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Snark by Snarkwest: Military Mad Science!
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By popular vote, I’ll be covering a post on the U.S. military’s mad science. Here’s the session description:

For more than 50 years the mad scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—aka DARPA, the outrageous research arm of the Pentagon—have been launching the most disruptive technologies on earth, living up to their mantra of “high risk—high payoff.” We have DARPA to thank for the personal computer, the Internet, the Berkeley Unix system, most of NASA, and countless crazy military innovations. Their mission is to think beyond the possible and forever be three decades ahead. In this talk we will dig into, and present the relevant parts of, DARPA’s $3 billion-dollar budget, pulling out the most amazing and most-likely-to-reach-fruition projects. Think electromagnetic bazookas, telepathic soldiers, ape-inspired robots, memory chips in brains, shapeshifting planes and boats. It might sound like sci-fi, but given its inspired history it seems that analyzing DARPA’s current projects will give us one of the clearest views into our future reality. Fasten your seat belts.

Speakers: Christie Nicholson, Christopher Mims, John Pavlus

Liveblog after the jump!

3 comments

Tim, I asked John the best approximation I could of your questions. He said DARPA has its fingerprints on so many projects, so many of which are classified, that he can’t really speak to a shift in focus within the agency. He did say he’s seeing more coming out of DARPA looking at the after-effects of combat. And he said he’s a Snarkmarket fan who looks forward to meeting you in person!

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Tim Carmody says…

Yeah, John and I are Twitter buddies. (Mims, too.) And all three of us have both written for MIT Tech Review at different times.

Hans Ibold says…

Hi Matt,

If only there were such nicely written live blogs for all those wish-I-attended-but-ate-a-pulled-pork-sandwich-instead panels. Thanks!

Did they talk at all about smart/AI to-do lists/personal assistants?

Hans

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