[atlasunshrugged]

I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been much of a pitch for an ARPA-AI, maybe because AI touches on a bit of everything or too many other stakeholders in gov are doing AI stuff? But AI seems like an area where an organization just focused on that would be rather interesting and it would likely have broad ramifications for the other ARPA's being considered (e.g. advancements in medical with protein folding and drug discovery, advancements in energy with automated grid management and figuring out optimal mixes for minerals for batteries)

[MichaelMoser123]

i think that's what they have DARPA for.

Actually Norbert Wiener thought a lot about intelligent machines, he called that Cybernetics - but there was a problem, he didn't want to accept any funding from the military:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener

"After the war, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what he believed was political interference with scientific research, and the militarization of science. His article "A Scientist Rebels" from the January 1947 issue of The Atlantic Monthly[19] urged scientists to consider the ethical implications of their work. After the war, he refused to accept any government funding or to work on military projects. The way Wiener's beliefs concerning nuclear weapons and the Cold War contrasted with those of von Neumann is the major theme of the book John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.[20]"

John McCarthy invented the term Artificial Intelligence, in order to avoid any association with Cybernetics - I think he didn't want any association with Norbert Wiener. I suspect that this might have something to do with funding...

see http://jmc.stanford.edu/artificial-intelligence/reviews/bloo...

[JackFr]

I don't know why, but I always thought it was cool that the Lambda the Ultimate Papers were sponsored by ARPA. I suppose to some extent because they're basic research not specifically applicable to any defense project, and yet like a fair amount of CS/PL research, they're very practical as well.

[atlasunshrugged]

Sure but DARPA does all sorts of work, not just AI related stuff

[MichaelMoser123]

certainly, TCP/IP was a DARPA project, lots of other things were also financed by DARPA. https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/tcp-ip

TCP/IP was a major change in networking, because all telephone companies were used to have reliability at the link layer - that's how you do a telephone network. But TCP/IP is much more scalable, because it has a reliability layer that is not dependent on the link layer.