Interview: Anthony Finkelstein, chief scientific adviser for national security The Engineer

"Magazines like The Engineer arrange interviews in two ways. Sometimes we contact organisations to request interviews with people who we think might be interesting, and sometimes they are pitched to us. In this case, the Royal Academy of Engineering got in touch and asked if we’d like to speak to Anthony Finkelstein. He is the chief scientific adviser for national security, we were told. “Basically, he’s like Q from the James Bond films.”

This is not the sort of introduction that one can turn down. Meeting Finkelstein in a basement conference room at the Academy’s headquarters near St James’s Park (a time-honoured rendezvous for Cold War spies, as John Le Carré told us), I wasn’t sure whether to expect the sort of bumbling-but-brilliant character portrayed by Desmond Llewelyn in the original films, the donnish-but-sarcastic type played by his successor, John Cleese, or the unassuming-but-penetrating new version of Ben Whishaw. Finkelstein resembles none of these; he is a tall, slightly gangly man with a taste for floppy caps and warm knitwear, and has a measured manner of speaking that indicates he is considering every word carefully. He is also quite adamant that he isn’t Q. When asked whether there is, in fact, a Q at all, he replied that he can neither confirm nor deny it. “But if there were one,” he added dryly, “she’d be doing a quite marvellous job.”

Finkelstein is a software systems engineer by profession, holding the chair in the discipline at UCL and based at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data sciences headquartered at the British Library. However, he added, we should not necessarily draw any inferences from that about the nature of the science he advises on. All other government departments save one have chief scientific advisers (CSAs), he explained (the Treasury has a chief economist). “We try to have a kind of mix among all the CSAs of different disciplines, so that when we have a multidisciplinary problem we can call on a range of people. We have physicists and materials scientists and people who have control and robotics experience, and a statistician, so I’m the sort of resident computer scientist.”...

“Things have changed, technologies are a lot easier to access and the global science base is a click away, so the government is very conscious that science is globalised, and there is a whole range of states that now have advanced science and are moving at our rate if not faster. The national security community now knows we can’t do everything behind the barbed-wire fence. We are only going to be able to keep up with exponential technlogy advances and with fast-moving agile adversaries if we exploit the full value of the innovation community and of the open science and technology community. It’s difficult and counter-cultural for us to achieve that openness – we prefer in general not to tell people about our capabilities or our lack of capabilities, but on the other hand the brightest people don’t necessarily work for you, so we have to reach out.”"