[HN Gopher] The rise of 'ARPA-everything' and what it means for ...
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The rise of 'ARPA-everything' and what it means for science (2021)
Author : two_almonds
Score : 45 points
Date : 2022-08-08 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been much of a pitch for an
| ARPA-AI, maybe because AI touches on a bit of everything or too
| many other stakeholders in gov are doing AI stuff? But AI seems
| like an area where an organization just focused on that would be
| rather interesting and it would likely have broad ramifications
| for the other ARPA's being considered (e.g. advancements in
| medical with protein folding and drug discovery, advancements in
| energy with automated grid management and figuring out optimal
| mixes for minerals for batteries)
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| i think that's what they have DARPA for.
|
| Actually Norbert Wiener thought a lot about intelligent
| machines, he called that Cybernetics - but there was a problem,
| he didn't want to accept any funding from the military:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener
|
| "After the war, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what
| he believed was political interference with scientific
| research, and the militarization of science. His article "A
| Scientist Rebels" from the January 1947 issue of The Atlantic
| Monthly[19] urged scientists to consider the ethical
| implications of their work. After the war, he refused to accept
| any government funding or to work on military projects. The way
| Wiener's beliefs concerning nuclear weapons and the Cold War
| contrasted with those of von Neumann is the major theme of the
| book John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.[20]"
|
| John McCarthy invented the term Artificial Intelligence, in
| order to avoid any association with Cybernetics - I think he
| didn't want any association with Norbert Wiener. I suspect that
| this might have something to do with funding...
|
| see http://jmc.stanford.edu/artificial-
| intelligence/reviews/bloo...
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Sure but DARPA does all sorts of work, not _just_ AI related
| stuff
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| certainly, TCP/IP was a DARPA project, lots of other things
| were also financed by DARPA. https://www.darpa.mil/about-
| us/timeline/tcp-ip
|
| TCP/IP was a major change in networking, because all
| telephone companies were used to have reliability at the
| link layer - that's how you do a telephone network. But
| TCP/IP is much more scalable, because it has a reliability
| layer that is not dependent on the link layer.
| JackFr wrote:
| I don't know why, but I always thought it was cool that the
| Lambda the Ultimate Papers were sponsored by ARPA. I suppose
| to some extent because they're basic research not
| specifically applicable to any defense project, and yet like
| a fair amount of CS/PL research, they're very practical as
| well.
| bm3719 wrote:
| As someone with ARPA-related experience, I can say there are some
| trade-offs (possibly even flaws) in the execution of "the recipe"
| as practiced in the modern day. However, it's probably also the
| part of government that most closely resembles the start-up
| world. In fact, when I was there, we often intentionally modeled
| certain things after ideas borrowed from that side of the private
| sector. If you believe in maxims like "being okay with failure",
| "failing fast", and "going for moonshots", then you might think
| it's worth the cost (and all the untrimmed fat).
|
| That said, I'd probably like to see high-level visibility on some
| accounting of cost versus success in, say, the past 15 years.
| From what I've seen, there haven't really been the kind of big-
| impact wins you usually see touted from further back in history.
| Instead it's mostly been PR, shrug-worthy output, and outright
| graft (e.g., a golden parachute for a certain Solyndra exec).
| walleeee wrote:
| Agreed. Worked on an ARPA-E funded project and it was reported
| as a success even though the primary deliverable was never
| completed and was probably not viable anyway. Everyone involved
| meant well, but I sensed the PIs viewed it more as a vehicle
| for their ICs' careers than as a mission-driven enterprise.
|
| This is a wicked incentive problem and I don't know how to
| solve it.
| elzbardico wrote:
| But, did the project significantly advance the knowledge in
| the field, even if the deliverable couldn't be completed?
|
| In that case, I would call it a success anyway.
| walleeee wrote:
| It produced some modest results which slightly advanced the
| field. Not remotely groundbreaking. The applied work did
| demonstrate the viability of a few robotics applications
| and the infeasibility/insufficient ROI of a few others. I
| would say that was the most valuable output.
|
| It did not begin to approach the goals in the project
| description, which I've since come to believe are detached
| from reality. A moonshot may have seemed collossally
| ambitious in 1961 but we already had most of the basic
| capabilities necessary to succeed. In this case, however, I
| don't think we're anywhere close, and even if we were, it
| would be a suboptimal solution to the problem it's meant to
| solve. (It would however be politically and economically
| convenient).
| elefanten wrote:
| Curious to what degree the "low-hanging fruit" dynamic comes
| into play when comparing the current era to the past.
|
| It keeps coming up in many other fields.
| malfist wrote:
| For those not familiar with the jargon, can you expand what
| PI and IC means? Private Investors and Individual
| Contributors?
| walleeee wrote:
| sorry, Principal Investigator and Individual Contributor
| two_almonds wrote:
| For those less informed about its history, is there any
| transparent accounting of ARPA's cost-vs-success during its
| initial decades that you recommend reading? I am only
| marginally familiar with some of the 'big-impact wins' that are
| frequently mentioned, so I would love to read a comprehensive
| analysis of its accomplishments.
| elil17 wrote:
| I've absolutely loved working with ARPA-E in my job and I cannot
| imagine why we would create ARPA-C. Anyone in ARPA-E will tell
| you they are fundamentally working on climate. They also do some
| energy security stuff but I they would all be very dissatisfied
| if it got paired down to that.
|
| ARPA-H sounds like a great idea, I hope it's well executed!
| JackFr wrote:
| Well climate != clean energy.
|
| It would be great if there were people looking at climate
| change in truly innovative ways. But if it's a lot of the same-
| old, wrapped in a new ribbon it's going to be a disappointment.
|
| And honestly there is a _huge_ disconnect between the dire
| warnings we 're getting and the actions we're taking. If it
| truly is an existential crisis, better wind turbines and solar
| panels that are 2x more efficient are great, but they're not
| gonna move the needle, and the real work should be a bout
| surviving in a hotter world.
| nimbius wrote:
| A cynics take awaits you, however, if you consider scientific
| research an organism of sorts then this makes complete sense.
| since most legislated spending at the congressional and senate
| level is only ever expediently approved if it is in the interest
| of the national defense, then the simplest way to encourage and
| continue meaningful advances in the body scientific is to simply
| blanket them all as "defense" projects.
|
| so, your climate analysis grant may face grim prospects until the
| cosmic DARPA modifier is applied, and in doing so, becomes easily
| funded.
| packetlost wrote:
| > if you consider scientific research an organism of sorts
|
| Somewhat off-topic, but at a macro level, society itself and
| the systems it produces are fundamentally the same thing as the
| individual cells that make up our bodies (the specifics of what
| those systems act on and the context in which they act _in_ are
| obviously different). Basically every societal structure can be
| reduced to the behaviors of an organic system at some level of
| complexity.
| comex wrote:
| This article is about the creation of new ARPAs without the D,
| which are explicitly not about defense. They are rather are
| meant to take DARPA's model and apply it to other areas
| (climate, energy, health). Organizationally speaking, they're
| unrelated, being under different federal agencies depending on
| the area. They may borrow some of DARPA's glamor but they
| aren't considered defense projects. So your comment doesn't
| seem applicable.
| mepian wrote:
| It's strange that the article ignores the Mansfield Amendment and
| the transformation of ARPA to DARPA.
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