4 ms·

Is this defense funding at work?

• etrautmann 11y ago
  Yes - often times towards basic science and areas that are deemed "too risky" for NSF/NIH/DOE/NASA/etc and not towards weapons. Important to note that DARPA has funded the research that led to GPS, the internet, critical components of cell phones, autonomous vehicles, and many other pieces of core technological infrastructure. The creation of the new Biological Technologies Office (BTO) this past year is particularly exciting. Example projects I find exciting: Neural prosthetics for psychiatric disorders: http://www.darpa.mil/program/systems-based-neurotechnology-for-emerging-therapies http://www.darpa.mil/program/systems-based-neurotechnology-f... neural prosthetics for memory: http://www.darpa.mil/program/restoring-active-memory http://www.darpa.mil/program/restoring-active-memory
  • justizin 11y ago
    GPS was developed primarily to improve the aiming of nuclear weapons, afaik, let's not fool ourselves. Neural prosthetics sound like they want to create automatons, but it's possible that they want to deal with the military's epic mental health crisis.
    • etrautmann 11y ago
      That's without a doubt a major motivation of neural prosthetics. Rehabilitating soldiers who've lost limbs due to IEDs, etc, is one of the explicit reasons for DARPA's REPAIR program as one example. I don't see that as a weaponization though, and find it a morally defensible motivation for research, though I recognize that many members of this community in particular may avoid projects with any connection to defense.