Meeting of the Parliament 25 January 2024
I am delighted to begin the Scottish Conservatives’ contribution to this important debate. Any day when I get to quote the science fiction author Arthur C Clarke is a good day. Clarke wrote three laws about the future, the most famous of which was:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
He wrote that in 1968, at a time when many people believed that, by now, we would have colonised space, cured hunger and ended disease. Well, we could not accuse them of being unambitious. However, if the author were here today, would he see the technology that we possess now as magical? Would he recognise that same technological ambition in us today?
Since Arthur C Clarke’s time, we have transformed the way in which we live and work. The warehouse-sized computers that helped to put man on the moon can now be vastly outperformed by the smartphones in our pockets or even the smartwatches on our wrists. In every sphere of life, from education and health to engineering and business, new technologies have transformed how we live and work.
As the Government’s motion alludes to, Scotland has achieved a great deal as a technological nation—our technologies have been groundbreaking and transformative. However, as the Scottish Conservative amendment seeks to point out, our past achievements are no guarantee of future success. At a time when the pace of change in technology continues to accelerate and whole new fields of research are in development, we should be laying the foundations of future success. Instead, we have a Scottish Government that does not just lack focus on long-term gains; in some cases, it takes decisions that actively harm such gains.
The coming years will see dramatic changes to our economy and society as a whole. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and zero carbon energy all have the potential to radically alter our lives, and the Scottish Government and this Parliament should constantly be considering how that could and should impact policy making.
The Scottish Government has not completely failed to recognise the need for change. The Scottish technology ecosystem review, which was led by Mark Logan—and commissioned by Kate Forbes back when Scottish National Party plans for the future extended beyond the Scottish Green Party manifesto—offered more than 30 recommendations to support more start-ups and scale-ups in the technology sector, which the Scottish Government duly accepted. However, the report examined only part of the picture, at best, and, despite being published in August 2020, it was written at a time when the arrival of AI felt more distant than it does today.