In his last public event as U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg visited the Ford School for a conversation on investments in infrastructure. Below is an excerpt from an interview with S&H.
S&H: What is the government’s role in fostering innovation? How do we balance the interests of economic development with safety, environmental, and equity concerns?
Pete Buttigieg: Government should do things that only government should do, and that turns out to be a lot. We need government to support certain kinds of basic research and step into other situations where the market can’t or won’t do something on its own. Then, let the market pick it up and run with it within safe guardrails. The first automated vehicles (AVs) happened in response to a challenge from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Today, a lot of the AV technologies are being developed by the private sector, but some of it’s happening in research facilities funded by the U.S. government. It will be the government’s job to make sure that there are the right safety regulations so that it unfolds in the right way.
We have to be intentional and recognize the point of these technologies is not to be spiffy for their own sake.
Pete Buttigieg
It takes some intention to make sure that things unfold in a fair way, otherwise, existing patterns of unfairness will just get magnified. Access to technology is a huge part of the story. There are ways to make sure businesses that are small and owned by people who’ve been excluded in the past have access to capital. If we get it right, then technology can help with everything from addressing a crisis in roadway deaths that disproportionately harms communities of color to delivering pharmaceuticals in rural areas that disproportionately miss out on the availability of those supply chains.
We have to be intentional and recognize the point of these technologies is not to be spiffy for their own sake. It’s to make people better off and then make sure that they truly are set up so that people can have fair and equitable access to those opportunities.
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