Arati Prabhakar on Creating a Better Tomorrow: Science and Technology’s Essential Purpose

Remarks as prepared for delivery at the University of Maryland

Thank you so much, Darryll. It’s an incredible pleasure to be back here on your wonderful campus. I’m delighted to have this chance to be with all of you.

The Purpose of Science and Technology

President Biden loves to tell the story from many years ago about Xi Jinping, now the President of the People’s Republic of China, who asked him, “How would you define America?” And his response was, “America is a country that can be defined in a single word, and that word is possibilities.”

The fact that this is how President Biden thinks about our country is one of the reasons that I lit up a couple years ago when he asked if I would come to the White House and serve as his science and technology advisor and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Because after a four-decade career, that’s very much how I think about the role of science and technology in our society.

Today, I want to share a few perspectives from this vantage point and invite your thoughts and questions. We’re in a period of change. It’s a period of great uncertainty. It’s a period that calls on all of us to make deliberate and thoughtful choices.

The place to start is with the purpose of science and technology, which is this: to open possibilities so that we can achieve our great aspirations. And America’s aspirations today are as great as they have ever been. Some of them are relatively new aspirations in recent decades: meeting and overcoming the climate crisis, and using artificial intelligence and other technology advances to strengthen rather than to erode our values.

Other aspirations are longstanding, but they now have to be tackled in today’s context. We have always aspired to health and opportunity for every single person in America, not just for a chosen few. We have always aspired to vibrant economic growth that creates good paying jobs in every part of our country. And to national security and global stability, and to expanding the boundaries of knowledge. These are aims that we’ve always strived for, but we have to go after them in a different way today.

It’s no surprise that we have great ambitions. America should always be a country that is filled with great ambitions and aspirations. That’s who we are.

Achieving these huge aspirations takes many actors and institutions. It takes communities and it takes policies and it takes companies and industries. But the science and technology community plays one particular role in achieving these aspirations, and that is to change what’s possible so that we can open pathways to achieve these big goals.

Today I want to share with you some glimpses of possible futures in three areas. We’ll talk about health, we’ll talk about climate, and we’ll talk about artificial intelligence. In each area, I’ll show you what the future could look like—dark or bright. And then I’ll share the work we’ve been doing to get America on the path to a better future in each of these areas.

Health Outcomes

Let’s start with health. Here’s a postcard from a dark future of health. In this future, a kid grows up eating poorly. He drinks water that’s contaminated with lead and PFAS, and exercise isn’t really part of his life. His friendships are drying up because he’s falling deeper and deeper into his online world. And he has family members who are dying early from diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Unfortunately, that’s a reality that already exists for too many of our kids today. But in this particular future, add to all of that a drop in vaccination rates so significant that we’re below herd immunity. All of that taken together means that this kid grows up expecting to live only until maybe his 50s.

Think about that for a minute. Three dozen countries today have longer life expectancy than the United States. That’s unacceptable for the richest country in the world. And in this dark future, we slip even farther behind.

That’s pretty ugly. But a very different future is possible as well, and it’s the future we want. It’s a future in which kids grow up running and jumping and playing. They’re out in nature. They have thriving friendships and family relationships. They’re able to eat all kinds of healthy food. They’re drinking clean water, and they’re breathing clean air.

In this future, infectious diseases still break out once in a while, but no outbreak ever becomes a pandemic. And in this future, many, many families never have to find out that a loved one is going to die early from cancer. Think about what that could be like. This is a future where people can take robust health for granted and get on with living their lives.

The question for all of us is: what do we do to make sure we get to this future? It is a really daunting challenge, and when you start thinking about it, it is overwhelming.

The work that we’ve been doing in these last few years with the Biden Cancer Moonshot offers a great and very hopeful example of what can change outcomes at this kind of scale.

President Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden started the Cancer Moonshot back when he was Vice President. They reignited it when he returned to the White House a few years ago. And at that time, they set a couple of very aggressive goals.

One is a quantitative goal, which is to cut the age-adjusted cancer death rate in half

in the next 25 years. That’s about double the rate of progress we’ve been making, and that means millions of lives saved.

And the second goal is a qualitative goal, which is to change the experience that patients, their families, and their caregivers have as they’re going through the cancer process.

If you know about the Biden family, you know how personal cancer is for them, because they lost a son to cancer. The President and the First Lady know that it is personal for every family in America. Who is untouched by cancer? They saw this as a place where we could pull together and make a huge advance on something that matters to everyone in the country.

When I started at the White House a couple of years ago, I was very excited to get to be part of the Cancer Moonshot. It’s run by Danielle Carnival, who leads the Health Outcomes team within OSTP. When I came in the door, the number one question in my mind was, “Were we just going to write a bunch of new research papers, or were we going to move the needle on cancer outcomes?”

The answer was clear: we’re going to move the needle on cancer outcomes. And the reason is that the Cancer Moonshot recognized from the beginning that success required preventing as many cancers as we can, detecting as many cancers as we can early and nipping them in the bud, and then fully treating the cancers that we still have to deal with.

We’ve made major progress on all three fronts. So much work has gotten done under the Cancer Moonshot, and I’ll just give you a few highlights.

For prevention, the EPA has put in place the first-ever national drinking water standard. What that means is that, over time, 100 million Americans will be protected from PFAS in their drinking water. We’re also doing the work through the Inflation Reduction Act and other bills to remove lead pipes across America.

In early detection, we’ve made a host of investments to expand screenings. Today, it’s not just those who have primary care and regular insurance coverage, but more and more people who can get the benefits of cancer screenings. And President Biden’s PACT Act for our veterans made sure that all our veterans are screened for the toxic exposures that they may have had in active-duty service.

We’ve expanded access to treatments and care. The President has reduced the cost of medications for so many Americans. And today we’re at an all-time record number of Americans who are insured, with the help of the Affordable Care Act. What these actions mean is more and more Americans can now afford the treatments that we know save lives.

We’ve also expanded cancer patient navigation services. Navigators are the people who work with you when the doctor says the “C” word, the people who help you figure out how to get the world to stop spinning and get everything organized so you can take care of yourself. With this Administration’s actions, now for 150 million Americans, that’s a reimbursable service under their insurance plan if they get cancer. That’s a big deal.

And looking ahead to the next generation of innovation that we need, the President not only boosted funding for the National Cancer Institute at NIH, but he also started a new ARPA, an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. The President knows what DARPA has done for national security, and he was clear that we needed that kind of solutions-focused innovation to augment the great research that we do in health. He started ARPA-H with an investment of $4 billion over its first three years, and this new agency is off to the races.

These are some highlights of work that’s been accomplished under the Biden Cancer Moonshot. Think about the impact it will have over not just a few months or years, but for decades into the future. It will make a huge difference on cancer. And it shows us a comprehensive way that we can approach the broader challenges of American health outcomes.

Climate Change

Let’s turn to the climate. Here too, it is possible to see a dark future ahead. Today, we’re living in a world in which average temperatures have risen 1.19 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Already, we’re experiencing significant climate impacts. We are experiencing extreme heat and drought and wildfires. We’re experiencing extreme storms and flooding. We’re experiencing the breakdown of the biodiversity that all of human life depends on.

In one future, in a dark future, we go into feedback loops on climate change with our natural systems interacting in ways that spiral out of control. In that future, our planet becomes less and less habitable. And we go headlong into the sixth mass extinction event where the biodiversity that’s the foundation for all life, including human life, fades away.

We know that the climate will keep changing, but it’s in our hands how severe those changes get. In a brighter future, we decarbonize and achieve net zero emissions fast enough to limit the frequency and the intensity of extreme weather events. And we do that in time to avoid the most severe tipping points. We renew our relationship with nature. We not only use nature’s gifts to help manage a changing climate, but we hit the brakes on biodiversity loss. And we build resilience in every community.

Climate change is an area where the President and the Vice President have taken the most ambitious actions anywhere, any time in history to step up to this crisis.

On Day One, President Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement. He has put in place critical emissions rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions. He passed two very significant pieces of legislation, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, which together amount to the most significant investment ever in clean energy. Public dollars are drawing far more private dollars and with all of that capital put to work, we are deploying clean energy at a scale that the climate notices. That’s a massive scale, and we have finally gotten started.

In addition, we’re making significant investments today in climate adaptation and resilience across communities in all parts of the country. And President Biden is the first President to set important goals for conservation. An initiative called America The Beautiful has set a goal to conserve at least 30% of our lands and our waters by 2030, to start restoring our relationship with nature.

Just a few years ago, I felt hopeless about our ability to meet the climate crisis in time and at a scale that really works. We’ve now shown that it is possible, and that gives all of us hope and energy for the very substantial work that is still ahead.

That is the purpose of the research and development that this Administration has undertaken. It includes R&D that helps us get to where we can massively scale the other technologies that we need to fully decarbonize: modernized grids and battery storage and advanced nuclear, including small modular reactors. And we’re driving the next generation of the technologies that still have to get to commercial viability, such as advanced geothermal and fusion. That’s what it will take to fully decarbonize energy, and we have laid the ground.

Similarly, we have done the work to continue to build resilience: getting communities the information they need to plan for resilience, researching how crops can be tailored for a changing climate and how our food system will evolve. And we are making nature an integral and visible part of our economy and our national security, recognizing that bolstering nature is essential for the thriving of our planet.

Artificial Intelligence

Let’s turn to AI. Artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful technologies of our time. Much of its power comes from its tremendous breadth of uses. When you think about the kinds of futures we could have with AI, we can imagine a future where everything is phenomenally efficient, but that efficiency undercuts our way of life and the values we hold dear.

In this dark future, discrimination and bias in housing and loans and in criminal justice and in health care gets implemented at massive scale because of AI’s tremendous efficiency. In this future, every worker’s every move and click is surveilled. In this future misinformation and disinformation and deepfakes are so rampant that they distort our reality. And fraud is so rampant that trust is destroyed. And perhaps worst of all, there is no privacy. There’s no protection between you and corporations, you and the state, or even you and your neighbor.

That’s a very dark future. And without serious attention to where AI is going, we can end up there. Some of these problems are, unfortunately, part of our lives already.

But a bright future is also possible. If we build a stable platform by managing AI’s risks, that’s a stable platform that we can stand on to use AI to reach for the stars. I don’t mean that we will use AI to wave away complexity or magically take dangerous risks off the table. But if we do this right, AI can be a tool that helps us wrangle complexity and navigate our way through challenges—ultimately to open up pathways that we just couldn’t have imagined before. And that applies to all of the different aspirations that we’ve been talking about.

Let me tell you some of the highlights from the Biden-Harris Administration’s work to get AI on the right track for this future.

AI was already in our lives before the recent surge of generative AI, but it was behind the scenes: behind the ad served up to you, or the price you were offered for an airline ticket. Suddenly, with generative AI’s chatbots and image generators, it was in our faces. So it created a moment that President Biden and Vice President Harris used to say, “We have to get AI on the right track for our country.” They were clear that every powerful technology brings a bright side and a dark side, and that our task is to manage AI’s risks so that we can seize its considerable benefits.

We have worked intensely. The President signed a landmark Executive Order. We have worked with industry and civil society, worked globally, and worked with Congress. And today, changes are happening in people’s everyday experiences that demonstrate that we are getting on the right track for AI.

When you go to the bank and put in a loan application or mortgage application, almost always an AI model is evaluating your application. And, today, because of rules from our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whether you get a yes or a no, you’re owed an explanation. That helps you can get a fair shot at your own American dream.

If you see a healthcare provider, many are using AI trained on prior health care decisions to put together your diagnosis and treatment. But we know that the history of medical decisions includes problematic and biased decisions. Blindly distilling the bias of these poor decisions into today’s very efficient algorithms is simply not acceptable. So today, our Department of Health and Human Services has a rule in place that health care providers have to make sure that they are not embedding bias and discrimination into these algorithmic systems before they use them.

And finally, the Federal Trade Commission has a rule today that says that you can’t use AI to impersonate a business or bank or a government agency to commit fraud. These are very practical examples of managing AI’s risks so that we can start to trust this technology.

There is ongoing work ahead to build the stable platform for AI by managing its risks. And it is also time to start reaching for the stars at the same time.

If you look today at what the business community is doing, companies and investors are pouring massive funding into building applications for consumers and for business. We want to the productivity enhancements that these services can bring. It has to be done ethically and responsibly. That’s critical, but we definitely want those productivity advances.

But that’s not the whole story, because AI can also help us to do the country’s work, to go after public missions in powerful new ways. To help us achieve America’s great aspirations.

Think about what’s possible if we use AI to accelerate how we design and approve drugs. Think about what it looks like when we actually start being able to deliver a much better weather forecast to all Americans, especially in this time of a changing climate. And think about what it would mean if we could use the advances in AI to help edtech tools finally, actually, close educational gaps for our kids.

These are amazing possibilities that lie ahead if we get on the right track with AI.

Why We Do This Work

I’ll finish with a postcard from the past: our Constitution.

All of us in science or engineering set a hypothesis, then do the experiments to test it, and then iterate and keep working until we get solid facts or until we get practical solutions.

The underlying reason to do all of this work is that if we get it right, we can help our country succeed at the great experiment that tests the most inspiring hypothesis of all. And that is the hypothesis—the idea—that we the people can form a more perfect union. The idea that we can secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

Americans have succeeded at this experiment through two and a half centuries. And now it’s our turn. For those of us who get to work on science and technology, this is our great privilege. And it’s also our great responsibility.

It is my great privilege to be part of the broad science and technology community, along with all of you here at the University of Maryland, as we do this work for our country. Thanks so much for having me, and I look forward to the discussion.

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