in data. It's a tradeoff, really.
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  And the Human Brain project is also another large failure.
• realjohng 3y ago
  Oh boy, jarring coming out of that dark background website
• computing 3y ago
  so did DeepMind, excuse me, Google DeepMind.
• TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Odd that the article author lists “Data as an instrument of coloniality: A panel discussion on digital and data colonialism” as an example of them doing nothing - digital colonialism is an important subject and one that many larger institutions seem afraid to cover.
  • martopix 3y ago
    Indeed, and it's a topic that would not be covered by big tech. I think this idea that academia must compete on the same terrain as big AI companies is misguided. There are areas where only academia can be successful, because they would not be profitable, and others where academia doesn't have the resources.
    • midiguy 3y ago
      Yup. I think it will be pretty important for academia to serve as an intermediary between the possibilities being presented by big tech on the one hand, and the concerned regulatory bodies and lawmakers on the other. It's the only place you will find individuals who actually understand stuff like LLMs without necessarily having a vested interest in any one firm.
• nologic01 3y ago
  Imagine how people might feel about the "departed AI train" in any lesser European (or other) country that would not even remotely dream of having an Alan Turing Institute. It is such self-inflicted misery. The bright future for the UK would have been as a core member the EU, helping shape a large economic space with massive amounts of talent, happily moving around the wonderful cities, taping the endless cultural heritage and building a digital society congruent with the European way of life and values (which in various important ways differs from the US). While the nationalistic reflex is not as strong elsewhere in Europe it is still a hindrance that shows up in countless frictions. In any case, LLM's are just another stop of the journey. If people stopped digging while in a hole there is always a way out.
  • matthew9219 3y ago
    Your premises are deeply mixed into your argument here. From an (conservative leaning) American perspective - the Alan Turing Institute is an perfect example of broken European thinking. Real innovative happens at highly motivated private companies, private companies who have huge profits to make if they are successful, and who pay huge salaries to talented employees, talented employees who desire to be rich. Government institutions more frequently pay mediocre salaries, reward politicking rather than excellence, and are undermotivated to solve problems, because they are unlikely to receive commensurate share of the benefits. Now that Britain has left the EU, we Americans hope they will stop pissing money down the drain on useless government programs like the Alan Turing Institute and will instead reorient to a more business friendly environment, which recognizes that innovation happens mostly in successful businesses, and that governments role is to create that business friendly environment.
  • TMWNN 3y ago
    What utter and complete nonsense. What evidence is there that a UK in the EU would be in any, way, shape or form better off in terms of AI? Zero, zip, zilch, nada, nothing. Or anything else, for that matter? The current economic woes of Britain are no greater or worse than that of its western EU peers, contrary to the repeated prattle of the UK having committed "economic suicide". Or, rather, if the UK has committed suicide, so has the rest of western Europe.
• deleted 3y ago
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• martopix 3y ago
  I feel this isn't quite a failure of the Alan Turing or of the UK, but rather of university research vs big tech -- the latter has a significant advantage in this specific field, for a number of reasons. There was an interesting paper about that and relative discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35564013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35564013
• anotheronebytes 3y ago
  because their real job is to preserve the knowledge, not innovate or invent new stuff. but if academia is not the institution in charge of innovating, then which is it? I'm still a bit confused about this. I saw it like a contradiction but do not know what to do about it. PhD degree programs telling "come innovate" into the institutions whose real job is to preserve knowledge?
• 908B64B197 3y ago
  Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a government research center named after him seems particularly strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it. Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of state. She could have simply overturned his conviction. The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe. If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.
• nurettin 3y ago
  Why should they copy everyone?