Three Big Ideas #1
Three Big Ideas #1
Self-driving cars, AI art, and measuring immigrant entrepreneurship
Welcome to our weekly Three Big Ideas roundup, in which we serve up a curated selection of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
🚗 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Everything’s bigger in America, so the saying goes, and that certainly applies to their cars. An obvious problem with all that extra weight, as a recent article in The Economist explains, is that while supersized vehicles are safer for those inside them, they can pose lethal consequences for anyone else who isn’t. After analysing ten year’s worth of US crash data, they conclude that for every life saved by the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks, there are more than a dozen lost in other vehicles.
People don’t buy bulky cars to deliberately jeopardise their fellow motorists though. Bigger models are roomier and thus more pleasant to sit in. Part of the extra weight that modern cars have gained is due to modcons like climate control, electric windows and sunroofs. An inconvenient truth about electric vehicles is that they can often be heavier than their gasoline-powered equivalents because of their hefty battery packs. So calls to simply ‘mandate lightness’ would come at a cost to consumer welfare and possibly delay progress towards environmental objectives.
Fortunately, a technological solution is (safely) hurtling down the road – autonomous vehicles (AVs). Driverless cars promise to eliminate the vast majority of crashes – after all, just 2% of collisions in the UK are due to vehicle defects. The computers that control them don’t get aggressive, tired or drunk – but they are able to talk to each other remotely and have much faster reaction times than humans ever could. An enormous productivity boost could ensue if AVs enable more efficient transportation of both goods and workers. (Say goodbye to the commute as you know it.)
Earlier this year, the Autonomous Vehicles Act received Royal Assent, which means AVs could be driving on Britain’s roads by 2026. At the end of last month, British AV-startup Wayve announced a partnership with Uber, in which they will integrate their AI into vehicles using the ride-hailing firm’s platform.
Good news like this should encourage us that a safer, more prosperous future is possible – but let’s not take it for granted. Writing for the Greater London Project, Shakeel Hashim does a great job of sketching out some of the Cheems (for the uninitiated, read this) reasons why AVs might find themselves stuck at a metaphorical red light in Britain. He argues that, despite the AV Act being passed in May, there are still legislative hoops to be jumped through before we can expect driverless cars to be whisking us around. Given the gains that stand to be made, the responsible civil servants must have their feet firmly on the accelerator.
🎨 Anastasia Bektimirova, Researcher
Sci-fi author Ted Chiang penned an essay for The New Yorker arguing that “AI isn’t going to make art”, really ever. He writes that “art is something that results from making a lot of choices” and that AI “is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning.” In response, the commentary on social media got so loud it bordered the HR territory for some.
Unlike the caricature that Chiang’s piece sketches, the reality of AI art is more nuanced than typing a prompt into a machine. Like cameras or brushes, AI tools are instruments shaped and put to use by humans to assist in the creative process. It still requires artistic direction and iteration–that is, a lot of choices–and the initial output is rarely the final product. Such works can take days, weeks or longer to refine. The creative core remains human: people shape the message and use AI to express their vision. We don’t think of photos taken with digital cameras, where computer interfaces unlock hundreds of sophisticated and increasingly automated manipulations, as lesser creations than film photos. The medium isn’t the message here, and its choice is neither a yardstick for a work’s artistic merit nor a boundary of what it means to be creative. So is the case with AI – it is simply an evolution of the artist’s toolkit.
AI introduces a new dimension to creativity. And this dimension is an innovative space for human-machine collaboration and hybrid work. Refik Anadol, whose AI-generated art was on display at London’s Serpentine North Gallery this February, described AI as “a thinking brush that doesn’t forget, that can remember anything and everything,” and said he would “invite that AI to my studio, and host and cocreate” with it. Over at the Sydney Opera House, AI-generated choreography instructions keep dancers on their toes, creating a unique performance each night. From Pollock's drip paintings and Arp’s gravity-led collages to Cage's chance operations, there is something about chance that has long fascinated artists, and AI offers a new way to embrace it.
Beyond the “what counts as art” debate lie hard policy questions. No one is under the illusion that permission from every single artist whose work feeds into an AI tool lands in developers’ inboxes. Policymakers will have to grapple with what to do about this. Judging by recent copyright infringement court cases, this won’t be an easy fix. AI-assisted output is usually sufficiently transformed, but using this as a basis for policy is unlikely to satisfy many. One way forward might be infrastructure for detecting content ownership and providing compensation. But this is likely to be hard to implement in practice, especially at scale. As O’Reilly founder and CEO puts it, we need “a virtuous circle of ongoing value creation, an ecosystem in which everyone benefits.” There is a possibility that, when the dust settles, norms might end up shifting. On aesthetic grounds, there is still a long way to go before most AI art is worthy of the name. But the excitement of a new medium in its early days is an opportunity space to be leveraged not binned.
For the road, I’m leaving you with this piece by Vera Molnár, who is considered to have paved the way for generative art. Back in the 1960s, she was one of the first artists to produce computer-assisted drawings.
🌎 Philip Salter, Founder
Our latest report, Job Creators 2024, reveals that 39% of Britain’s fastest-growing companies have at least one foreign-born founder, with 32% of all founders across these companies coming from overseas. Given the UK’s immigrant population is less than half of this, we can confidently conclude – and we do – that immigrant founders are a critical component of Britain’s flourishing entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Debates around immigration can become emotional. But facts matter, and they really don’t care about your feelings. That so many of the UK’s most innovative companies are started by immigrants reveals that we are reliant on them for innovation, jobs and economic growth. It also suggests a path to more growth, if we can attract and retain more immigrants like them. The report has eight policy recommendations aimed to target them.
You can measure immigrant entrepreneurship in all sorts of ways. Before our work, the most common approach was to look at the percentage of those born outside the UK who are registered as directors of companies. The claim here was that the higher percentage proves immigrants are more entrepreneurial.
However, Governments understandably care about jobs and productivity and this measure doesn’t account for the economic impact of these businesses. Also, some of this could be ‘necessity entrepreneurship’, which might include immigrants who are excluded from employment due to discrimination. This certainly wouldn’t be something to celebrate.
The methodology we used was inspired by another report in which SyndicateRoom partnered with Beauhurst to track the 100 startups that have seen the greatest growth in valuation. In other words, a list of companies which private markets have taken the biggest bet on. Critically, unlike many lists of top companies that are put together with additional motives, e.g. PR,business development, it passed the smell test, including the likes of Darktrace, Deliveroo and Monzo.
Statistics can have a memetic quality – Rishi Sunak regularly quoted our finding that in 2019 that half of fastest-growing companies had an immigrant founder. That’s now dropped to 39%. Luckily, we know how to get it back up where it belongs and what that would mean for economic growth.