I'm starting a political party. Let's save Britain
Our number includes SWEs, ML experts, engineers, founders, megaproject managers, network builders, and polling experts. Join us.
Dear SoTA,
SoTA exists because it is representative of a need. The need in question is for the most creative and talented among scientists and technologists to have means to assemble and collaborate. This is vital, because the collection of knowledge is a prerequisite of any great endeavour, and the foundation of all scientific and technological progress. But that sense of togetherness in the face of profound challenge and uncertain odds is also important for another reason: in Britain as we know it, as we live in it, progress isn’t simply necessary. Progress is difficult.
Why is it that something so elemental, so natural to the human spirit, as progress should have become so difficult? Because Britain, the nation that coined the sciences as we know them, and that taught the world how to socialise their benefits, has become an opponent of progress in many of its forms.
The SoTA letters are full of inspiring theses. And yet if you trace the roots of many of the appeals found in many of those letters – to help unlock Britain’s human capital in hardware; to give space its proper priority; to address the inadequacies of our higher education system – you will find their common connection is a wider appeal to make progress possible. To change the conditions that predominate in this country that oppress our human capital, and prevent us from reclaiming our vacated position as, pound-for-pound, the most technologically advanced and prolific nation in the world.
I am leading an initiative – being driven by some of Britain’s finest minds in software, heavy industry, the hard sciences, and beyond (and including several existing SoTA luminaries) – to make that reclamation, Britain’s restoration to the pinnacle of scientific and technological achievement, possible.
Our plan is to create a new political party, crewed by individuals of extraordinary talent, powered by unique technology, and defined by a policy philosophy that bridges left-right divides. Our aim is to trigger a much overdue evolution in the general political consensus.
Why? Because our total vision – to make Britain the shining peak of the global technological light cone, and spread progress and wild prosperity to its every corner, in scientific and moral example of the rest of the world – is an intrinsically systemic problem, and a political-systemic problem.
No objective so wildly ambitious can be achieved without the best minds of several generations being committed to it. That’s why we’re looking for the kinds of people who will read these letters to come and lend their hand. Cracked SWEs, ML experts, engineering PhDs, founders of data and AI companies, megaproject managers, network builders, and polling and focus grouping experts already count among our number. We need more.
You will have noticed that these are not profiles of individuals who would typically have been found spending their time devoted to political matters. And yet we are all united by our shared feeling for Britain’s parlous present state, that there is nowhere left to hide from the fact of our decline; and we are bound together by a burning conviction that the slide can be arrested, that profound transformation is possible. That it is in us. That It Can Be Done.
Every sentiment in every SoTA letter is evidence of profound ability awaiting liberation-to-post; each one expressive of a brilliant mind begging to be allowed and enabled to build all the value it is capable of building. If you want to build a Britain in which the realisation of these fantastic ambitions is the norm, then come and work with us.
With regards,
Maxi Gorynski, on behalf of Progress (a.k.a ‘The Startup Party’)