In industrialized nations, partnerships that link up a national government with engineering- companies take many and varied forms, including commercial contracts. But the essential facts are the same in almost every case: each party needs another; together they can do things which are impossible without such a partnership.

Ever since the long-ago days of NASA’s Gemini program, governments and engineering organizations have needed each other for incredible, transformative technology innovation. These kinds of cross-over alliances are especially important whenever the aim is to move innovations out from the lab and into the marketplace, into the hands of citizens.

Gemini heavily depended upon corporate labs, and later upon corporate test centers and production facilities. What you find in the 1960s aerospace world is also true in the 2020s: while agencies signed commercial contracts with engineering-focused companies, the relationship was in fact much more about partnership, one marked by shared risk and shared rewards.

It is a balance that remains to be struck right now in terms of artificial intelligence (AI).

A lived experience

The pertinence of the engineering-governmental partnership was evident in my own family's history. In particular, I think back to my father's engineering journey, which always involved U.S. companies partnered with the federal government. His job in the 1950s was with the nuclear-focused engineering innovator, American Machine and Foundry Corp. (Today, AMF is mostly known for its bowling equipment!)

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had tasked AMF with building reactors in various countries. Under President Eisenhower, the AEC promoted what he called the Atoms for Peace Program. The goal was to deliver the benefits of nuclear engineering to improve healthcare, innovate in science and grow economies with cheaper power.

In partnership with Westinghouse Electric Corp., AMF took on an especially challenging assignment: engineering, designing and constructing Japan’s first nuclear reactor. Since this was the mid-1950s, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were still fresh in Japanese memories. Nuclear anything was easily maligned. It took some real diplomatic effort and political skills to implement, which needed to be irrefutably backed up with engineering savvy.

My father moved the whole family to Tokyo, where he worked from the inside of what was then one of the largest Japanese corporations: Mitsubishi Electric. The experience in Japan taught one important lesson to the AMF and Westinghouse leadership team: there was a clear and compelling alignment of the corporate mission with the government’s. Both parties could learn to work together, despite each one having a different focus, a different risk tolerance and a different set of stakeholders.

After completing that, my father took a job with another company, shortly to be acquired by General Electric. There too, he worked hand-in-glove with the government, but with the EPA, to design and install electrostatic precipitators at hundreds of coal-fired power plants. He and the rest of the team at Silicon Valley-based Envirotech Corp. worked to perfect this interesting (and commercially successful) air-cleaning technology.

Factories and power generation plants were facing a new regulatory regime stipulated by breakthrough legislation passed in 1970: the U.S. Clean Air Act. Envirotech developed a suite of engineered solutions to help factories run more cleanly and utilities to generate electricity - all in ways that complied with a critical mandate that garnered widespread public support: reduce deadly pollutants.

What the young Gordon Feller saw and experienced in these cases still resonates today: The government sets goals; engineering deeply informs those. Somewhere in the middle, social benevolence prevails.

How this applies today

In our current moment, AI’s incredible powers seem to grow stronger each day. But there are firm guardrails, whereby our machines don’t have permission to act outside of human command. It’s my humble opinion that the corporate mandate must be married with government mandate. A strong framework, defined by moral principles, seems like a smart way to guide the use of potent emerging technologies – especially in a case such as AI, where there are still so many unknowns.

Striking the delicate technology-morality balance is always hard. In fact, it’s sometimes a bit blurry to know where the line is. Nonetheless, a sharp focus on striking that balance is always needed. Look back six decades ago, to President Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address. Sitting in the Oval Office, Ike warned about the rise of an increasingly powerful military industrial complex. “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex."

A recent address issued a similar warning, although it cautioned against the rise of unchecked Big Tech. Governments around the world are working on morality frameworks that have relevancy to today's AI technologies. The U.K.'s AI regulatory strategy puts AI oversight in the hands of existing regulators under several overarching principles: safety, security, transparency, accountability and fairness. It’s a pro-innovation approach, but it’s also grounded in the notion that these officials know best how to regulate AI in their specific sectors. The end goal of the U.K. effort is to spur responsible AI development, while ensuring to best of our knowledge today, no AI surprises create a digital Frankenstein, or worse.

The E.U. and approximately 20 other national governments have adopted AI rules. Meanwhile, the U.S. lags behind. A federal study is currently examining how this technology should be regulated. But few would be surprised if that study isn't cancelled, sidelined or falls on deaf ears.

Private sector engineers and scientists will continue to develop breakthrough innovations, regardless of government partnerships. The history of successes in space, and elsewhere, tells us pretty clearly: National governments must work together with those private companies, and not only in ways that are commercially viable. Instead, partnerships help ensure that government regulations are typically well-reasoned and with the best intent - although yes, likely highly politicized. And that’s because engineering-government partnerships help solve social problems as well as technical ones.

So, do governments or engineers build the better future? Having worked both as a special government executive inside the federal government, and as a corporate executive in engineering-led companies, I can understand the perspectives of these two worlds.

Hopefully, with scars from both worlds, I can be unbiased in my answer. As in any great partnership, both parties bring something to the table that the other can’t bring. But the government enjoys two advantages over any business of any kind: taxation and supreme authority. Those are unbeatable advantages.

However, those advantages wouldn't be required in a partnership of equal standing, were it able to offer something better. Say, the intellect and creativity of the engineers on the other side, who are tasked solving technical and social challenges - and regulatory hurdles they are often setting for themselves.

Perhaps it's pretty clear who champions the better future. And they might be the ones who need to clamp down on unchecked AI.