Going to the border and harrumphing won’t solve the very real immigration problem, which pits our humanity against our sovereign entitlement to say what kind of people we are.

We are not alone in this struggle.

The world is on the move. Untold millions of people who live south of our border with Mexico want to move north. Equally untold millions who live in Africa would like to move to Europe; and millions in eastern Europe want to live in western Europe.

From the Indian subcontinent, millions would like to move to Europe, specifically to Britain. Millions of East Asians have their eyes set on Australia.

Within these geographic areas, people also are on the move. Millions from Venezuela have flooded their neighboring countries. Likewise in Africa, where war and famine are ever-present, people try and walk to a marginally better future in another country. In the Middle East, Jordan and Lebanon are flooded with refugees first from Palestine, then from Iraq and Syria.

As The Economist pointed out recently, a slum in Spain is incalculably superior to a slum in Kenya.

The drivers for migration are poverty, violence, crop failure, and political collapse. And persecution, ethnic and religious; for example, the Rohingya in Myanmar have sought refuge in Bangladesh.

The goal of the migrant is the same worldwide: A better, safer life.

The political price paid by the stable democracies continues to be huge. It played a role in Donald Trump’s election as president and will play a role in the next presidential election, whether Trump runs or not. It was the great driver for Brexit and Britain’s seeming self-harming. It has driven the move of Hungary, under Viktor Orban, to autocracy.

It is hard to stop people who have nothing to lose from crossing a frontier if they can. But they aren’t the only migrants. Some, a small number, are opportunists. These are the migrants who overstay student visas, manipulate qualifications for residence, and willfully circumvent the law or contract so-called green card marriages.

But they aren’t what the border crisis is about — any more than it is what the overloaded boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea is about. It is the physical manifestation of desperation.

Because the migration problem is so complex – human problems are almost by definition complex— it isn’t a matter of resolution so much as management. We want, for example, immigrants with high-tech skills, but we are worried about the impact of millions of desperate peasants walking across the deserts.

Now a new driver of migration has opened: global warming. The heat and drought hitting the U.S. West Coast is also hitting Central America and will affect livability.

Adding to the complexity of the immigration conundrum is the labor shortage. Construction depends on immigrant labor, farming on contract labor, and slaughterhouses and chicken processors can’t stay open without immigrants to do the unappealing work.

One small step forward would be a sensible work permit.

It seems to me that the wall — Trump’s wall – isn’t a bad thing. It is a declaration, a symbol. It won’t deter desperate people and it won’t end smuggling. The latter is going to get worse with drones and even autonomous aircraft that can bring their lethal cargoes deep into the United States.

While there is an insatiable market for drugs here, smuggling will continue and even increase. And while that is so, lawlessness south of the border will accelerate.

Sadly, despite Vice President Kamala Harris’s statements, we aren’t going to repair the countries to our south overnight. But we might look to repairing our drug policy, seeing if that can be adjusted to take the profit out of the trade. Except for the gradual, local legalization of marijuana, we haven’t contemplated drug management, short of prohibition, in a century. A new look is due.

There is no single policy that is going to solve the human misery south of the border which drives so many to risk their lives or, through love, to send their children north.

Therefore immigration policy will never be a total, sweeping thing, but rather an ad hoc affair: We need some immigrants, we don’t want others; we have big hearts, but we fear immigration that is unchecked.

We fear the political, cultural, and social change immigrants will bring, especially if they are of a common language and background. Pain in Central America is political torture in the United States.

Kamala Harris shone in the Senate when she was asking questions in hearings. That is where the idea that she might have presidential possibilities flourished. Democrats, observing her surefootedness, were led to think, “Here is the next Barack Obama.”

But the shine is off Harris and the tarnish is setting in.

When Harris ran for president, the only evidence of that hearing-room confidence was when she attacked front-runner Joe Biden in the Democratic debates. She implied he was the proprietor of old ideas and hinted that he wasn’t up to date on matters of race.

So, it was extraordinary that Biden chose Harris to be his running mate. There were other strong contenders among those who had sought the Democratic nomination, and many more who hadn’t run for president. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is the one who should have been chosen: a tough, well-qualified woman of her times.

Biden, in choosing Harris, heard the music of diversity which has been turned up of late. He felt the need to make history and to show that he was in accord with the values of today.

But he must have had some dealings with Harris when he was vice president; observed her in action in the Senate and heard about the difficulty she had organizing her small Senate staff. He must have done the political equivalent of due diligence. And he must have been cognizant of the damage Sarah Palin did to John McCain’s candidacy in 2008.

Whereas Obama appeared not to think of himself as being of color, Harris clings to it. Her journey intrigues her; Obama’s didn’t intrigue him. He traveled it with purpose and dignity.

Now it must worry the president to learn, as the rest of us have, that Harris seems to have no ideas. Her public remarks are flip at worst and off-the-shelf liberal at best.

What does she see as the future for America? This isn’t laid out or even discernable. We need to know her vision because she is vice president to an old man – the metaphorical heartbeat away.

Harris and Biden have chosen to believe that solidarity at the top is an important message, hence the frequent references in White House announcements to the “Biden-Harris Administration.” In public, Harris is often at Biden’s side. But she often seems to be standing there as his girl Friday, not as the second-in-command.

In his well-reported piece in The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere hunted for the real Harris and didn’t appear to find her. He notes that she asks good, hard questions, like a good prosecutor, but as she dodges reporters, they aren’t able to ask good, hard questions of her.

It isn’t a given Democrats will back Harris if Biden turns out to be a one-term president which given his age, 78, is a reasonable supposition. But ditching her would be hard because it might cost the party its progressive wing and keeping her might cost them as dearly in the center.

Republicans are salivating at the thought of running against Harris. She is the bright sun in their darkening sky.

The immigration assignment seems to have been thrust on Harris. It is unlikely she sought it. She doesn’t appear to have grasped it with relish. Save for brief visits to Guatemala and Mexico, she has done and said little.

Harris is finally looking at the chaos on the border herself. She needs to present a better idea than championing what amounts to nation-building in Central America. That has been tried and tried again and failed.

She isn’t going to solve the pain inherent in the immigration challenge, but it is a wonderful opportunity for her to give us her view of America, and what we might expect from a President Harris. Another assignment that could be thrust upon her.

The severe drought gripping the Western states looks set to reach into all lives in the nation and into every pocket.

The unbearable heat for those living in the West, with record-high temperatures stretching from Wyoming to the Mexican border and from the Pacific to the Mississippi, will impact the rest of the country as well.

Scientists have classified this monstrous baking as a megadrought. There hasn’t been regular rain or mountain snow in the West for more than 20 years.

To call it a scorcher is to underestimate a catastrophe that has the possibility of reaching near-biblical proportions. This is big and there is no quick fix. None.

The drought means epic disruptions, merciless rearrangement.

First, of course, there is no water, which means much economic activity may slow or cease. Farmers won’t be able to grow crops or raise livestock. Food prices that are already high from the pandemic’s disruptions will go even higher.

The electricity supply will be strained and may be curtailed because of reduced hydroelectric production. The 13 Western states get more than 22 percent of their electricity from hydropower dams, located mostly in Washington, according to the National Hydropower Association.

In today’s world, farmers depend on electricity to water crops and livestock, milk cows, dry grain, and freeze produce.

The first measurable disruption of the summer will be from breakdowns in the California food supply chain. Prices in supermarkets will reflect the impact of the drought on California, which acts as the nation’s truck farm. If you eat it, it grows in California, but only when there is water for irrigation.

The rivers of the West are running dry. The reserves of water in the great dams on the major rivers, especially the Columbia and the Colorado, which act as the lifelines of much of the West, are way below normal.

Manufactured goods from Western states will be affected if power shortages are extended and widespread. Wildfires will abound and have already started their annual scourge.

In quality-of-life terms, electricity shortages will be particularly brutal for the people living in areas served by the grid in the West, known as the Western Interconnection. Without air conditioning, many people will feel like they have taken up residence in hell. Lives will be lost.

The historical move of Americans from the Northeast to the South and Southwest will be in question, if not reversed.

Droughts aren’t ended because it rains. It takes years of sustained precipitation, ideally falling gently, to restore that which the heat has taken away.

According to those who keep track of these things, the West isn’t the only part of the country suffering drought. Most states are reporting reduced rainfall, including the traditional soggy regions of New England.

No one can predict when the Great Western Drought will break, but political fights breaking out over the distribution of what water remains, followed by litigation, are foreseeable.

Living through drought is a uniquely joyless experience as clear blue skies change from being emblematic of nature’s bounty to being the cruelest of deceptions, the smiling face of betrayal.

Science can come to the rescue, as it did in the record speed with which COVID-19 vaccines were developed. But usually, it takes a long time, as with fracking which changed energy shortage to energy abundance. That took decades.

Finally, beware of brave talk about desalination. That takes a lot of energy and, if it is to be done at a meaningful scale, a giant new environmental problem results: What to do with millions of tons of salt?

We used to worry about climate change in Africa, an electrical engineer in San Francisco told me, but now we have to worry about it in California. Actually, everywhere.

After the long, dark night of the pandemic, many are predicting a rosy dawn followed by a bright summer day. The feeling is that we, the people, have borne the battle and can now celebrate the victory.

But recoveries are tricky, and this recovery will be trickier than most because we are coming out of hibernation into a place changed radically from the one where we began our COVID-19-avoidance slumber. We isolated in one world and are reconnecting in another.

Enthusiasm flows from a sense of accumulated demand and already evident brisk economic activity.

There is a labor shortage despite unemployment at 5.8 percent. I have been following job offerings across the country (I review dozens at a time) and this would appear to be a good time to get a new job or change up. Employers are sounding desperate; they are paying more and being accommodating.

Unfortunately, tight labor markets and rising house prices are often a harbinger of inflation to come.

Yet there are some wondrous possibilities. On the plus side, we are awakening into a new world of technology-driven change.

In transportation, the surge in electric vehicles is here to stay. Ford’s announcement that next year it will offer an all-electric F-150 pickup truck is significant. It breaks down technical barriers and, significantly, it also breaks down social ones.

Working men and farmers who have been dubious about electric vehicles, regarding them as being only for effete liberals, now can embrace the electric vehicle revolution. The electric F-150 will be a milepost in the electrification of transportation and socially changing attitudes.

New materials, like graphene nanotubes and new ways of production using additive manufacturing, known commonly as 3D printing, will change the factory floor as well as add to the possibility of on-site production and the deployment of new, small factories.

Interconnectivity, sped by 5G, and the massive deployment of sensors will have its impact from the checkout at the grocery store to medical diagnosis, much of it done remotely as part of the swing to telemedicine.

Already, Domino’s Pizza is testing autonomous delivery vehicles in Houston. Like those ubiquitous scooters in cities, this will spread on the ground — and in the air, as drones get into the game.

COVID-19 has stimulated not just medical research but also a general interest in research which will in turn promote more public funding. The vaccine successes reestablished a certain level of confidence in medical science.

But there are old-economy realities ahead.

Real estate is in boom and bust simultaneously. The future of office towers is uncertain, and the future of shopping centers is precarious. The possibility of home buyers finding affordable houses is remote. Want to start married life living in a tent pitched in an abandoned department store?

A surge of homelessness is expected to follow the ending of the moratorium on evictions. Tens of thousands may be evicted as they haven’t paid rent for a year and won’t be able to do so. An equal number will be sitting in the dark as utilities finally start disconnecting for unpaid bills. One utility, CPS Energy in San Antonio, Texas, has $105 million in uncollected bills. Multiply that across the country.

The federal government has, as it were, shot its wad, in stimulus and can’t be expected to step in and help renters with their back rent or electricity customers with their accumulated bills.

There is another disrupter on the horizon. It is drought, the worst recorded, which is drying up California and much of the West.

Expect reduced food production, affecting the whole country with higher prices, a terrible wildfire season, and even a shortage of electricity as dams across the West (including Grand Coulee on the Columbia River and Hoover on the Colorado River) will cut electricity output due to low water.

The mighty Colorado — the life force for so much in the West, including farming and electricity production — is running seriously low and will continue to decline as summer progresses. Hardship in the West will be felt in the North, South and East.

A new Dust Bowl? Technology hasn’t yet learned to make rain.

Normally, a trial involving a nuclear power plant would garner national attention.

But there has been a significant struggle underway over an unfinished nuclear power plant in Hollywood, Ala., and nary a word of it has caught national media attention. Even in the area affected by this trial, served by the giant Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), coverage has been modest. The importance of new green energy hasn’t been raised, which is the back story here.

The bench trial (before a single judge) which opened in Huntsville, Ala. on May 16 and concluded three days later involves the two units of TVA’s Bellefonte nuclear plant.

TVA started construction on the plant in 1975, then suspended it. Later TVA revived construction, and finally mothballed the plant in 2o15.

A year later, TVA declared the plant surplus to its needs and put it up for sale. This attracted just three bidders and a purpose-specific company, Nuclear Development LLC, won. It was the high bidder at just $111 million. Two lower bidders both planned to cannibalize the plant and ship parts to other plants, some abroad.

TVA accepted the Nuclear Development bid without reservation, or none was expressed. According to Nuclear Development, the company went ahead inventorying the plant and doing customary due diligence prior to the deal closing after two years.

When the deal was to close in November 2018, TVA asked first for a two-week extension and then scrapped the deal, claiming the purchaser had failed to get the necessary licenses transferred from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as required by the Atomic Energy Act. The judge has already affirmed this much in a pre-trial opinion.

TVA told me in a statement, “Nuclear Development had two years to obtain the necessary Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to transfer Bellefonte’s NRC-issued construction permits. Nuclear Development failed to obtain NRC approval before closing, making it illegal for TVA to close the sale.”

Bill McCollum, president of Nuclear Development, told me that the license issue wasn’t raised in the time from the sale in 2016 to the abrupt change of heart on the verge of signing in November 2018. NRC hasn’t been a party to the trial and neither has any other federal agency. After the cancellation, Nuclear Development immediately sued for breach of contract.

The dispute is important in the national context with the Biden administration straining to end carbon emissions from electricity generation and the two units of Bellefonte representing between them 2,700 megawatts of clean green power.

There is some controversy over the state of completion of the plant, but Unit 1 is put at 88 percent by the purchaser and Unit 2 at around 58 percent.

McCollum knows the plant: A career nuclear engineer, he was the chief operating officer at TVA until he retired in 2011. Previously, he served for 33 years in the highly respected Duke Energy nuclear program.

Nuclear Development is owned by Franklin Haney of Chattanooga and his family, who have amassed a fortune in real estate development in Tennessee and around Washington, D.C.

Creative financing has been Haney’s specialty, and he had devised a plan to finish the Bellefonte plant using private funding and federal tax credits and loan guarantees. He first shared this possible plan with TVA in 2013 — so it has been long-germinating.

Haney had worked with TVA on creative financing for another nuclear project. He was a known quantity to TVA.

Purchaser sources believe that TVA pulled back when it realized that Nuclear Development wanted to sell its electricity output from Bellefonte to the City of Memphis, TVA’s largest customer, at a discount. Otherwise, it could have made the sale contingent on the license transfers.

At a time when clean air is a national priority, it seems the litigation in Alabama is more than a commercial dispute. It is an environmental one. After all, TVA is a federal independent agency, and the NRC is a federal independent commission. Couldn’t they have worked out the licensing problem before it came to legal fisticuffs?

In my years of writing about TVA, it has always been a nuclear champion and keenly aware of its social responsibility, having been born in the New Deal.

“This is not your father’s Oldsmobile,” said the car ad tag line. Well, this is not your father’s electric utility.

The traditional electric utility is a simple ABC construct: The electricity is generated in one place (A) and sent down a wire (B) to the customer (C). In today’s electric world, power is generated from many sources and wires carry the current to and from diverse points, switching in fractions of seconds.

Renewables — wind and solar — are driving the changes in the electric utility industry, but so are new and different demands on the utilities from customers, and new operating environments which include aberrant weather, wildfires, and cyberattacks.

To cope with this more difficult environment utilities are digitizing: They are rapidly becoming connected. “The future utility will be driven by data analytics plus communications,” says Joe Weiss, a leading electric industry consultant in cybersecurity, particularly relating to programmable controllers and transformers.

This future depends on broadband, which can carry vast amounts of data almost instantly, allowing the data to be analyzed and acted on in something close to real-time.

Anterix, a Woodland Park, N.J.-based company, has just announced the formation of an extraordinary collaborative grouping — which it calls an “ecosystem” — of 37 high-tech companies to help the utilities with their broadband transition. This ecosystem includes ABB, Cisco, GE, Ericsson, and Motorola, and is a de facto brain trust which will assist the utilities’ move into the digital future — turning them into what some are already calling “virtual utilities.”

That, to my mind, is an exaggeration. But the value of data and data management is not.

Data is being called the new oil and not without cause. It contains a treasure chest of information which, when unlocked, can reform utility practices, and can help prepare for emergencies.

Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, says data can help the utilities “wring more” out of the existing infrastructure. That is more power from everywhere — from big central stations to dams to wind turbines and solar arrays. Also, data will be the cornerstone of smart city planning.

Anterix, a relatively small but visionary firm, has licenses for a substantial amount of critical 900-megahertz spectrum. It is offering this to the utilities as the platform for private broadband networks. Already two important utilities, Ameren and San Diego Gas & Electric, have signed up. Separately, experimental licenses have been issued for 11 test sites, ranging from the giant and influential New York Power Authority to Texas State University.

The companies in this ecosystem will advise, competitively design, and build out these networks, which will use the current standard LTE (4G) technology.

Every utility CEO I have questioned tells me that what keeps them awake nights is cybersecurity. That worry is heightened after the attacks on SolarWinds and the Colonial Pipeline. Private networks offer secure communications, totally free of other networks and the internet, which is appealing to the utilities as they continue to bolster against cyberattacks.

As for physical protection, Rob Schwartz, president and CEO of Anterix, says with a private network and a full deployment of sensors throughout the utility’s system, if a line breaks, the utility’s control center will know about it before the broken line hits the ground and it can be instantly de-energized, avoiding fires and danger to the public.

Around utilities these days “resilience” is a watchword. Private communications networks can be an important part of resilience, says Schwartz.

It isn’t like it was in dad’s day. We didn’t use the word ecosystem then, let alone apply it to strengthening utilities.

The restaurants are back. Bravo! Across the country, restaurants are open or beginning to open. Cheers!

But there is something amiss. Something unexpected and as-yet-unexplained is going on: There is a national shortage of restaurant workers.

During the lockdown, I was among many who lamented the fate of those who prepped, cooked, served, and cleaned up, enduring bad hours, difficult conditions, and uncertain earnings.

However, there have always been those who want to work in restaurants. For some, like college students, it is a way of earning on the journey to somewhere else. For others, and there are many, it is because they love the ethos of restaurant life: its people intensity, and its real-time energy and urgency.

And for those who link ambition with acumen, restaurant work has always fostered the possibility of, as I have heard waiters say, “a place of my own.” Chez Moi beckons to those who would sell foie gras, as well as those who would sell hot dogs.

For unabashed entrepreneurs, it is probably impossible to beat restaurateurs. The chance of self-employment, to my mind, is the great motivation of the free-spirited. A food truck is a start and may be enough.

We knew the pandemic would change things. But to change employment in the restaurant industry, even a reduced one? That isn’t only a puzzle, but also a hint of how the pandemic has altered things.

There are those in Congress and the statehouses who hold that restaurant workers are lolling at home because they would rather collect unemployment benefits. I doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are so lazy, so work-averse that they would rather stay home — after more than a year of staying home — than returning to their restaurant jobs.

Something else is happening.

Horizons have changed, new jobs have been found, and the grueling but satisfying work of restaurants has given over to something else. After the plague, a new dawn.

The country is resetting, and lives are being reset, too. A waitress I know of in Florida found work in a print shop. She prefers the regular pay there to the uncertain income from waitressing. That is a reset in her life.

As we go forward, as the pandemic is less dominant in our lives, we are going to experience changes — some anticipated, some surprising like the restaurant labor shortage.

We don’t know whether the full complement of workers will go back to their offices; we don’t know how schools will deal with the lost year, and we don’t know whether the mini migration from town to country that has been a feature of the last year is a trend to stay or a product of panic.

What we do know and rejoice in is that we can go back to being restaurant patrons. In brief travels around New England, Washington, D.C., and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., I found people are eating out with joy.

Restaurants are milestones of life. It is in them we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, advance romance, or simply eat something that we wouldn’t get at home.

But that isn’t all. Restaurants, however modest, are destinations. During this long pandemic, we have missed having a destination.

Restaurants in all societies are part of the fabric of how we live. Eating out is woven into our lives, whether it is a humble hamburger or a great ethnic food feast. The first step in the American Dream for many immigrant families is to start a restaurant, to employ the social capital that they brought with them: their cuisine.

Bon appétit! We need restaurants because, in their great variety, they add spice to our lives, especially after the long lockdown.

In case you don’t know, it is, the White House has announced, Older Americans Month.

They say, in the newspaper game, “Write what you know.” I find I know about being “older.” That sounds just a bit kinder than the bald “old.”

Chalmers M. Roberts wrote a wonderful book, “How Did I Get Here So Fast?: Rhetorical Questions and Available Answers from a Long and Happy Life.” Quite so.

I was the youngest at everything for a long time. I didn’t go to college, so I got a head start in journalism. Leaving school at 16 wasn’t then considered a life sentence of being second-rate. In those days and that place, Southern Rhodesia, a college education was a rarity; and people who had one were regarded as wise, even if they were stupid, as they frequently were.

There was a different social dynamic in London, where I launched myself on the legendary Fleet Street four years later. Few had been to college and those who had were regarded in the popular press not with reverence, as they had been in Africa, but with hostility. I was even hired at the BBC.

When a very nice man, Roger Wood, became editor of The Daily Express, there was consternation. He was a university graduate and, to make matters worse, from Oxford. The end of our hallowed way of life (phony expenses claims, heavy drinking, and bad food) was at hand. En masse, the denizens of the newspaper world went to the pubs to mutter darkly about the imminent collapse of civilization. Change often is greeted with the sense that civilization is over.

Years later, I told Wood about the near insurrection his appointment to the popular London newspaper’s editorship had caused. He was surprised. The discontent had never reached the editor’s office.

In my next stop, New York, I was told, “No degree, no work.” At least not in television, and not at The New York Times. All three television networks wouldn’t grant me an interview even though I had been a scriptwriter at the BBC.

Perplexingly, The New York Times told me I could be an editor, but I could never hope to write in the newspaper because of my lack of a college degree. Go figure! You can’t write here, but you can fiddle with what others have written.

Despite this gaping hole in my past, I’ve managed and even pocketed an honorary degree along the way. I’ve lectured at a trove of universities, from Harvard and MIT to the University of Southern Mississippi. While, I think, for science there is no substitute for college, for the rest I’m less convinced.

These days, a heavy burden is put on people who don’t get at least two years of a college education, and an even heavier one on those who leave high school. Here, the language is indicative of the social stigma: You don’t “leave high school,” you “drop out.” That implies at a young age, a life going south, headed for repetitive failure.

The social pressure for an orthodox education is immense. The Biden administration, in its endless good intent, may be adding to the pressure on those who, for many reasons, took a different route in their lives. The role of the universities isn’t blameless. They have a predatory streak. They are as money-hungry as any corporation, shaking down the alumni and justifying it with moral superiority.

Treating formal education as the foundation of a social class is pernicious and destructive at all levels.

I used to fly light aircraft with a brilliant pilot — the best I have ever known. But despite skills and knowledge far above average, he was precluded from getting hired by the airlines: He didn’t finish college. Instead, he went off to fly airplanes.

A scientist of real ability, a friend of mine, who climbed high in Big Pharma was sidelined not because she was a woman, but because she didn’t have a doctorate, only a masters. So she became an administrator.

Governments are right to emphasize learning. However, they need to demand thoroughness and excellence in primary and secondary schools. Our public schools are a disgrace and damage children long before they decide whether they want to continue to college.

Now that I am an “older American,” I wouldn’t deprive anyone of a joyful life, as I have had, by limiting their opportunities with rigid orthodoxy about college. The university mission should be learning not class branding. I was lucky. I dodged the branding industry, known as college.

When we look back on the convulsion that is going to reset America — the great technology-driven revolution that will extend to nearly every corner of American life — it may be named for President Joe Biden, but it won’t be his revolution. It is innovation’s revolution. He will help finance it and smooth it out, but it is already happening and is accelerating.

Biden’s typically soft speech to Congress (no stemwinder he) was a wish list of things dear to him, but also an acknowledgment of what already is in motion.

Technology is rampant and government’s role should be to provide partnership and, above all, standards, according to two savants of the tech world, Jeffrey DeCoux, chairman of the Autonomy Institute, and Morgan O’Brien, a visionary in U.S. wireless telecommunications, now executive chairman of Anterix, a company providing private broadband wireless networks to utilities. Above all, they said in an interview with me for the PBS program “White House Chronicle,” standards for the new technology are essential.

Partial interconnection with different appliances, from road sweepers to drone delivery vehicles speaking only to identical devices, will be self-defeating. The internet without international standards would have failed.

Biden is set to preside over the greatest industrial leap forward since steam provided shaft horsepower to make factories a reality. If Congress allows, the Biden administration will finance much of the upgrading of the old infrastructure. It also will be called upon to be part of the new infrastructure, the technological one. That will be expensive; both DeCoux and O’Brien warned that it will take huge sums of money to build out complete 5G broadband networks, which will carry the load of interconnectivity.

For the nation to leap forward, these networks need to bring 5G broadband to every corner of it, O’Brien said. It can’t be allowed to serve only those places where population density makes it profitable, like cities.

In his speech to Congress, Biden laid out a revolutionary abstract for the future of the nation. The human side of the Biden infrastructure plan — things like daycare, free community college, better health care, prescription drug pricing — is the true Biden agenda.

The technology revolution is seen by the president not for what it is, a resetting of everything in America, but rather as a way to job creation. It will create jobs, but that isn’t the driving force. The driver is and has been innovation: science helping people. That, in turn, will bring about a surge of productivity and prosperity, and with that, new jobs, quality jobs – robots will soon be flipping hamburgers and painting houses.

This other agenda, the one that will make the fundamental difference between the nation of today and the nation of tomorrow, is the technological revolution. The evolutionary forces for this upheaval have been gathering since the microprocessor started things moving in the 1970s.

At the core of the coming changes is interconnectivity. That is what will craft the future. Cars on highways will be connected with each other through thousands of sensors, and these will speed traffic and enhance safety both for those with drivers and new autonomous ones. Likewise, drones will deliver many goods and they will need to be interconnected and have superior flight management. Every aspect of endeavor will be involved, from managing railroads to increasing electricity resilience and the productivity of the electric infrastructure.

In an interview on the Digital Roundtable, a webinar from Texas State University, this week, Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, said improved interconnectivity could increase available electricity from dams and power plants often without new construction. He explained that interconnectivity wouldn’t only be essential to managing diverse generating sources, like wind and solar, but also in wringing more out of the whole system.

Technology has gotten us through the pandemic. Most obviously in the huge speed at which vaccines were developed, but also in our ability to meet virtually and the effectiveness of online ordering and delivery.

By nature, and by record, Biden is a get-along-go-along politician, a zephyr, as we heard in his address to Congress. But history looks as though it will cast him as a transformative president, a notable leader presiding over great winds of change.