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From Sputnik to the WWW, a History of ARPA
Ian Lamont writes "Next month is the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, but it's not just the start of mankind's exploration of space that should be observed. The 'October surprise' also changed computing forever, thanks to the subsequent creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of IT research at ARPA, catalyzed the invention of an astonishing array of IT, from computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet ... and even an early 'electronic office.' However, the long-range vision that Licklider promoted at the agency is allegedly in danger, according to some observers quoted in the article: 'In the early years, ARPA was willing to fund things like artificial intelligence — take five years and see what happens,' [CMU Professor David Farber] says. 'Nobody cared whether you delivered something in six months. It was, "Go and put forth your best effort and see if you can budge the field." Now that's changed. It's more driven by, "What did you do for us this year?"' Former ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld blames Congress and a new crop of 'wishy-washy' agency heads. DARPA's response: It still is investing heavily in technologies that may take years to come to market, such as universal language translation, realistic agent-based societal simulation environments, and photonic communications in a microprocessor having a theoretical maximum performance of 10 TFLOPS."
Our politicans have surrendered the long term, instead looking for the quick fix. The US economy is now based on "pass the bag", flipping stocks to the next buyer. But what happens to those at the end of the chain.
And who is there to blame? Ourselves, the voters within the US. We vote based on short-term memories. We vote not on who would do the job best, but by who slings the most mud. We ignore qualifications for image. Politicians are out on a JOB INTERVIEW! The voters are the managers deciding on who to fill in the position. Take it as seriously as if you were hiring the nurse to administer your parents medication, because truth is, you are.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Any more, it reminds me of the great quote from Ghostbusters where Ray tells Venkman: "You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
From industry to Academia the general trend to is to focus on smaller and smaller time frames to judge success. This myopic view is exemplified anytime anything about NASA comes out. People moan about money wasted that could be used for social programs or some ignorant rant about how NASA's funding could prevent world hunger. You can also see it in how companies now are interested only in looking good for the next quarter. Where they mortgage the future of a company just to see higher Quarterly returns. We all hear of how Company X has a banner year but lets go of 1/3 of their workforce before the 2nd quarter to show a even rosier quarter. Academia is now slowly converting into just an alternative corprate R&D lab. Long term basic research is getting harder to fund and you need buzz words like "string theory", "nano technology", "Quantum", and "Intelligent Design" to get any funding from the current Government.
There are so many things that are useful to know beyond what is immediately useful. If it was naught for the hundred of thinker toiling away on trivial problems we wouldn't have such a broad knowledge base in science. We'd have much better made Full plate armors, Sailing ships, rapiers, pots, cast iron cook ware, black plague repelling perfumes, and Iron Plowshares. Many of the really interesting and unique inventions came about form basic research into trivial things. We need to fund those. Arpa net used to be one of the ones who did this but a general mindset of "we need results this quarter" will hurt science and humanity in general.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Our politicans have surrendered the long term, instead looking for the quick fix. The US economy is now based on "pass the bag", flipping stocks to the next buyer. But what happens to those at the end of the chain.
I don't know if that's the case. Wheeling and dealing seems to be where the money is, for good or bad. Perhaps we are biased as geeks and wish that brains paid better. Everybody wants their specialty/hobby to be more important than it really is. (Most countries reject heavy wheeling and dealing culture because they feel it "ugly" and demeaning.)
Our schools may be deluding the population into believing that calculus is an economic savior when it fact it is as outdated as factory work because its cheaper to think overseas.
Table-ized A.I.
Should be not be welcoming our WWW-creating overlords at CERN for that?
-A
The problem is really simple. Because free markets worked so well for some things, free market processes have been misapplied. It became very much in vogue, during the 1980s and 1990s, to treat research as just another business process. Much as someone would put together an project plan and a bunch of Pertt and Gant charts for defining the development of a new car, we as a people came to believe that we should run all aspects of government in the same way, and you simply can't.
Business processes are about minimizing risks, and therefor unknowns, and research is about exploring the unknowns. You can't have a process that says, after we do ten things, we'll knock out this fusion problem and cure cancer as a milestone at step 72. You just don't know, and, in research, if you get to a point and find that you don't know something, like you thought you might have, you WANT to invest the time to find out that which you don't know. In business, you would want to think about an entirely different approach. The two are simply diametrically opposed.
I know it is in vogue to say that scientists should be accountable and we should be able to audit their productivity, but, really, you just can't. All you can really do is educate the hell out of them, ensure that it really means something to get a Phd, try and see if they are motivated, but once that is done, you just have to give them a bunch of money, lock them on a campus, and say, "let me know what you find out all along the way." Then, if we get jealous because it seems like they have a cushy job, which they do, we just have to say, well, you should have aced calculus in high school and college, because that's what they did.
This is my sig.
As others have noted, the focus on short-term payoffs is not limited to DARPA but affects our whole society. The days when private corporations invested in basic research is gone.
Gone, too are the J. C. R. Lickliders and Vannevar Bushes and Jerome Wiesners who laid the foundations of our technical and scientific success. The President's Science Advisory Council vanished under Nixon. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished under Reagan. Science and engineering are no longer at the table when national policy is being decided.
And the current hostility toward immigration and the hoops that foreign grad students and postdocs have to jump through isn't helping, either.
Call the roll of the people who gave us our nuclear weapons. Sure, there were the Harold Ureys and E. O. Lawrences and Richard Feynmans, but a lot of it depended on foreign scientists escaping the European dictatorships. Postwar, the space race was a contest between "our German scientists and their German scientists."
And now we have an administration that is not only fostering science and engineering, it seems to have an active hostility toward it. Somewhat reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union when Lysenko came to the fore.
I think it's probably too late for the U. S. to maintain its present position of world leadership in science and technology. The conditions that nourished that leadership have been too absent for too long.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
DARPA is doing OK; they've been getting results. I've dealt with DARPA on and off since the 1980s, and I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team. That was something that needed doing. DARPA had been funding robotics research since the 1960s without much to show for it that DoD could actually use.
The academic AI community needed some serious butt-kicking. CMU had been working on automatic driving since the 1980s, with very slow progress. Stanford AI had totally tanked. MIT AI was off on the behavior-based robots tangent, which had peaked in the early 1990s. Some of the old guys had to be shoved aside to get things moving again. That's now happened.
In the private sector, though, computer science research is almost dead. Google is focused on applications; they do a little theory, but not much. Microsoft did some good work; their big contribution was moving Bayesian statistics into the mainstream, something for which Bill Gates was directly responsible. Beyond that, there's not much. The DEC research centers are gone; HP Labs barely exists, PARC was dumped by Xerox and isn't doing much, Bell Labs is barely alive, and IBM Almaden was severely downsized. (I happened to be visiting IBM Almaden the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was like a funeral.) Apple does little basic research any more. Sony SCEA diverted most of their research talent into dealing with the horrors of the PS3 programming problem.
Smart people aren't going into research any more. They go into startups. Or finance. The two best people on our DARPA Grand Challenge team went to hedge funds, where they did very well financially.