Early Indications September 2018: Why can’t your organization innovate like DARPA?

Following up on last month’s newsletter, which asked who was going to generate the big-scale innovations required for a growing world, I recently read Sharon Weinberger’s 2017 study of DARPA entitled The Imagineers of War. The effort was well worthwhile, if only for the nuanced explanation of the origins of the Internet. Paul Baran’s famous mesh diagram of a survivable communications architecture for command and control of the US nuclear forces is only part of the story. J.C.R. Licklider, a key figure in the history of human-computer interaction, was also involved: he saw far earlier than most of his contemporaries how having access to computing can change how we think, so his connection of computing to psychology was significant.

More generally, psychology was a hot area of defense and intelligence research in the late 1950s and 1960s, in part because of the interest in and fear of “brainwashing,” that is, some form of mind control. The bestselling book The Manchurian Candidate was but one manifestation of this fascination; Stanley Kubrick’s still-brilliant Dr. Strangelove also captures many aspects of the era with searing insight: mine-shaft gaps, purity of essence, and of course Peter Sellers’ brilliant one-sided phone conversations with his Soviet counterpart on the hotline.

Thus we have in some ways come full circle as the Internet was successfully used for psychological manipulation by Russian entities and surrogates in the 2016 election. History in this case did more than rhyme. For all the historical interest I had in the book, there are some concrete lessons: for all the attention DARPA gets for its successes — Stealth aviation, GPS, drones — the organization is likely to spawn few imitators. I posit that there are at least seven reasons for this.

1) Your organization isn’t motivated by defense of American interests

Being charged with preventing future surprises like Sputnik means that very little subject matter is out of bounds. Budgets are much bigger than private industry typically can mobilize. Patriotism can motivate devotion and behavior that cannot be simply hired.

2) Your organization doesn’t pursue enough whackadoo ideas

When it was first proposed, stealth aviation did not sound much more plausible than ESP between mother rabbits and their bunnies (the former were thought to know when harm befell the latter, even at a far geographic remove), telepathic spoon bending (accomplished by none other than Uri Geller), or antennas mounted on elephants to aid in radio communications through Vietnamese jungle foliage.

3) Your organization has short time horizons

Notwithstanding the common critique of corporate focus on quarterly numbers, even a 5-year plan is sometimes too short. GPS took 20 years between theoretical proposal and first satellite launch. ARPAnet was more than 5 years in the making when one of four connected computers sent the message “lo” to a second unit (it was supposed to be “login” but the system crashed), and the World Wide Web launched another 30 years after that.

4) Your organization can’t bury failures as secretly

The author of the DARPA book noted in the endnotes that classification has obscured both successes and failures from being publicly viewed. A box of documents related to a James Bond-like jetpack remains classified many decades later. DARPA hasn’t undertaken an institutional history since 1975, when it was about 18 years old.

5) Your organization has more moral prohibitions

ARPA was deeply connected to the US war in Vietnam, attempting to use everything from fortune-tellers and soothsayers (who were paid to predict a Communist defeat) to Agent Orange (one of an entire family of air-sprayed chemicals designed both to cut off the food supply and deprive the guerrilla forces of jungle cover). GE proposed a mass galvanic polygraph to be used on entire villages. John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness project, mass surveillance with little human or institutional oversight (AI was supposed to protect privacy), ran on DARPA money. Somewhere in the DARPA robotics budget there most likely exists a human-out-of-the-loop autonomous robot with lethal capability.

6) Your organization has more conventional hiring processes

Related to 2), Darpa has a long history of hiring rogue, unconventional, or outlandish individuals, then giving them long leashes. In the age of post-Sputnik fear, one Greek physicist proposed creating a defensive shield of high-energy electrons trapped above the earth’s atmosphere in the magnetic field. Multiple nuclear explosions were detonated high above the earth’s surface to try to validate the concept, which of course did not work in practice. One former DARPA director held the biannual agency conference at Disneyland not once but on multiple occasions. Program managers in the parapsychology field held the beliefs and credentials you might imagine for such a post.

7) Your organization has some nominal and procedural objectives

DARPA rarely gets too specific on what its mission and objectives are. Over the institution’s history, they have ranged from investigating counter-insurgency to counter-terror to space-based weapons to lots of secret stuff the public can’t see. Regimes have been supported with cash, expertise, and other assets, scientists (and psychics) have been funded, and numerous contractors have been generously enriched. Most of this activity is only loosely connected to an overall remit. 

As Weinberger notes in her conclusion, “the dilemma for DARPA is finding a new mission worthy of its past accomplishments and cognizant of its darker failures.” (p. 371) After failing massively in trying to win the hearts and minds of Vietnam’s people with as few US ground troops as possible, and after 30 years of a bi-polar (US-USSR) world order, the age of Al Qaeda and related entities has proven more difficult to fight with technology. After tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, for example, the best weapon for fighting against improvised roadside bombs remained . . . dogs’ noses. Very few of our civilian or even DoD organizations would be allowed to spend so much and come up with so little.

Early Indications August 2018: The Next Big Innovation?

Few books have stuck with me the way Geoffrey West’s Scale (reviewed here last summer) did. I don’t fully buy the book’s argument for the applicability of natural scale laws to human structures such as cities (here’s a much smarter review than mine), but he did put the planet’s projected population in sharp perspective for me: worldwide, 1.5 million people will be moving to cities every _week_ for the next (now) 34 years. West argues, plausibly in my view, that we will need step-function innovations on the order of the Internet to feed, employ, cure, and transport all those people.

 

There’s a quasi-debate running between several economists and management scholars. Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee at MIT argue that human organizational structures have lagged, as they historically do, technological development. Robotics per se doesn’t put people out of work; rather, corporate, taxation, labor law, education, and other structures don’t yet create a place for these new machines and humans in a larger, functioning economy. On the other side stands Tyler Cowen of George Mason, who says that we have harvested all the “low-hanging fruit” (his words) and that compared to the 20th century, our era’s record of groundbreaking innovation is thin.

 

All three views hang together in my mind: we are due for another massively important innovation — including in the “rules of the game,” as it were. Since the iPhone launched the age of mass smartphone use 11 years ago, it’s hard to find truly important ideas: Uber and Airbnb are both about 10 years old, as is blockchain (in which China now leads the world in patent applications ), which has yet to solve a truly important problem. Autonomous vehicles, meanwhile, are looking like less of a near-term bet (as recent news from Waymo illustrates). What am I missing?

 

Before looking ahead, let’s look back and see where the last few world-changing innovations came from:

 

-The Internet began at DARPA (in 1969, ARPA) but key components including the World Wide Web came from elsewhere (Europe’s CERN, in the case of the WWW). AT&T famously passed on the contract to build the Internet, because their substantial expertise in the existing circuit switched regime made it clear the technology would never work.

 

-Malcolm McLean owned a North Carolina trucking company and died worth about $350 million. His innovation? Containerized shipping: in 1956, when he piloted the idea, hand-loading a ship cost $5.86 a ton. Containerization dropped that to 16 cents per ton. “Globalization” and all that implies, including increased standards of living in many locales, rely heavily on his invention.

 

-Norman Borlaug earned a PhD at the University of Minnesota then spent most of his professional life in Mexico, cross-breeding crops. He has been credited with saving a billion people from starvation and won the Nobel peace prize. His so-called (by others) “green revolution” was critiqued from several angles: input-intensive agriculture made seed, fertilizer, and tractor companies rich and famers indebted. Large-scale farms (including road-building and other infrastructure) destroyed cultural practices and institutions associated with subsistence faming. Pesticides and monoculture have negative long-term environmental effects. All of that is true, but feeding a billion people who most likely would otherwise have starved deserves a healthy dose of credit.

 

Thus we see an entrepreneur, an individual humanitarian, and large-scale government agencies all making decisive contributions. Absent are corporations: yes, the Toyota Prius is 20 years old, but it has not (yet?) shifted the global auto industry off of fossil fuels. Even pure electric vehicles rely on a power grid that most likely begins with the burning of gas, oil, or coal. The great innovators of the past — GE, HP, IBM, AT&T, Xerox — no longer pack the research punch they once did. Innovations at Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Amazon are heavily tilted to the realm of consumer behavior, in which advanced algorithms are used on the relatively easy task of manipulating purchase and viewing patterns, one person at a time. 

 

What about big Pharma? In an age when economic rationality means $500 Epi-pens and 5,000% price increases on off-patent drugs (see Shkreli, Martin), it’s hard to see the sector as currently constituted solving a capital-B Big human challenge. Meanwhile, as antibiotic-resistant bacteria get tougher to combat with every passing month, it’s not impossible to imagine that penicillin and its offspring may not matter (or matter much) 100 years after the drug’s discovery in 1928. As science cracks the code of the biome, particularly regarding the gut, entirely new modes of treatment may become feasible. If (very broadly speaking) the 19th century was the dawn of surgery, and the 20th belonged to the birth of entirely new categories of pills, perhaps we will see the potential of genetics and related science realized for the remaining 80 or so years of our century. There’s no guarantee the Pfizers and Mercks of the world will be the relevant parties for these to-be-built treatment modalities. Recall that Sports Illustrated did not launch ESPN, nor did Sony introduce the iPod.

 

Zooming back out to the larger issue of the innovations required for the planet we are rapidly populating, two key questions will have to be answered: 

 

-what kind of organizational structures will help envision and develop ways to feed, move, educate, and/or employ large numbers of people?

 

-in what domain will the truly big innovations reside?

 

It’s easy to perceive the trajectory of history as moving upward: higher standards of living, as measured by money. Longer life expectancies. Farther reaches of sea and space explored. I was reminded today, though, that part of a 9-billion-person planet will be doing with less: less animal protein, fewer square feet of housing per person, less social mobility in a given country even as the broader population does better on the whole. 

 

Thus the new innovation might be in the arrangement of social order: both the limited-liability joint stock corporation and republican democracy are human inventions (as are human slavery, dictatorship, and monarchies). The next big thing might be “social technology,” designed to organize large numbers of people, along with their wants and needs, just as we saw with the pre-Reformation Catholic church in Europe, or Pax Britannica from about 1815 to 1914. (Technology matters a lot for these social arrangements, as witness the printing press’s role in the decline of the former or the place of steam power in the latter.) Alternatively, there might emerge some innovation as we more traditionally define it: technologies to move people in cities, process and distribute nutritional protein, or teach people how to earn a living. In either case, time is getting short: according to United Nations projections, global population will hit the 8 billion mark in about 6 years.