[HN Gopher] A growing number of governments hope to clone Americ...
___________________________________________________________________
A growing number of governments hope to clone America's DARPA
Author : edward
Score : 12 points
Date : 2021-06-06 21:35 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| ourmandave wrote:
| Just start with a big BIG pile of cash and work back from there.
|
| https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/budget
| chc4 wrote:
| 3.5 billion for every DARPA project is a hilariously low
| number. DARPA projects are famous for having low budgets,
| completing under budget, and completing under time. It has an
| extremely worthwhile return on investment.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I'd be keen to see a source on this if you have one.
| goodcjw2 wrote:
| $3~4B is indeed quite big budget. However, it's dwarfed by big
| tech's R&D budget. FB alone spends $20B+ each year.
|
| 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...
| rektide wrote:
| The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider & The Revolution that
| Made Computing Personal, by Michael Waldrop[1], is one of the
| books out there that touches upon the early days of ARPA,
| what happened, and how computing & networking was jump
| started under by a far-seeing thrown-into-position bureaucrat
| who both dreamed big personally but more so, stood back &
| gave multiple far seeing groups of techies free reign to
| bring their dreams to life. A lot of other books I've read
| also speak similar stories, and I tend to believe them.
|
| 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...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14119220
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-06 23:00 UTC)