A growing number of governments hope to clone DARPA
economist.com
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From being on the inside for a short period of time, I've had a glimpse at just how hard this is. Projects come and go, getting killed for budgets, politics, etc etc
The commitment and early vision, are very difficult to re-create.
I'm most familiar with WiFi as I worked with one of the inventors. It was patented in 1992 based on research in radio-telescopes for detecting black holes, which had been done years earlier.
If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it.
Most computers were desktops, you didn't take a laptop to get a latte (which was also just barely a common beverage). Most people didn't have the internet, so there wasn't much to connect to. Your computer didn't move, so why have it wireless. Mostly you'd connect to a printer, which was also huge, so may as well be wired.
There was nothing you would do on the network which would use the speed that WiFi was capable of.
It would be almost a decade before it would be somewhat useful, and not until 2008, with the arrival of smartphones that it was a necessity.
So yes, I believe most countries should try to support a DARPA like environment. I don't believe most countries will be successful in their attempt.
[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45088.pdf
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: Overview and Issues for CongressDARPA will fund that too, but almost always only as part of a larger applied research project. DARPA project deliver working systems.
DARPA projects are also always limited term, without renewals. That gives a deadline, which is different to most research agencies.
(ex-PM for a research agency that worked with *ARPA here. Most of the non-DARPA US *ARPA agencies aren't as effective as DARPA itself though).
The projects I worked on were all on tight budgets and deadlines with the goal of finding a way to commercialize the research.
That being said, I'm not a researcher and my job was finding/developing a commercialization path for existing research.
SEL is a modern miracle. The decision by the government to de-fund the work is a tragedy.
As you said some fantastic projects, but a lot of political budget decisions.
In 1998 I was setting up a shared internet connection in the apartment block I lived in. I remember wondering if I should go for a bundle of ethernet cables in the stairway or this newfangled WiFi thing. Neither I nor anyone else in the block had ever tried WiFi, and I believe it was still a few years before I did.
Went for the cables - and it ran without a hickup for all the time I lived there. Nobody else used the connection much so student-me ended up with an insanely fast 512kbps at 1/10 the price.
Last I heard, this seeing people with Wifi was very poor resolution and filled with noise but worst of all, the system had to be trained on the specific rooms it was being used on so you couldn't apply it secretly.
Cellphone jammers are probably a clearer example of cheap tech that can be used covertly but it's illegal and people usually don't.
Another important factor is that they aren't scalable because it takes a human a lot of work to hack only extremely local targets, not a program that can scan computers all over the world automatically.
Until we don't.
RIP Jon Lang. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wsFBeetiYMs
Second seems to be that the tech is uncommon and has poor resolution.
^ this is true with the first digital cameras as well.
As the MIT researchers first publishing their work on this know, the minimumly viable tech needed to use wifi to passively see observe each breath someone takes is 5% hardware and 95% software. We aren’t talking about cutting edge tech. We are taking about commonly available tech that is just used to observe distortions in the 3d radio propagation geometries.
The actual hardware required to see exactly where someone is behind walls and what their hands are doing costs less than $300. Most of it is software needed to reconstruct the geometry from the signals. Software like this is notorious for being randomly and abruptly open sourced.
You can also see if someone's breathing by noticing condensation on their windows in winter or seeing them enter their house one day and come out another day. They must have spent the intervening time inside breathing. If that's the level of invasion, it hardly matters.
This is a prime example of wasteful government spending, when a free market could have better allocated investment!
This is a private, for-profit enterprise with a public (_as in owned by the State_) customer.
Vastly different incentives when the customer and the one executing are not the same.
Walk me through how US deficit funding work to the detriment of US citizens and the benefit of the rest of the world?
But I do agree that it is very efficient to prototype and scale things there because of manufacturing ingenuity and efficient supply chains.
Not being transferable as an export seems like a benefit for the hosting nation doesn’t it?
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-breakthrough-solar-cell-materi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/05/19...
- Why does DARPA work? - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw
- A private ARPA user manual - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa
I would not consider DARPA work to be low budget. DARPA programs are very typically in the $50 million range and program resources are split up between multiple performers. Sometimes larger program bets are made, especially in hot areas of research or programs where there are large integration costs.
I guess one key difference is that unlike FB, DARPA money doesn't need to be confined to make quick and visible returns, thus they can focus on more long term problems.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/resear...
It's a near & dear book to me (although due for a re-read at this point), & I think many others. A history of many of the ideas circulating, and how many overlapped & reinforced on the way to building what ended up being the internet. There's more internet-centric accounts like Where Wizards Stay Up Late or Dealers of Lightning, but Dream Machines remains the favorite of many[2].
I just cant emphasize enough how much benefit I think there is to government granting good hard working big idea people, with not a lot of oversight or expectations. The counter though, is that these were relatively small organizations, all in all, and the goal is not to create jobs for life (as I feel like most other research institutions tend to do) but to fund projects, ideas, for a duration, and then move on, re-allocate funds.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2001/10/the-dream-machine-j-c-r-lickli...
For instance, at every company I've worked at, all of the infrastructure is under the R&D budget.
Like in the last two years, quite a lot of software developers in Poland suddenly started doing "R&D", because performing the necessary rituals to convince the tax man that your CRUD app is "research" let you drop your tax rate to 5%.
There's nothing secret about it.
Moreover, many US corporations are effectively encouraged by tax law to go into debt (and always operated under debt), because having a zero effective income means you pay zero taxes. So that's what many companies -- they spend a little bit (or sometime a lot) more than their revenue, and thus report a loss each year (consequently paying zero taxes).
DARPA doesn't actually do much (any?) research on its own. Its role is to award contracts to "performers" that actually run the experiments, train the models, build the devices, etc.
In other words, a big chunk of (e.g.,) Teledyne's R&D budget is actually the same money as DARPA's R&D budget.
Source: was at BBN while DARPA pushed the Internet and created SIMNET. Did work for DARPA at own company later. Never met a wooly-haired, wild-eyed fellow nerd or VC with half the imagination of buzz-cut DARPA people.
In contrast, the NIH and NSF are very trainee-focused: a typical project consists of one professor loosely overseeing 1-3 “trainees”. We obviously need future scientists, but this model has a ton of drawbacks in terms of speed, quality, and even the nature of the project (which needs to let three people be somewhat-separately “evaluated”). It has also no room in it for any ICs more than four or five years post-PhD, which is bonkers given what the same organizations just paid to train them!
https://higheredstrategy.com/a-very-canadian-innovation-prop...
I worked on a few programs and commercialization came up regularly. The PMs wanted to know your plans for regulatory testing/approval, if you had met with the relevant agencies, were you filing patents, etc. This literally started at the day 1, the proposers’ day, and the end goal was very clearly to have an off-the-shelf option that the DoD could buy en masse. They have other organizations, like In-Q-Tel that are also clearly meant to push this along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Advanced_Research...