[ExI] DARPA seeking Genesis-style godware capability

[Stefano Vaj]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 3:26 AM, spike<spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> When DARPA proposes something wacky, I listen and think.

DARPA is exactly in the business of high-risk, far-fetched, high
failure-rate, long-term projects, that is what the "market" (nor even
other agencies bound to deliver essential services and to guarantee
specific results in a short-to-medium term framework), would never
finance, based on the idea that *some* money should also be invested
in this direction.

This is an incredibly far-sighted approach, and a legacy of a
different era, when people were less obsessed by short-term ROI and
more on long-term competitiveness of their society and countries.

Thus, while of course DARPA's political agenda and concerns are not
mine, since I am not a US citizen, I sincerely welcome its existence,
both for what it ends up producing for the "state of the art" in
various fields, *and* as a stimulus for other countries to do at least
a little of that as well. The fact that the it is military research
may be unpleasant to some of us, but I dare say that research whose
immediate purposes are of a military nature remains way better that no
research at all.

-- 
Stefano Vaj