Pentagon to Significantly Cut CS Research

GabrielF writes "Over the last few decades, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded some of the most successful computer science research projects in history, such as the Internet. However, according to the New York Times, DARPA has recently decided to significantly cut funding of open-ended computer science research projects in favor of projects that will yield short-term military results. Leading computer scientists, such as David Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and worried."

Comments

Re:sigh...

[tbo]

Disclosure: I'm a graduate student at a major research university, doing public research that happens to be funded in part by DARPA and the DoD. The research is long-term, but is in a field that will clearly have national security implications.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard).

Then you've never seen how research happens at a major university. Waste happens *differently* than at major corporations, but it happens in vast amounts, often in the form of wasted time.

At a private company I used to work at, when there was a minor problem with my working environment (too cold), it took a day or two to fix. At a top-rated university, a more serious problem (lights that turn off by themselves every ten minutes) took seven months to fix.

At the same company, security was taken very seriously. When the door to the server room was being repainted, we had a security guard stand there, literally watching paint dry. At the major university, we had five break-ins to our building last semester and yet it's still possible to break in in 15 seconds with nothing more than a newspaper. (The last of those break-ins cost the university about $10,000 in computer equipment, and it took four months to get the computers replaced and running again).

I haven't even started on the amount of time wasted on pointless administrative tasks (e.g. two weeks telling payroll how to do their jobs).

The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships.

Professors don't get crazy bonuses, but the top administrators get pretty hefty salaries and bonuses (like a beautiful house on campus). Compensation for administrators is approaching corporate levels.

Plus, universities find lots of ways to sphon off federal grant money. Any major purchase or salary coming from a federal grant gets a ~50% "overhead" charge tacked on--that money goes to the university.

It literally hurts me to see DARPA cut funding to universities (my group took a hit), but I can understand why it's happening.

Military Research Solves the Wrong Problems

[billstewart]

Government-funded research almost always works on the wrong problems - it's inherently working on problems the government wants solved, rather than on problems that Real People want solved. This not only takes tax money out of citizens' pockets, which they would have spent on things they wanted instead of things the government wants, but it also has the far worse effect that it takes bright researchers who could have been working on problems that the real world wanted solved and directs them toward problems that the government wants solved - partly the military, partly the military-industrial complex that feeds off the military, and in general toward directions that support big centralized businesses that support big governments.

We do occasionally get good things out of it, and it does let bright people develop ideas and technologies that have broader uses, but mostly it develops better and better technology for killing people. Sure, we've gotten communications satellites, and the Internet does things that UUCP-net didn't do. But there's a huge amount of solar energy research that simply didn't get done because the college kids who were good at thermodynamics went to work developing aerospace technology instead. And while that aerospace technology has civilian applications, much more of it is for jumbo jets than for small private aircraft and free-flight navigation that would make air travel more practical and decentralized. (I *still* want my flying car :-)

Some of the agricultural research has been seriously useful. But too much of it has been directed in ways that support big agribusiness quasi-industrial farms instead of family farms, and towards pesticides that enable mass production, toward genetically modifying plants to make them more resistant to pesticides so that they're more practical for pesticide-based farming, and towards monocultures rather than increased diversity. And if you thought software patents were nasty, you should go look at the biological patent explosions of the last 20-30 years.

Medical research seems like it wouldn't have this problem, and while it's nowhere near as bad, it's still a mixed bag. Most medical techniques that are useful on battlefields are useful on other trauma, and more Americans are still killed every year by the side-effects of the War on Drugs than the wars for oil, and far more by car accidents than either one. But government-funded medical research has unfortunate interactions with the FDA's regulation of new drug development - the regulatory barriers make it economically difficult to develop drugs that have less than a billion-dollar market, and the government funding tends to encourage large labs, and make up for some of the regulatory problems by funding universities which can avoid the regulatory barriers rather than fixing the regulatory barriers.

Short-term military-focused research is far more of an interference to the evolution of our economy than long-term mixed-use research. But they're both bad.