DARPA’s Bold Vision: Tech That Shaped Our World and What Comes Next

Shaping Tomorrow, One Innovation at a Time

Every so often, I’ll come across some piece of technology we now take for granted and discover DARPA somewhere in its family tree.

The early internet is the famous example. DARPA also helped drive the development of smaller GPS receivers, autonomous vehicles, and early brain-computer interface research. Much of that work began with national defense in mind and eventually reached far beyond it.

Which makes me intensely curious about what they’re working on before the rest of us realize we need it.

A few years ago, I came across a fascinating Gizmodo interview with then-DARPA director Stefanie Tompkins about the agency’s approach to innovation. What stuck with me wasn’t one particular technology. It was how comfortable DARPA seems to be with attempting things that might fail spectacularly.

That’s essentially the job.

DARPA goes after problems where success is uncertain but potentially transformative. Its history includes projects that helped lay the groundwork for the internet and accelerated autonomous vehicle development, along with plenty of ideas most of us will never hear about because they didn’t work.

I love that.

I would also be lying if I said it didn’t make the speculative-fiction part of my brain start pacing around the room.

Because DARPA’s job isn’t to invent cool things for consumers. It exists to develop breakthrough technologies for national security. Sometimes those breakthroughs eventually make civilian life better. Sometimes the same capability can be useful, unsettling, or both depending on who controls it and how it is used.

That’s where the interview got especially interesting to me.

Tompkins acknowledged that there is no way to anticipate every consequence of a new technology. She described DARPA bringing in ethicists, legal experts, anthropologists, philosophers, and even science fiction writers to think through some of those unknowns. Then she said something I may like even more than the technology itself:

“We want to lose a little sleep thinking about the consequences.”

Yes. Please lose a little sleep.

The history of innovation is full of things created for one purpose that eventually changed society in ways their original developers could not have fully predicted. ARPANET grew into the internet. DARPA’s autonomous vehicle competitions helped accelerate technology that is now being developed for civilian roads. Work once confined to laboratories and defense programs can eventually become something millions of people use without giving much thought to where it began.

That unpredictability is part of what makes emerging technology so exciting. It’s also why “can we build it?” is rarely the last interesting question.

What happens when it leaves the lab? Who gets access? Who controls it? What other uses become possible once the technology exists? And how much responsibility belongs to the people who create something when they cannot possibly know every way someone else will eventually use it?

Those questions turn up constantly in my fiction because I’m fascinated by technological ambition without being particularly inclined to trust ambition on its own.

I don’t want scientists and engineers to stop attempting impossible things. Quite the opposite. I want the impossible things.

I just appreciate knowing somebody in the room is losing a little sleep.

You can read the full Gizmodo interview here.

Until next time, I’ll see you in the bookstores.

Monica