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What DARPA's Been Up To, At Length
The New York Times takes an inside look at DARPA, the secretive defense agency, mentioned frequently on Slashdot, that is "changing the way we use machines — and the way they use us" in the form of a review of Michael Belfiore's The Department of Mad Scientists. Besides tracing the history of the agency, Belfiore's book expounds on the well-known Grand Challenge and its link to ever-more-automated vehicle control in civilian and military contexts, as well as other DARPA pet projects, including robotic surgery, information analysis, and the integration of electronics with the human body.
Darp darp.
Darpa is an old boys network that funds tons of projects by the program managers friends. I worked on a robot project for a couple of years and it was depressing. They ask you to do something impossible, but something that sounds cool. Then they don't care if it doesn't work - the right money has exchanged hands.
Sure they have done some good things, but that was a long time ago. What my complaint is mainly about is the low level of science, and the sleazy way they distribute their money.
Robotic surgeons integrating electronics with the human body?
DARPA is run by the Strogg!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Metal Gear.
No mention of the disastrous Bush-era reign of Tony Tether at DARPA? With an incurious, aggressive president, we got an incurious, aggressive DARPA head, who cut long-term and academic research in favor of short-term corporate research. His dumping by Obama led to joy and celebrations (OK, cautious hope) across the land.
The interesting bit in the article is about modern-day Cybrogs and how we and machines are getting integrated. Of course the article is designed to startle - after all people will read it only if it challenges them. But should we really be scared?
It is not really any more alarming then "machines that can actually create cloth" were in the early 19th century. That too was a ceding of a human ability to machine enhancement.
We need to realize that we always were part machine - albeit chemical and biological ones, rather than electrical and metal ones.
So what makes us human? Certainly not emotion, that is easy to simulate. Perhaps it is free will, social intelligence and an inquisitive inventive mind ? Perhaps it is the combination of all this in a single package: we are multi-purpose, FLEXIBLE, animals.
And what if a machine can be built that would do all that, and would be just as multi-purpose? Intellectually that would simply prove our own nature: multi-purpose flexible machines is what we are. Politically it would be something we can legislate against if we dislike it: after all we already have humans; why build a "mark II" if we like "mark I" ?
Our humanity is in danger from only one thing: laziness. If, due to our own laziness we give away our free will, social intelligence and inquisitive inventive mind - then we are in trouble.
That would happen if we allow educational standards to keep slipping. It certainly could happen, but its up to us.
The interesting bit in the article is about modern-day Cybrogs and how we and machines are getting integrated. Of course the article is designed to startle - after all people will read it only if it challenges them. But should we really be scared?
It is not really any more alarming then "machines that can actually create cloth" were in the early 19th century. That too was a ceding of a human ability to machine enhancement.
We need to realize that we always were part machine - albeit chemical and biological ones, rather than electrical and metal ones.
So what makes us human? Certainly not emotion, that is easy to simulate. Perhaps it is free will, social intelligence and an inquisitive inventive mind ? Perhaps it is the combination of all this in a single package: we are multi-purpose, FLEXIBLE, animals.
And what if a machine can be built that would do all that, and would be just as multi-purpose? Intellectually that would simply prove our own nature: multi-purpose flexible machines is what we are. Politically it would be something we can legislate against if we dislike it: after all we already have humans; why build a "mark II" if we like "mark I" ?
Our humanity is in danger from only one thing: laziness. If, due to our own laziness we give away our free will, social intelligence and inquisitive inventive mind - then we are in trouble.
That would happen if we allow educational standards to keep slipping. It certainly could happen, but its up to us.
welcome our new overlords.
Depends on where your contract with DARPA is. Sure, the robotics stuff at DARPA is about 1% as interesting as what's going on at the MITML, unless you're really into marrying robot brains together with cascading LISP in P2P modalities... which of course leads to exactly what you'd expect-- a bunch of stoned, lazy robots all bumping into each other, mirroring their designers' memetic template perfectly.
And then there are the rockstars of DARPA initiatives, like Lincoln Labs, who appear to be interested in marrying scruffy neural networks with the flight control and combat systems on modern war planes. And there are hundreds of things in between, such as the science and methodology of evacuating megalopolises in coastal regions, which while amounting to ultimately nothing more than the biggest makefile in the world, are still mostly very interesting.
DARPA is like any other shadowing government organization which operates outside the law: Some people are working on irrelevant, boring crap. Some people are working on earth shattering mega theories. But most are somewhere in the middle, trying to pay their kid's medical insurance while at the same time trying to do something that interests them. Money get's thrown around DARPA projects based almost completely on who's doing the throwing, and it's never the same person. Sure there's an ugly side to DARPA funding... but as you should know perfectly well if you've been the recipient of any sort of funding, public or private, there's *always* an ugly side to it.
Our humanity is in danger from only one thing: laziness. If, due to our own laziness we give away our free will, social intelligence and inquisitive inventive mind - then we are in trouble. That would happen if we allow educational standards to keep slipping. It certainly could happen, but its up to us.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Very insightful...
There, fixed it for myself.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
During that "disasterous" period, DARPA made progress on the "Proto 1" and "Proto 2" cyborg arms, and the military (not sure if DARPA specifically) funded Bussard's "Polywell" fusion project.
Revive the Constitution.
Dear DARPA -
Stop your exotic experimental stuff and do something about scanning and preventing explosives getting on board airplanes.
Find a way to do this without eroding the freedoms of ordinary citizens. Your dollars will be well spent on this rather than
some mambo jumbo stuff.
I think the tech we DO have was funded by DARPA at some point in the development of quite a bit of it. And how WITHOUT "exotic experimental stuff" will we find something that can ?
U.S. government: Any amount of taxpayer money for killing people and destroying property. Why? Partly because it is easy to hide who is getting the money.
Tony Tether (whom I've met) did a reasonably good job with DARPA. Especially in robotics. He was behind the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was done partly to give academic robotics departments a serious butt-kick. Academic robotics had been funded by DARPA for decades, but nothing fieldable was coming out. The reason that major universities devoted entire departments to the Grand Challenge was that DARPA had told them quietly that if they didn't do well, their funding was going away. Prior to the Grand Challenge, a typical academic robotics project was one professor and a few grad students producing a thesis on an obscure topic. Universities weren't organized to do system integration and make all the subsystems play together. Now they are.
It was time to cut back on Government-funded R&D in computer science, because it's a mature technology. DARPA shouldn't be funding "high performance graphics" - industry, Hollywood, and the game industry are doing that just fine. Networking is in good shape. DARPA hasn't been influential in operating systems since the 1980s. DARPA never had much of a role in personal computing at all.
DARPA isn't the NSF. Their job is to develop technology DoD can use.
I wantsz to noze !!
Buck
ah well , about time they started with skynet. The world is supposed to be in ashes by 2018 , so they better hurry.
Slipping shoelaces ?
your forgetting the religious lobby, nsf research tends to support inconvenient truths such as evolution directly or indirectly (such as genetic based research); whereas money spent on darpa will likely result in people of competing faiths being reduced in number.
In one sentence you say:
,
Which is true; the charter for the organization is indeed to do advanced research to support the needs of the US Department of Defense. But then you go on to say
This is not correct. Doing something for the purpose of getting the expected results is engineering, not science. DARPA was not founded as an engineering agency, it was founded to do research into things - often with the goal of addressing immediate practical concerns, though certainly not always or only.
If anything, your understanding of what the agency ought to do is what really screwed up DARPA under the previous director. His focus on meeting goals and GNG targets severely curtailed the willingness of participants in programs to pursue more "out there" approaches to problems - which is in fact a hindrance to basic research, as well as ultimately detrimental to the overall research goal.