H+ | DARPA,
the Defense Research Projects Agency, is perhaps best known for its
role as progenitors of the computer networking and the Internet. Formed
in the wake of the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik, DARPA’s
objective was to ensure that the United States would avoid technological
surprises in the future. This role was later expanded to causing
technological surprises as well.
And although DARPA is and has been the leading source of funding for
artificial intelligence and a number of other transhumanist
projects, they’ve been missing in action for a while. Nothing DARPA has
worked on since seems to have had the societal impact of the invention of the Internet. But that is about to change.
The current director of DARPA is Dr. Arati Prabhakar. She is the second female director of the organization, following the previous and controversial director Regina Dugan
who left the government to work at Google. The return to big visions
and big adventures was apparent and in stark contrast to Dugan’s
leadership of the organization.
Quoted in WIRED, Dugan had, for example, stated that “There is a time
and a place for daydreaming. But it is not at DARPA,” and she told a
congressional panel in March 2011, “Darpa is not the place of dreamlike
musings or fantasies, not a place for self-indulging in wishes and
hopes. DARPA is a place of doing.”
Those days are gone. DARPA’s new vision is simply to revolutionize
the human situation and it is fully transhumanist in its approach.
The Biological Technologies Office or BTO was announced with little
fanfare in the spring of 2014. This announcement didn’t get that much
attention, perhaps because the press release announcing the BTO was published on April Fool’s Day.
But DARPA is determined to turn that around, and to help make that
happen, they held a two day event in the SIlicon Valley area to
facilitate and communicate about radical changes ahead in the area of
biotechnologies. Invitees included some of the top biotechnology
scientists in the world. And the audience was a mixed group of
scientists, engineers, inventors, investors, futurists, along with a
handful of government contractors and military personnel.
