Science and technology shapes our world – Roy Green

After the second world war there was another bout of industry building. Here, in an extract from his Keynote Address at the 2024 Pearcey Foundation National Awards, Emeritus Professor Roy Green reflects on the creation of Australia’s first computer, and what it can teach us about today’s industry policy challenge.

We are here tonight to commemorate the 75th anniversary, almost to the day, of Australia’s first stored-program digital computer, the CSIR Mark I, later retitled as CSIRAC.

https://www.pearcey.org.au/ It remains the only intact surviving first generation computer in the world, now preserved at the Scienceworks Museum in Melbourne.

1949 was an extraordinary year for Australian nation-building initiatives after the second world war, which included the launch of the Holden car and the start of the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

The role of government at this time was to reimagine and prepare for the jobs and industries of the future, and CSIR Mark I played a critical part in this with its functionality demonstrated at an international conference in Sydney in 1951 and the establishment of a joined-up computation system CSIRONET some years later.

While CSIR Mark I was not the first computer of its type in the world, it was designed and developed independently here from 1947 by the remarkable scientist Trevor Pearcey and his engineering colleagues Maston Beard and Geoff Hill for CSIRO, which made a strategic bet on Australia’s future with a massive box of vacuum tubes and mercury delay lines.

It was preceded, but only just, by the code-breaking veterans of Bletchley Park in the UK, with the SSEM, also known as the ‘Manchester Baby’, and EDSAC at Cambridge, as well as by a team in the US, though it must be said their machine didn’t actually work.

Charles Babbage is usually credited with the foundation concept of modern computing, which took the form of the so-called ‘Difference Engine’ in the 1820s.

He then took mechanised arithmetic to fully-fledged general purpose computation with his ‘Analytical Engine’ some years later.

The role of Ada Lovelace is often overlooked, but her programming skills were essential to the success of the enterprise.

Pearcey, like Alan Turing and other famous contemporaries, emerged from this tradition of visionary polymaths, surrounded by and immersed in the achievements of the Industrial Revolution.

He also shared their prescience, for example noting in 1948: “It is not inconceivable that an automatic encyclopaedic service, operated through the national teleprinter or telephone system, will one day exist”. Tim Berners-Lee took him at his word with the invention of the World Wide Web.

The point is it didn’t matter whether CSIR Mark I was the first, third or fourth such computer in the world, because its real importance was to embed national infrastructure for a new generation of Australian scientists and engineers.

Their mission was to pioneer a new wave of technological change in industry and to grow what we would now call innovation ecosystems around our research and education institutions.

The current strategic bet on quantum computing immediately comes to mind in this context.

Again it matters less whether we are the first in the world to develop a utility-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer, or indeed who does it, provided we establish open access infrastructure to drive downstream applications, with the prospect of building home grown innovation capability.

Australia’s challenge is reflected in the latest Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity, which measures the diversity and knowledge intensity of a country’s export mix.

Its rankings demonstrate the impact of economic orthodoxy, with its outmoded doctrine of ‘comparative advantage’. Australia has now dropped from 93 out of 133 countries, which was concerning enough, to 102, behind Argentina and Bangladesh.

Much has been made of stalled productivity and real wage stagnation in Australia, but this ‘burning platform’ has yet to translate into widespread recognition of its underlying source in our narrow trade and industrial structure, based overwhelmingly, and precariously, on the export of unprocessed raw materials.

The time has come once again, just as it did in the late 1940s and 50s, to reinvigorate Australia’s fragmented and underfunded research and innovation system, as part of an emerging national industrial strategy.

A major opportunity is now provided not only by quantum computing and its potential applications but also by the more immediate challenge of the clean energy transition, with an estimated global market of $15 trillion by 2050.

The Federal government has made a promising start with its Future Made in Australia initiative, focusing on programs to achieve net zero combined with greater economic resilience and complexity.

It is also embarking on a ‘strategic examination’ of how declining business and public investment in R&D can be reversed, including through the growth of collaborative place-based innovation ecosystems.

While a big part of this task is to create a renewed and motivating vision of change, an even bigger one is to ensure that it becomes a practical reality.

Emeritus Professor Roy Green is Special Innovation Advisor at the University of Technology Sydney. This article is a summary extract from his keynote address at the 2024 Pearcey Foundation National Awards in Brisbane on November 19.

Picture: Pearcey Foundation/Trevor Pearcey in front of CSIR Mk1 in Sydney in 1952