Blackett Lecture 2023

This year’s annual Blackett Lecture will be taking place on Thursday 7^th December 2023 at the Royal Society in London’. Further information about the Lecture will be announced shortly.

Paul Clarke CBE FREng - Independent Advisor to Government, Industry and Start-ups 

In November 2020, Paul Clarke stepped down as Chief Technology Officer at Ocado, where he had led the sharp end of their innovation factory for many years, cooking with a cauldron of disruptive technologies including data, AI, IoT, synthetic environments, digital twins, robotics, smart machines and living labs. 

Paul is passionate about the recipes for successful invention, innovation and disruption, which in his experience are all about embracing non-linearity, mess, uncertainty, intersectional thinking, unconventionality, intuition and leaps of faith. He believes building a successful innovation factory is all about the people, culture, creativity, leadership and vision rather than just the underlying technologies, and he has spent much of his career being a piece of disruptive grit in a number of different oysters, trying to help people see what they can’t see and trying to inspire teams to do things they never dreamed possible. 

He now sits on a number of government and industry advisory boards including the Robotics Growth Partnership (co-chair) and Health Data Research UK, whilst at the same time advising a growing portfolio of exciting start-ups. He was a member of the UK's AI Council, the Innovation Expert Group that fed into the UK Innovation Strategy and an advisor to the National Food Strategy. 

Paul believes that on the back of existing missions and moonshots, the UK needs to assemble a “Lego set” of reusable building blocks, tools and infrastructure to enable research and innovation to be undertaken smarter, faster, and with less cost and risk. This is needed to deliver greater prosperity, resilience and defensible competitive advantage for the UK, but also at a planetary scale to tackle the growing list of wicked exponential challenges we now face as a species. To this end, he was one of the lead authors of the Cyber-Physical Infrastructure vision which was published by the government in Feb 2022 and was then the subject of a BEIS led formal consultation process. 

Paul originally read Physics at Oxford, before then entering the computer industry.  He has worked in software engineering, consultancy, interim management and a number of software start-ups. In what little spare time he has alongside his work and family, Paul loves to invent and build stuff, design PCBs, write software and generally tinker. 

Talk details

None of us can escape the huge focus on, and hype around, all things digital especially of course AI, LLMs and machine learning. This "digital hysteria" has exacerbated the eclipsing of physical technologies and strands of innovation, despite the inescapable reality that we live in a cyber-physical world. Tackling the growing list of exponential and existential challenges that we face as a species will require non-linear interventions, both digital and physical, that are massively reproducible, scalable and resilient. For example with climate change, orchestrating swarms of clean energy powered smart machines, on and under the ground, on and under the sea, in the air and even in space, to help us scalable measure, monitor, clean-up, re-plant and repair our planet. Where our physical and digital worlds collide live magical technological beasts such as digital twins, smart machines and living labs, and it is at this intersection that the most important and exciting things happen. However when it comes to exploring, understanding and optimising such complex non-linear systems and predicting their futures, mathematical models and synthetic environments are the often undervalued jokers in the pack, and we need to change that...