Happy Nice Mall

Risks are not only economic risks that harm our knowledge and technology intensive economy; are strategic elements that threaten our national and global security. In order to be both more agile and more robust in the face of these, we need our strong innovation ecosystem.

Our federal government has a key role here that only it can play. Risk assessments at the federal level must become more holistic and integrated, examining the impact of one hazard on another. Along with universities and industry, a government coordinating body should plan for hazards that may compound other hazards and offer strategic focus and funding for discoveries and innovations designed to respond to and mitigate them as part of an overall innovation policy.

When crises strike, the federal government needs to be able to pool resources and rapidly mobilize all aspects of our innovation ecosystem, from research to manufacturing and distribution, to prevent damage.

Our current crisis provides a precedent for the future: As the pandemic flared in March 2020, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, MIT, IBM, the Ministry of National Energy Laboratories and others quickly joined forces to form the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium. A number of key findings emerged from the consortium projects, including identifying drug compounds that could be reused to fight covid-19. Modeled on the consortium, the National Science and Technology Council has released the National Strategic Computing Reserve’s plan to provide ongoing computing support for future emergencies.

Strengthening supply chains

Of course, global supply chains are among the strategic weaknesses that need to be addressed if we are to learn from the pandemic. Intended to be efficient and cost-effective, many have proven insufficiently resilient in a crisis. The federal government must identify where bottlenecks can have cascading consequences and plan ways to overcome them, in part by improving our ports, expanding our local stockpiles, working with our allies to create new sources of key goods, and bolstering domestic production capacity for critical products. supplies.

With shortages in everything from life-saving personal protective equipment to swabs and reagents to test during the pandemic, the United States clearly needs to focus on medical supplies and essential pharmaceutical ingredients. Other critical products include semiconductors, which underlie many innovations; their lack led to the closure of factories in the automotive industry. A particular problem in this case is that 92% of the most advanced chips are manufactured in Taiwan. While China insists that Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland is inevitable, the risks there include a conflict between great powers and the disruption of industry worldwide.

modern production

While the United States continues to lead the research and development aspects of the semiconductor industry, it is at a disadvantage in manufacturing, which is overly capital-intensive and less costly in other countries, in part due to government subsidies. We need the federal government to get into the breach here. The Innovation and Competition Act, which passed the Senate and includes $52 billion to boost domestic chip production, offers a good start.

We also need to address potential bottlenecks in raw materials that could greatly undermine our economic and national security. China has almost monopolies on some high-tech materials. It is the world’s largest supplier of minerals called rare earth elements, which are crucial for electronic products of all kinds. Cobalt and lithium used in lithium-ion batteries are also key, especially as we move towards the increased use of electric vehicles. China refines an estimated 58% of the world’s lithium and 65% of the world’s cobalt, most of which is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Chinese-owned companies. Idaho. But identifying alternative ways to process it represents a critical way to address this issue in the short term.

In the long run, we must invest in research and development that will help us bypass such narrow passages by finding ways to use abundant materials in the world. And we have to invent new materials as well. The Federal Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) was launched in 2011 during the Obama administration, when I was a PCAST ​​member, to use powerful data and computational tools to discover new materials through experimentation and bring them to commercial use faster. Currently, MGI is working to consolidate a widely accessible Materials Innovation Infrastructure where tools and knowledge are shared to accelerate research, development, certification and deployment.

The impending climate crisis and beyond

Other areas critical to economic and national security are those that can mitigate climate change – everything from capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air to smaller, safer advanced nuclear reactors and commercial-scale fusion energy just down the road. We also need to see such systems in the context of our built environment, which accounts for around 40% of annual global carbon emissions through construction. Our cities are not optimized for sustainability, climate resilience or human well-being. We need advanced technological solutions such as renewable energy systems, responsive building platforms, new materials to decarbonize the systems of our daily lives and make sure they work for the benefit of all.

Our vulnerabilities in cybersecurity – particularly in physical systems that give bad actors the opportunity to do serious damage remotely – show that we need to work hard to build inherently secure quantum communication technologies and move towards a quantum Internet. To protect our vulnerabilities and minimize the consequences of disasters, we must develop both artificial intelligence capable of making predictions based on imperfect information, and quantum computing, which is used to solve complex optimization problems.

Pandemic preparedness and early warning systems for health threats are also a clear priority. We have underfunded basic research on communicable diseases and we need to fix this. We already have significant disease surveillance capabilities that need to be used in a more strategic and coordinated way.