The US intelligence community’s 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment report identified a number of research areas that will determine global military and economic superiority in the coming decades; AI, gene editing, synthetic biology, 5G, and quantum computing were among the areas specifically referenced in the report. It noted that America’s lead in the science and technology fields has been significantly eroded in recent years. The decline is the result of steadily declining US budgets for basic scientific research and a lopsided emphasis on the life sciences, to the detriment of emerging technologies. According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US government spent $67 billion on basic and applied science and technology research in 2017—less than 2% of all federal spending and just 0.3% of US GDP.
