This week we will be publishing excerpts from the Potomac Institute's latest report,
“THINK BIG: BIG Science, BIG Opportunities, and BIG Ideas.” THINK BIG argues that innovation in science and technology are the keys to American economic strength and national security. Rather than a return to the infrastructure, economy, and healthcare systems of the past, the report calls for a vision for the future.
The new Administration has identified infrastructure projects as a top priority. We must not merely rebuild or fix our current infrastructure; rather, we must reimagine the infrastructure of the future and invest in the technologies and businesses to achieve that future. The country has a unique opportunity to imagine and build a new America – to be the world leader in infrastructure innovation. Major infrastructure projects of the past, from the National Highway System to the commercial aviation sysem, have launched new industries and driven major economic development. America’s future will be a world of autonomous vehicles, universal access to information, and unlimited energy.
To reach this future, we need an innovative infrastructure investment plan. Our Future-Structure will include:
Autonomous vehicles that free humans from driving, accidents, and vastly reduce the costs of travel. Automated flying vehicles will revolutionize both commercial and personal travel.
Ultra high-speed internet access will be a universal right and will be available to the entire population just as fresh water is a national mandate, today. Entire new industries and intellectual freedoms will be born out of universal access to mankind’s knowledge base.
Super high-speed travel will usher in a new age of trade and transportation. Vast distances will be covered in minutes via ultra high-speed trains, super-sonic planes, and hyper-loop cargo systems.
Inexpensive energy will become a reality through new methods of generating and storing energy, not via a new grid but by eliminating the grid. Every home, vehicle, and electronic device will generate its own power from the vast energy provide by natural forces. Large, nationwide energy grids will become obsolete.
Education will be revolutionized when we put an iPad in the hands of every child in the country, giving them access to the world’s knowledge and customized, selfpaced learning. The next generation will know more and be more enabled than ever before.
Deep-space exploration and colonization will become possible, and eventually routine. The U.S. will become the global hub for space travel.
RECOMMENDATION
America needs an infrastructure investment plan for the future. We must leap ahead of current infrastructure systems to meet the technology-enabled demands of the next 50 to 100 years – and beyond. With a mandate to “rebuild America,” the new Administration has an opportunity to radically transform America’s infrastructure and ensure our status as the world’s economic and technology leader. Let’s embrace the future, not rebuild the past.
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Kathryn Schiller Wurster
Nov 29, 2016
UPDATE: Read the full report, "THINK BIG: BIG Science, BIG Opportunities, and BIG Ideas."
The priorities of the new Administration are to rebuild American infrastructure and reinvigorate the economy. Rather than return to the infrastructure and economy of the past, we should look to the future and think big. America’s strengths in innovative science and technology will help us leap forward and maintain our economic strength and global leadership.
The Potomac Institute was founded over twenty years ago in a politically turbulent era- Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had just taken over Congress, written their Contract with America, and dissolved the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) on the premise that it was too partisan when dealing with science and technology policy issues (a decision that has been much debated since). The Potomac Institute was founded to fill the role of a non-partisan, objective, and technically competent advisor to Congress and the Administration, regardless of party. The Institute was founded on the principles that 1) science should inform policy and 2) policy should foster the growth of science. Most importantly, the Institute works to anticipate emerging technologies and their associated policy implications, then guide investments to shape the future we want.
We urge the new administration to develop policy based on the best available science. In policy-making, the best available science can take many forms- from technical and experimental data to economic data to social science research findings. Most important, however, is that any policy be informed by the available information on potential impacts. Often policy-makers must make decisions based on incomplete or insufficient data- in those cases, we must use what is available and then support efforts to increase the available data. The concept of using science to inform policy should be non-partisan; data and evidence should form the basis of solid policy that all can agree on.
We urge the new administration to foster the development of science and technology. Economic development starts with good ideas and translation into products, and industry and government each have important roles in this process. If America leads the world in innovation, economic strength will follow, but to get there we have to focus on big ideas for the future rather than trying to return to the successes of the past. The science and technology investment priorities the Institute has identified for the next Administration include:
• Revolutionizing Medicine: Advances in genetics, precision medicine, sensors, and big data analytics hold great promise to revolutionize human health. The costs and inefficiencies of the American health care system could be vastly improved by leveraging technology, putting more power in the hands of the patients, and adapting the medical workforce.
• Renewing American Infrastructure: Major public investments to achieve great things are a hallmark of American history; we went to the Moon, built an atomic bomb, built an interstate highway system, and created the Internet. When we set big goals and invest in the science and technology needed to achieve them, the benefits are enormous. We need revolutionary new infrastructure projects to drive America forward, not just fix what is broken.
• Industrial Policy: The U.S. needs a strategic national industrial policy to drive economic development and preserve industries that are vital to national security. This industrial policy should focus on fostering American innovation, helping American companies stay competitive in a global marketplace, and protecting intellectual property.
• Biotechnology and Climate Engineering: These fields promise immense benefits but also represent unprecedented power to shape the world around us in ways we may not yet fully understand. The government has an important role to play in fostering innovative research and ensuring responsible development of biotechnologies.
Innovation in science and technology are the keys to American economic strength and national security. We will not lead the world by investing in old technology, old infrastructure, and old ways of doing business. The way to maintain America’s leadership and keep our country and economy strong is to think big.
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By Kathryn Schiller Wurster
Donald Trump won the presidency last night, taking the electoral college despite what appears to be Clinton’s narrow win in the popular vote. The results surprised nearly everyone in the media and polling world, who had almost entirely predicted a wide margin of victory for Hillary Clinton. Even Nate Silver’s blog FiveThirtyEight, which has earned a reputation for crunching numbers in exquisite fashion, had Clinton with much better odds throughout most of the race, with the final odds at 70/30 Clinton to Trump the day before the election.
But all the numbers crunchers depend on polls and statistical methods that aren’t reliable and now seem remarkably old fashioned. A Nature article examined this problem in mid-October and blamed the decline of landlines, rise of mobile phones, “shy voter” behavior, and unreliable online polls. At one time in history, calling people on the phone and asking them questions may have been the best way to find out their opinions and predict their likely behavior. But this election has just proved that it doesn’t always work. The UK saw a similar upset against the pollsters’ predictions in the Brexit vote.
The problem is what people say on the phone is likely driven by lots of other factors, especially when the candidates and poll questions are controversial. Conducting phone surveys today also relies on an increasingly outdated mode of social interaction, likely biasing the samples. Online polls likely have their own biases; they also rely on people answering honestly and having a representative sample. In the end, it is clear that asking a small subset of people questions cannot be relied on to give us a real picture of what likely voters are actually going to do.
At the same time, we have more data streams about people, and correlations to their behavior, than ever before. Advertisers can target microgroups based on incredibly detailed demographics. Each of us leave vast trails of data everywhere we go; these trails could be mined to answer all the questions pollsters ask (and likely much more). Social network analysis should be able to tell us who the influencers are and measure their impact on the outcomes.
Now we need a team of statisticians and big data analysts and marketing gurus to look back at trends in data from a wide range of sources in the lead-up to the election. We need a forensic investigator to try to find correlations and trends that we missed along the way and connect the dots that led us here. The margins were narrow, so it may be that - for now - the degree of uncertainty we have to accept is still greater than the margin of error in the actual results. But we should be able to do better than this.
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By Charles Mueller
Today is one of the most cherished traditions of the United States. It is Election Day, a day where the people get a chance to voice their opinion about who should represent them in US, State, and Local governments. Every year though this beloved day is riddled with controversy as we debate how we vote, when we vote, where we vote, who should vote, who we vote for, and why the entire process just seems destined to always fail us in some way.
I’m tired of having these same old debates. None of these conversations recognize the real problem: year after year we refuse to accept that our entire system of governance and electing officials to represent us is not just archaic, but centuries outdated. We live in a world of advancing technology, a world where my refrigerator can restock itself, people can transmit thoughts to each other using neurotechnology, and we can not only educate ourselves about virtually all of human history with the click of a button, but we can also communicate our thoughts and opinions just as fast. Our society is fundamentally different in practically every way than the one that existed during the time of our founding fathers and it's time we stop trying to make their system work for our way of life.
It is time we rethink the idea of only casting our vote once a year for those who represent us. Why can’t Election Day be, in a sense, every day? Why don’t we create a system where we can continually voice our confidence in our leaders, helping put the appropriate amount of pressure to keep them honest, transparent and effective as policymakers? It's not like we don't have the technology to do it...
It is also time we rethink the very structure of our government and the way it utilizes things like S&T to carry out its mission to serve and protect the people. Why can’t we create a government that is efficient and instead of being decades behind utilizing technology, is a pioneer of how to incorporate technology to carry out the job of governance? Why do we continue to waste our time and energy complaining about the shortcomings of our governance system instead of using that time and energy to fix it?
None of this will be easy, but all of it is necessary. The future is one where S&T will continue to change the fabric of society seemingly overnight and we need a new process for defining what government is, how it works, and how the people are involved in this next phase of our existence. So as we all stand in the long lines today that are too part of the Election Day tradition, let's use that time to talk with our friends and neighbors about the future of democracy and the United States, instead of continuing to complain about how awful everything is.
Let’s work together to make the future better and hopefully some day down the road, Election Day will be a time we elect some individuals bold enough to lead us into this brave new world.
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By Paul Syers
It is absurd that Election Day is not a federal holiday. Not doing so greatly impedes the ability of millions of Americans to vote. Other measures to address this problem, like early voting, only serve to erode the authority of the election.
I don’t think I’m taking a controversial stance when I say that I think we should have a federal holiday for elections. There is something the public cherishes about voting in person. The logistical setup required for enabling the entire voting public in the US to cast their ballots on a single day is massive and it boggles my mind that we manage to do it every two years. The volunteers who make it happen have my immense respect.
Yet the fact that people have to either take off work or fit voting around their work schedules creates huge unnecessary problems. We see it every time: the news reports of long lines, people waiting for hours, waiting into the night. With Election Day not a holiday, the difficulty of voting is hardest on the lowest income voters in this country, who often work multiple jobs a day, have children to care for, or both.
Most states have enacted early voting policies, in large part to alleviate many of these problems. Early voting has a major problem itself, and that is that it undermines the basic function of an election. As I’m sure some know-it-all has told you at a high school or college party at some point in your life, we don’t actually live in a democracy, we life in a representative democracy. That’s right, we pick leaders to represent us, and the vote is the way we pick our leaders. The vote is meant to represent the will of the people, but it can only represent the will of the people at a specific moment in time. Early voting screws with that. It begins sampling the will of the people at multiple times. Some states begin early voting a full month before Election Day. A month, or a couple weeks might not have seemed to matter much in the past, but with the increased speed with which our society consumes news and spreads information, it matters a lot more.
The new mobile communications technologies of recent years hold the possibility of revolutionizing how we vote. Our children may never need to go to polling locations, instead wirelessly casting their vote, or data gathering and analysis of the public’s social behavior could even assess the will of the public on an ongoing basis. However, as the hacking scandals of recent years have shown the dire need for advancements in the security of our mobile technology, voting at polling places, in person is still the most secure method, in my mind. This traditional method needs to be done with integrity, and making Election Day a national holiday helps accomplish that in many different ways.
If people knew they didn’t have to work, then more would volunteer to man polling stations. Schools could be closed for a half or a full day. Fourteen states currently do that, but we could make it a national policy. A half-day of school lets parents vote in the morning and teachers in the afternoon. The morning could be spent learning about the process and importance of elections, and elected officials can even visit schools and tell students the story of how and why they got into public service. It would be a great way to teach the importance of participation in public governance.
Public opinion about both candidates this campaign has swung significantly, often over the course of a few days. It’s been estimated that 15 percent of eligible voters have remained undecided all the way up to the end, a far larger percentage than in recent elections. How many of them voted early, only to change their mind over the past week and a half? The will of the people is fluid. The best way we can be sure of it is to measure it at a single moment in time and work with those results. In order to do that, we should make it easier, not harder to take that measurement. Making the federal election day a holiday would not only provide a simple way to enable a swift and efficient conduction of the election, but it would also communicate to the public that we genuinely value the power of the ballot.
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