Tectonic Shifts in Science, Technology, & Industrial Policy: Looking Ahead

Frank there hi hello everyone welcome to the MIT Mobility Forum I'm Jim huachao professor of city transportation at MIT the three Landmark bills the infrastructure investment jobs act the inflation reduction act the chips and science act together promised to invest substantially in our infrastructure climate Science and Technology much of them directly touched the transportation industry and research it's a wider generational opportunity to transform America's Mobility system today is such a pleasure to have Elise Reynold and David Mendel to join us and share their thoughts on the tectonic shift in science technology and Industry policy I invite Liz and David not only give us the big picture of what's going on but also give two or three concrete examples in the ACT hardly construed what are the tensions in the negotiation what do they mean for cities and transportation maybe a particular neighborhood particular Community here and also what does it mean for average person in the neighborhood why we should care on this right before I formally introduce this and David I do want to reinforce the norm of this forum which is everybody contribute y idea in either in a formal question or comments and type into the chat right to just to warm up the audience I prepared a poll uh I will project it now asking to what degree are the three acts rja ra and chips connected to your own practice right so I will start the PO here I just launched it so to what degree the three acts connect your own practice uh the property destroys forms I contribute to the development of the rrj the act itself right then the second one is related to my own practice significantly or related to in a partial way or are just curious okay I'll give three more second one two three so we'll enter the poll and the share the result so uh you need a couple of us in the audience actually contribute to the ACT writing system that's great and uh about 20 relate to the practice significantly and twenty percent really partially and half of interest in the in the conversation here great and the second exercise is I like everybody in the chat typing your organization City and local time just to give this and David a background of who the audience are so I was starting the chat I would say MIT Cambridge Massachusetts time is 1207 yeah so University of New Mexico uh Edgecomb Wireless fetal Northwestern aquaticity usdot Bobby UW medicine Qualcomm NTA officer sustainability MIT s next are we're banked Department Air Force IOP kind thank you thank you for sharing this information hopefully give some context for Liz and David on this right so let me introduce the list and Dave at least and I our classmates at MIT many years ago she researched on National Regional system of innovation as well as a manufacturing ecosystem I scale up she was a special assistant to the president to the President Biden for manufacturing at economic development at the National Economic Council until just uh last October during the time at the White House she helped the lead administration's work on Supply chains national manufacturing strategy Regional Economic Development and the broader industry policy agenda Renault was the executive director of the mit's industrial performance center for decades as well as the exact director for the MIT task force on the work of the future welcome to join us at least and David Mandel I actually have spoken in this forum twice is a professor of erastro and the professor of a history of engineering and Manufacturing he has this unique combination of engineering and Humanity which is precisely what needed to understand the mobility challenges in the society today he also co-chaired the task force on the work of the future he wrote six books so including the work of the future with Liz Reynolds on this he also co-founded a humanitics corporation also co-founder of unless partner of venture capital without further Ado let me pass the form to this and David peace uh thanks you and I think I'll start out a little bit and um it's great to be back here yet again maybe it'll be like Saturday Night Live where they keep records of the uh the most uh invite backs um and of course always happy to do this because it's always such an interesting conversation and a great audience um and boy looking at that list going by on the chat really gets your brain in the in a global conversation which is amazing um and I thought I'd uh start by putting my historian hat on a little bit and zooming out a fair amount um because there's a reason that we titled this talk the tectonics um and just to go back 200 years to the Industrial Revolution um we've had this amazing transformation in work and Technology many people called it the industrial Enlightenment because the industrial Enlightenment the Industrial Revolution really followed on a set of big ideas about work and machinery and production and consumption and distribution and of course that revolution has fed and clothed all of us here it has enabled the planet to support much larger populations uh with lower amounts of agrarian labor than by dramatic amounts and has really given us the industrial life and the industrial societies that we live in today and shaped pretty much everything about the way that we live in a modern world um and the ideas behind that original industrial Enlightenment I think um were very expansive and world changing but also missed two things as part of the core industrial philosophy that laid the groundwork for the revolution that came after and those I would call the problem of Labor how do you get people to work uh in a way that's Humane and uh fulfills their own uh human needs and allows them to eat and support families and uh live a thriving human life in a way that's Equitable and share in the prosperity and of course the last 200 years have been marked by uh labor Stripes uh much of it quite violent in this country in the 19th century and different forms of uh workplace exploitation and that carries on today um and only exacerbated of course by the pandemic and the second problem that the industrial Enlightenment missed was the problem of environment um the extraction of Natural Resources the impact on the world around us um and the uh sometimes and quite frequently negative After Effects whether it's a hunt of course climate or uh toxic waste or as we recently saw in Ohio industrial accidents impact on the world around them uh and I'll address those two in a minute um but before I do I want to say um uh the topic of course today is about government policy and um in the United States um government has played a critical role throughout this period of industrialization um and particularly in fostering Technologies for Mobility one of the first contracts led by the U.S federal government uh was led to the actually the Patriot Paul Revere here in Boston for developing techniques to roll copper for cladding of U.S Navy ships um uh of course the U.S government played a huge role in the expansion of railroads uh across the entire continent Westward and in patiently supporting not far from here either in Springfield Massachusetts the development of interchangeable parts production over a four decades period originally for manufacturing guns but after the U.S Civil War a lot of those companies turned their attention to other consumer products like sewing machines um typewriters and within a decade or two bicycles um and there was a Mobility craze personal Mobility craze in the late 19th century around bicycles which is a really interesting moment especially in light of a lot of what's going on today um and many of the same companies and particularly the machinists and master mechanics who built those companies soon thereafter moved out to Detroit and began building the foundations of the automobile industry of course a major revolution in Mobility here and everywhere in the world the U.S government invested in aviation for 30 years before it found really almost any kind of commercial Traction in the 1930s and of course the electrification of the of the continent um the urban Mobility um and electric uh what was called electric traction at the time today we'd call it electric trains was and continues to be a major part of a Mobility system uh which wouldn't have been possible without uh Mass Urban and then Rural electrification and one final example from the post-war decades uh the DARPA Grand challenges actually DARPA sponsored the development of autonomous vehicles for decades even before the grand challenges in the early uh 2000s that led to the the still nascent driverless car industry so we have a long history of um of government policies supporting the development of Technology and there are many different levers through which the government can make those impacts of course at MIT we're most familiar with research and r d grants and and our favorite agencies National Science Foundation or or DARPA or the Department of Transportation supporting um fundamental research but there are many many other important ways that the government impacts technology through tax policy um through uh and and particularly particularly simply through procurement the government is a massive consumer and a massive customer and um the right decision to buy the right new thing at the right time can have a huge impact on that industry and witness the debates recently about the U.S

Postal Service buying Electrical uh postal trucks um or in the Apollo program NASA purchased about 60 percent of the integrated circuits for a couple of years during a very key period in legitimating and creating a a production capacity on a market for that technology um so I think today um we're we're actually poised on the cusp of in a way a new kind of industrial Enlightenment um and have the opportunity to rethink our industrial system um and some of its fundamental ways I'll give you one example is the medium that we're working through here um the explosion of remote work from the pandemic of course it had been around for decades never quite achieved what people thought it would achieve um has suddenly upended uh the the way that we work particularly in White Collar work um in ways that that had been settled and really took a century to settle um into nine to five office work if you will and now we're in a moment where nobody quite knows what the right answer is certainly not MIT and uh certainly not many of the small companies that I spend my time with these days but everybody's trying to figure out a new way of working where do you need to live relative to your job what parts need to be in person what parts need to be remote of course blue collar workers and service workers do not get those same benefits and how do we how do we offer that part of the workforce uh some some of the advantages that are provided by these Technologies um and we also have the pressing imperative for decarbonization um and really rethinking our industrial system from the ground up uh there was a headline from Derek Thompson's article in Atlantic this summer around when these bills got passed um which I think captured it well which was um for America to decarbonize it finally realized it needed to re-industrialize and not de-industrialize so you can think about an environmental critique of U.S industry going back at least to the 1970s but even back as far as Ralph waldor Emerson that um and and Thomas Jefferson for that matter um that industry was a corruption on the landscape uh the otherwise pure which we know of course it wasn't U.S landscape and uh somehow industry is um a bad thing that we should just get rid of and and use less and live in a different way at the scale of population and the country that we're in that's not practical and at the same time we need to be rebuilding our industry both for economic reasons and for climate reasons and for um in some ways national identity manufacturing has been core to U.S identity for a very long time in some ways right up till the last 20 30 years when the economists lost sight of the fact that uh process Innovation was intimately tied to product innovation so we're at this incredible inflection point and um an opportunity for places like MIT but many other individual thinkers as well to contribute to thinking through um what a new industrial era ought to look like what are the good things that we want to draw from our history and what things do we want to do differently and again I think for me the the two major categories there come into the problem of environment and the problem of Labor um and uh I'll hand it over to Liz now because uh the reason that we titled this the tectonics is I think that's an appropriate way for uh to describe this incredible change in U.S Science and Technology policy that happened last year um I've been studying and working on these topics and working in these topics for the 30 years that I've been at MIT as of many of the folks on the call here and I feel like what happened last year was the most profound change um certainly in my time at MIT and possibly since the aftermath of Sputnik although received relatively little public attention in that sense and toward that end I think the best role of government and I hope the parts of these bills that we most effective are not selecting particular Technologies to build that's that entrepreneurs and principal investigators are extremely good at um but laying the tectonics and creating the kind of larger groundwork and pressures for people to move in the right direction and I know a lot of deliberate thought uh has gone into to the bills in that sense I'll just close by saying I think this is also a story uh a fairly broad one about MIT research finding its way into the policy realm um Genoa mentioned that Liz and I had co-chaired the the work of the future task force which wrapped up about a year and a half ago but there are many many people all across different parts of MIT who have been thinking about these problems for a very long time many of them providing various inputs into the policy making system whether it's on semiconductors whether it's on Regional Economic Development whether it's on Workforce Development whether it's on Mobility for example um and uh I think there's more to be learned about it but uh it's a wonderful case of uh problems that we've been thinking through on this campus finding their way at least through the legislative process and now it remains to be implemented um so I'll turn it over to Liz who was inside where the sausage was made as it were and has a unique perspective on how that all went great thank you David uh those final points and just remains to be implemented um we might pause on that moment because that's what I want to talk about to be with all of you and I have to say uh I left at the time I think just as the mobility uh MIT Mobility initiative was getting off the ground and I just commend Gene Juan everyone for this fantastic forum and and the and the diversity and breadth of participation today is is representative of this and and um and there is a really important uh for those um engaged directly in this topic you know it really is a call to Arms there is so much to do and I'm here to to perhaps lay out at a high level what um I think just happened in Washington and what what it looks like going forward and I wanted to um I also wanted to thank um those who have been participating directly or indirectly uh with the White House on the last couple of years in uh specifically in shaping some of this legislation but also dealing with some of the supply chain challenges I know that I turned to Genoa three or four months into my into the job when I was still a deer in the headlights and uh and and you know as everyone has lived we we have had we continue to have significant supply chain challenges in our transportation system and elsewhere and I was very grateful for all the incoming support and help on uh on bringing some of the best ideas and and to bear in those in those moments I'll talk a little bit about about some of those issues uh if I can get over the PTSD in my remote let me just start with with perhaps um an overview as as David you know you really can't overstate um I think the historic moment we're in in terms of and I'm in terms of U.S investment in um in key Industries and in key Technologies and uh the the sort of re embracing very publicly and very forcefully industrial strategy at this moment and I think it's important to put into context like the why we might be in a position where this is now also got bipart and support in many ways and and how we got here as a country but just to summarize I think some of the driving forces behind this have been uh first and foremost of course supply chain vulnerabilities that have been exposed uh by the pandemic um certainly if you think just from PPE to semiconductors to critical minerals it was not just National Security but Economic Security uh that has been um you know put at risk and so that I think has changed the the Dynamics existential threats due to climate change we've seen every year now for the last couple years 20 plus billion dollar uh weather events that um that have will just continue over time as we know there's also the geopolitical developments we had just gotten through uh you know delivering everybody's presence at Christmas in December when we had the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia uh which again sort of changed dramatically Supply chains for a couple key key Industries um and then of course the China Taiwan threat that is existing and um and then I think importantly for the for the Biden Administration in particular you're growing inequality and the sense that that is critical to our uh supportive democracy we've got issues in inequality that are affecting our social fabric the social fabric of the country and that we need new policies and new Investments to help directly address that and so that with that landscape I think those um developments uh over in the last most recent years but also you know over time were were what drove in some ways the um the success of on the legislative agenda over the last couple years or year plus for the bite Administration and so Gene Juan mentioned and I will just run through again what um what's just been passed the the bipartisan infrastructure law where transportation and Mobility are Central uh where 1.1 trillion

dollars uh in that in that bill a lot of it dedicated to um to energy as well as physical and transportation infrastructure but also importantly to remember we should remember that 80 percent of that funding is uh formula funding goes directly through our state dots and our Broadband offices Etc so very critical I think I saw somebody in the uh in the chat saying you know of course government's always directly involved in transportation by very by its very definition but not just federal government and state government and local government which I know many of you work in uh really critical um about you know how we're going to implement how these different states are going to implement what are they going to do and can are they leaning into Innovation are we you know going back to uh you know established uh Legacy systems Etc I think a lot of interesting and important questions uh in terms of the infrastructure Bill secondly of course the chips and science act and as um as David highlighted you know I think the chips act has gotten a lot of the attention in terms of money 52 billion going directly to the the manufacturing of um uh sort of Frontier and Legacy chips as well as an r d r d component and and you know the spillovers and some of that will also Touch Transportation I think and Supply chains Etc and then but the science act part of that which is the part that um a lot of a lot of folks on this call I think weighed in on also highlights the importance of Applied research with a new director at the NSF it highlights 10 different specific technologies that the US thinks that you know that we think need to be invested in many of them related to Advanced manufacturing um and it basically says you know we also care about regions we're investing in uh through Regional Tech hubs and other ways we want to see opportunities to spread uh Economic Development and Science and Technology capacity outside of our our coastal regions and then the third piece which I think uh Transportation Mobility is also you know Central to is the inflation reduction ACT people are sure are familiar with all the climate related provisions of that act and it's the one act that was not passed on a bipartisan um basis but it was it it does use a lot of what I'd call market-based strategies to try and crowd in private sector investment three quarters of the three 140 billion dollars in that act are through tax credits and so that's an important piece of understanding how is you know how how are we going to make this uh transition and uh and invest bring the private sector in and not necessarily pick the Technologies though some will say you know hydrogen really went out in in that act but but any technology uh that is you know that it has a zero emission um outcome is is eligible for these tax credits so trying not to put the thumb on the scale too much on on different Technologies um and again Transportation Mobility writ large very much the um the sister part if you will or the or central part of of the climate climate imperatives uh particularly given that 30 of emissions are driven by the transportation industry uh and I also wanted to say that that while a lot of this is the industrial strategy that is about investing in and choosing um particular Industries for investment in the United States Transportation semiconductors clean energy um critical minerals are also in their PPE uh was also part of this broader initiative I think that the point that the bite Administration has made in in many ways is there's no Transportation kind of put aside it's not about uh building everything in the U.S it's about building up capabilities that make the country less vulnerable in key important and key Technologies and key key Industries so the idea is there's a lot of conversation going on with Partners um about strategies for Semiconductor um manufacturing for example um and an understanding that we're what we're doing in the U.S will have significant spillovers particularly I hope on Innovation for for the world but there's friend Shoring and near Shoring and and that this strategy of sort of a new Industrial Revolution is is going to be helping this country but also uh not uh at the exclusion hopefully of other countries another point I want to make is not just you know the the what of this new legislation but the how so there's a number of different tools that I think uh are have evolved in our and um represent kind of our thinking our learning over the years about how do we um improve bring Innovation and improve on the um Investments we're making and bring the private sector along in that process so there's clearly the Supply push of grants that are going out and um ways in which we are making available as a country you know to to and through many many different um um opportunities for communities to apply for money and push money out the door in many different ways to uh to support this agenda so the the chips money for example is going to be a large grants with some conditionalities if people have seen uh what secretary Rolando announced last week uh but that's a supply kind of sort of a push if you will the other side is the demand pull of the tax credits and those we've really leaned into and I think people would say that perhaps in the clean energy space that we really completed the um the whole cycle there not just pushing out money as we have in the past but trying to provide the demand pull that's going to help uh Technologies and companies grow we also have a new strategy around demonstration as many of you know particularly in the in if you're in the cleantech space uh we have had challenges anything that has strong longer um development cycles and also High capex has not been easy to finance in this country I think there's a bigger Focus now on that scale-up process and how do we how can we bring new technologies to scale and demonstrate at scale um and then finally also uh the the place-based strategy is cluster-based strategies we're doing this in hydrogen we're doing this um in other areas where trying to build kind of a portfolio of expertise across this country and support the development of multiple places where we go see um expertise develop and investment happen and so the the hydrogen competition where there's uh I think it's about eight billion across multiple places to build up hydrogen capacities is an example of that so apart from Industries and the tools I also just wanted to highlight particularly for this group we're also looking at new institutional developments but I which I think are very positive that that you know if we're going to be looking to develop uh a new models and new ways of doing things we may also need to shake things the way things are done uh in Washington and so there is uh as I said before in demonstrations 21 billion dollars and a new office of clean energy demonstrations that's been stood up um and there's a new joint office between the office of energy and transportation to try and coordinate and understand the inter relationship and interdependency of those two offices there's a new office of manufacturing and energy Supply chains At Doe for the first time you know manufacturing has historically been kind of the purview of DOD and now we understand that actually no it goes beyond that it is a it's an issue for doe and it's a issue for DOT as well um and then finally uh authorized but not appropriated the arpa eye uh arpa infrastructure office which dot is working on standing up and uh and the process of getting funding for that I think is is underway um but that's incredibly for those who have you know worked with DOT Etc that's a very exciting new office in a place where uh driving Innovation and coordinating across uh jurisdictions and with public and private is really a possibility so so that's a I think important to recognize as well as that institutional um development and and just to be clear already we see signals from the private sector that these this um this legislation and some of the funding that's already coming through is already having an impact 300 billion dollars in semiconductor commitments by the private sector over 100 billion in EVs and batteries um also additional clean tech Investments so positive signs at this point um so I think the you know all of that's great it's great to pass legislation uh but of course the challenge is now uh in the implementation it's it's uh the how not just the the what and um just to just to give a a little bit of a um an example I think of something that's that's kind of going on right now that to me is an example of how how this industrial strategy might play out um I think everybody knows that there's you know basic upgrading and investment in the infrastructure law for for airports reports for public transportation for roads um Etc uh and then a lot of other significant investment in in cleantech um and in the building out of our um uh energy um grid if you will or energy infrastructure um so not only money for uh demonstrating new technologies but also money that's just gone out seven and a half billion for EV charging stations and I think that that you know again that money is going out to States and the question is how how are States going to use it same sort of thing with electric buses that I know uh Gene wild has been involved with as well funding going out for electric school buses How are um States and regions going to actually implement this and just a a quick um anecdote on the EV side EV charging side we um we I'd say two years ago we did not make EV charging um uh EV Chargers here in this country and um and bought EV Chargers fall under the infrastructure law infrastructure law has uh made in America requirements uh around steel which is traditionally what's been the case but also around manufacturing and Construction Products and so with this new um new incentive if you will and the signaling from the from the from the administration and the fact that there's you know a commitment to building Chargers you know 500 000 Chargers before 2030 and the commitments to EVS Etc we now have 11 companies in the country who are in a position to make uh EV Chargers and are focused you know particularly on addressing sort of the range anxiety and other things that that exist and I think that's you know we're going to see more of that hopefully play out in terms of capacity building in the country um and I think these the work again between government and private sector is a really is a really interesting area um the other uh the other point to make I guess on on the agenda in these in these bills is that the you know there's a tremendous amount that does focus on um innovation in transfer reputation and What needs you know what what the focus should be or what what the dot and others have highlighted like where we think the big challenges exist whether that's Advanced batteries um uh connected and automated Vehicles electric and hybrid aircraft High-Speed Rail low carbon shipping um low carbon heavy duty on and off-road vehicles uh Mobility on demand you know these have been highlighted as key areas of interest and opportunity for innovation but but I will say that I you know my experience and this is where I transition to a little bit of a supply chain stories is that you know it's as and I think this is uh this speaks to our work of the future effort um that David and I were involved in you know it's not just about the technology we all know it's not about you know just about innovation in technology and it's really about Innovation and processes Innovation and institutions um and so I I sort of if as we look ahead at implementation I would really um ask this group to think about Innovation broadly and how the um the work of the mobility initiative and uh and others on this call are thinking about and working on the integration um the disruption uh all of the things that need to happen for actual adoption and we we know um collectively that adoption is uh takes a long time how can we accelerate that path here what can we learn from other uh Industries or other places where we've seen adoption work and it's you know particularly challenging in the transportation space where there is such a back and forth with uh public and private sector um so just to just to highlight a little bit um the my experience with uh supply chain challenges in transportation I arrived at the White House in April of 2021 and you know by June uh it was all hands on deck for what we uh what we were seeing at our ports uh with the backing up of uh of of ships and uh the basically you know the the high point of that was a year ago January where we had 109 uh ships that anchor outside port of LA Long Beach which of course is the largest port for importing uh Goods uh from Asia and I just wanted to you know when what I would say there is first of all we have I think 17 billion dollars dedicated to our ports which is fantastic but it turns you know is really a drop in the bucket for those who know the cost and of of ports and so it's not it's not like this this infrastructure money is going to be transformational for ports what it what we need is real um reform and innovation in the systems that exist already and what the problems that were existed at La Long Beach existed there long before the pandemic they were just exacerbated by uh by what we you know were experiencing in terms of increased demand Etc um so what and and the country suffered we saw shipping Industries um what I would consider you know price gouging but basically raise their prices 20x uh break their long-term contracts uh as they sort of brought um empty ships back to Asia and uh to bring back higher margin goods and and basically really crippled our agricultural industry in this country um but you know very poor Management in terms of data sharing in terms of asset management with the chassis and containers and as a federal government you know we were watching this and uh and trying to figure out what is the rule since there's so little government actually um involved in in this in the port system so we have a very weak regulator the FMC we have a port of LA Long Beach uh are essentially their land um you know landlords so what we did is we appointed a port enhoy some of you may have followed John porcari um Deputy Transportation secretary under um in the Obama Administration to help bring a uh a sort of a convening rule for the federal government and bring all the players around the table to talk about ways that we could collaborate and and work very quickly to avoid um crises during the holiday season and it's amazing how the threat of a of a fee on Long dwell containers can can focus the mind and it ended up you know moving moving containers uh and helping um avoid massive uh bottleneck uh beyond what we had and it was sort of a lesson to me about how the importance or the role of the Federal Government in trying to organize at a at a level in which so many independent players private sector interests and and the and the weaknesses of that model of fundamental weaknesses it led to our first piece of of um legislation uh with the ocean ship and reform act so anyway we saved Christmas and you know got more funding to the FMC Etc and then the other one I just want to quickly mention is rail uh that rail continues to be in the front in the headline sadly um but you know the problems with rail and the problems that are deeply related in my mind to uh duopolies and reduced competitiveness uh are very fundamental to that industry there's been a decline in performance you know that's been noted even pre-pre-pandemic and there aren't so many tools uh we have a certain we have a regulator that we could use you know we've we've done some convenings and things but uh there I'd say you know TBD as to how we actually improve rail in this in this country and and what we can be doing as you know in this group with this transportation and in this moment to actually improve improve service and improve um improve also you know treatment of workers Etc so I'll stop there I don't want to um uh go on too much but a whole you know host of things that hopefully we can we can discuss and and work from um uh in terms of this moment this historic moment for the country great this is fantastically and David so here I I highlighted a few Professor uh in the audience here to add a invite to Adam Kong how's their uh Professor Dirk Striker and Professor Hani mamasani to add some remarks if you like a very short one minute is maximum uh before you I will start with Ellen please uh yes uh thank you I mean yes you you hit the nail on the head of the of the big problem I'm trying I wanted to throw in a couple of things I wish you'd mention GPS satellites because that was a military thing that I think I've always thought oh my goodness where'd that come from and how valuable is that but just throw that in uh um nobody mentioned nuclear I I won't but I just did um for some reason um that nobody's allowed to talk about that I understand why but it's it may be a shame that the problem the challenge is labor I mean what are we going to do you know where's our Presbyterian work ethic or whatever I'm not Presbyterian so I shouldn't say that but but um um you know that's that's that's a struggle here because you know we have what 340 million people or something and something and people need to work they can't work on the farm because they they're only two percent or whatever that work on a farm anymore that people need to work and and what are people going to do especially when everything that we're doing is trying to automate which for obvious reasons we want to automate why because it's easier to write an algorithm than whatever and to tell an algorithm what to do than to tell a person what to do maybe I don't know but anyway those that's the reason to me that's the Crux of the problem and then you know I don't know what we how how we hit how we do it deal with it sorry uh honey yeah thank you uh Liz and David first of all I very much appreciate the enthusiasm that you're bringing to this uh you know to this topic and to this conversation and um I'm gonna just quickly say that obviously this is a very complex problem uh with uh you know with with many different actors particularly the interplay between the public sector and the private sector uh because a lot of the technological advances that we have seen and and the commercialization and so on has been pretty much driven by the private sector and government has always played a role whether direct or indirect uh but that is a complex set of interactions and uh I'm gonna say within my domain which is mobility and transportation and not get into the broader sort of manufacturing side of things but I'm gonna just use one example from from our my experience where I'm gonna say we've been burned before uh and I'm gonna say it's the area of intelligence and transportation systems which perhaps and I could have could have addressed where there was a quote a grand vision and so on but ultimately it really under delivered compared to what what what certainly what the vision was and what the expectation was and um for all of the plans and program that existed what ultimately appended all of this is that Google slash waymo showed up with an autonomous vehicle when the its world was focused on connecting and automated highways um Uber came through with you know with shared uh uh you know with on-demand Mobility where all of the other Visions never really went anywhere and when it came to electrification Tesla appended the um you know um the the equation in that space so I there's again a role for both and you can always dictate or legislate Innovation because some you know there is an entrepreneurial element uh in it and how do we achieve all of these synergies I think is a challenge obviously uh and I think for from the standpoint of um um helping Innovation perhaps you know being inclusive in the in the vision uh is with would be important to help to help advance that and perhaps recognizing as well that things may come out from where we we're not expecting them necessarily and to keep an open mind when when these opportunities present themselves and kind of help Advance them thank you very much for a very inspiring presentation today thanks honey uh Duke yes uh well uh there's such a range of different areas that have been touched on and the question of how you coordinate and Define priorities but to my mind there's got to be one big priority because if if we don't meet that priority and we're not doing a very good job of it right now we're going to find all the rest of it will not even matter uh and that is climate change it is the particularly the increase in the uh CO2 in the atmosphere and we're way behind schedule as far as any Targets and all that have been uh set and what have you and we have to think about this and we have to say how can we really focus this country and hopefully you know a lot of other countries on particular areas where we can have some success in climate change and I just you know I think I like to see priorities Divine and I say this is number one priority with five stars in terms of importance great thank you Dirk yeah give me the time I'll just add wine remarks and pass for John for questions then we'll in the end ask this and David to summarize and respond to many of this question there right the I'm going to introduce is the communicative angle right so this massive amount of investment uh federal government talked about it at MIT will talk about it but do an average person in the country talk about it or should they right so nobody initiative as a Institute what we try to do is bring this discussion to the general public in order in the end of this implementation not to build a bunch of a project but also you engage the public in this discussion in this right so that's all to say I'll give it to John to bring the audience questions as well yeah super well thanks thanks so much and again our chat has absolutely exploded I'm I'm gonna actually start out with a quick question if I may which is I'm curious Liz and David if you have any thoughts about the economist Mariana mazukato who's at University College London um I think you're familiar with some of her theories she talks about the department of energy made guarantees for solyndra and for Tesla cylinder was a failure Tesla was not I'm just curious what what are where are the two of you thinking about this this topic and some of her theories she was uh gonna speak at my class yesterday and uh and had to cancel last minute but anyway um so so Mariana's been you know one of the few economists who's really put on the table the important role of the government and the role of the government as um a stakeholder uh that you know is not just about uh you know addressing market failures but actually shaping markets and creating markets and we have a long history of doing that um and so the conditionalities which is the word she uses that that actually the government has a has a right to ask for something in return for all of these things I think is a very fair uh area for exploration uh and I think that you've seen that right now with the chips Act Right these companies are now going to provide child care for their workers which if you think about the labor shortage we have and one of the key issues is daycare uh this is just solving a lot a labor problem allowing allowing the policy to actually you know succeed and obviously other countries have a much more generous situation and if we can't if we're not going to create a national system or state system this is the way the by Administration is tied you know some of its goals and I I don't I think that's that's fair and I think it's also fair to think about stock BuyBacks and and uh and say you know that's not how uh public money you know we want public money to be used so I I think she's got a a very good you know Vision there or a plan there I I do feel like uh she's often talks about mission-driven work you know uh building a you need missions I think the missions that work and nobody better than David Mendel to talk about you know an Apollo Mission you need specificity when you want mission-driven work you need some kind of specific goal that I think is not just about you know a more resilient Mobility system so I I would just take issue at that point that's actually exactly what I was going to say I I like a lot of her ideas I'm always a little wary uh of the use of the Apollo program as a model for some of these things because it had such a simple and well-defined goal man moon decade as they say and one of the challenges with a lot of these problems and it's true in various Healthcare aspects is how do you define a project that has such a simple goal where you can tell by looking at the calendar practically whether it achieved the goal when those things are possible are are when we can Define problems and I do think you know a lot of the startups that I see especially the bigger well-funded ones take Commonwealth Fusion you know they're entirely focused on one goal right now which is proving that their reactor can work and generate uh positive gain and as soon as that happens they'll transform as a company but they've got their own Apollo program there um and so but but the larger kind of societal and you know of course it is so complex it's one of the challenges of it is it's hard to define a single well-defined goal in that way excellent okay let's see so many questions let me just throw two of them out and you can take whichever one uh appeals the most so the first one question from Zhao Barros who's uh an entrepreneur uh from Portugal he writes which revolutions and transportation do you believe would have happened or have happened faster with less government intervention and what lessons can we learn from that um so that's uh first question second question from Mackenzie human how can U.S governments support innovation in a way that balances competition across Technologies while also directing supporting efficient Network planning so two very sort of different questions any takers for either of those well I would address the first one a little bit uh looking at Aviation right where um you know great Innovation story uh the Wright brothers really had no relationship to government anything they were bicycle mechanics although again you could say that bicycles were supported by government technology from 50 years before um but the military as a customer played a big role in aviation and other aspects of airmail and so on and it was 30 years before Aviation found its kind of commercial product Market fit to use today's language and um what I I came away from the work of the future project with very much a sense of that 30-year cycle and um and it's the five to to you know 25 years that you need the government to be patient and provide some structure um and there are other ways to do it to be sure actually I meant to mention that the rain Hill trials in 1829 were the the first place where steam had been around for a hundred years by that point um and the rain Hill trials were the first place was a privately funded competition um to uh build an effective steam locomotive and was a public event it was enormously effective in selecting the Stevenson rocket as the um uh the best the winner of that solution um so there there are other social forms but um you know we came away from the work of the future project and pretty much everything we've done since that when you talk about Industrial Systems including Mobility these Transformations take time and private capital is not always Well Suited or structured to support them for that intermediate period um and and it's fairly less frequently that they update with the rate of the apps on our phone Liz any thoughts from your side on network economics yeah I mean um we need we we need them more than ever right now uh what I would say is I think on the cleantech side um people have thought a little bit about this in terms of you know competition across technology the fact is that they're at very different stages of development so the thought is that solar and wind now are really in a position for deployment you know immediately over the next decade plus we then it takes it takes you know 20 to 30 years to get to nuclear and and uh and hydrogen I think you know in terms of full adoption and the ways we're imagining so I think there's a sense of sequentialness here uh and and also that our needs are so vast and the trans you know the transition and or the transformation that has to happen is so enormous that there's um little not so much concern about that we're going to have a crowding out of some technologies over others at least at this point in time I think that's not our Challenge and maybe if that's our challenge down the road you know maybe that's that's a welcome one super okay uh let's see General do we have time for one more question yeah yes we'll have two more minutes okay super uh so there is a question about liability uh law coming from Ellen Partridge how does liability law impact the development of Technology independent of Regulation so I I think this is alluding to the kind of litigious nature of of our society and just any any thoughts on how we can move into this tectonic shift this new future and move away from that yeah oh I do not I I do not have a good answer for that except that I can tell you that a lot of people have pointed to this problem so if people you know Ezra Klein and others about how do we've forgotten how to build we don't we don't have the capacity to actually build in this country because we have uh created you know such a democratic process that it slows down the actual the doing of things and you know I think that the numbers about actual investments in in um grid infrastructure like 10 to 20 years so I would say it's very much at the hot you know it's at people's um you know people are aware of this and then how we actually address that and what you know what has to happen at the state and local level versus at the federal level I think is is you know in discussion but there's no question uh that those you know those are important you know important issues for how we go forward and particularly in things like mining uh in you know in this country that'll be I think the front and center I'd also just flip that around a bit and and and phrase it for certain Technologies in terms of safety and that um actually we are woefully behind in our kind of innovation and safety engineering um people are building 21st century Safe Systems and we're stuck with trying to safety certify them with techniques from the 70s 1970s maybe sometimes the 1870s that are really not applicable and I don't have the answer to that but there's you know there's one or two faculty on our campus here who really study safety engineering uh in a serious way and there ought to be dozens we need Innovation there great thank you so much I I hate to to disrupt this especially interesting conversation so ladies and David thank you thank you again everybody to joining

2023-03-17 22:22

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