[walleeee]

Agreed. Worked on an ARPA-E funded project and it was reported as a success even though the primary deliverable was never completed and was probably not viable anyway. Everyone involved meant well, but I sensed the PIs viewed it more as a vehicle for their ICs' careers than as a mission-driven enterprise.

This is a wicked incentive problem and I don't know how to solve it.

[elefanten]

Curious to what degree the "low-hanging fruit" dynamic comes into play when comparing the current era to the past.

It keeps coming up in many other fields.

[malfist]

For those not familiar with the jargon, can you expand what PI and IC means? Private Investors and Individual Contributors?

[walleeee]

sorry, Principal Investigator and Individual Contributor

[elzbardico]

But, did the project significantly advance the knowledge in the field, even if the deliverable couldn't be completed?

In that case, I would call it a success anyway.

[walleeee]

It produced some modest results which slightly advanced the field. Not groundbreaking. The applied work did demonstrate the viability of a few robotics applications and the infeasibility/insufficient ROI of a few others. I would say that was the most valuable output.

It did not begin to approach the goals in the project description, which I've since come to believe are detached from reality. A moonshot may have seemed collossally ambitious in 1961 but we already had most of the basic capabilities necessary to succeed. In this case, however, I don't think we're anywhere close, and even if we were, it would be a suboptimal solution to the problem it's meant to solve. (It would however be politically and economically convenient).