newspeak

DARPA launches first phase of “open source” vehicle design challenge | Ars Technica.

I’m probably not alone in thinking, Why just the military? Why not other fields? Why not, say, transportation, medicine, what have you?

Probably the answer: In America (the US), government market intervention is generally seen as scary–except for military intervention, that is, defence spending. Then it’s just seen as inefficient, but for all that, more desirable to perpetuate than to stop.

(It also has, for all its hideous focus and monstrous inefficiencies, brought some meaningful improvements, such as richly funded research universities which, however indirectly, created a unique university culture; and though this could have and ought to have been done more directly, more efficiently, the beauty of defence spending was that it was pretty much untouchable and not directly reducible to the mega-corporations that very interestedly strive to shape contemporary US higher education.)

So this move by DARPA is interesting, and promising. DARPA, btw, in case anyone has forgotten, was instrumental in establishing the model and actuality of the Internet, among many other things we almost take for granted.