Wired’s “Danger Room” blog interviews DARPA chief Tony Tether:
NS: Does Darpa’s mission change at all when it’s dealing with a low technological surprise as opposed to a high technological surprise?
TT: No. A lot of people think that, when we look at an effort that, unless it’s going to take us 20 years to do it we’re not interested. When we look at ideas and efforts, we look to see what the impact would be if something could be done. And if it takes 20 years, that’s fine. But if it takes a year, that’s fine too. So we evaluate more by the impact of the idea than we do by the length of time it happens to take to do it.
NS: Right.
S: One area that we really are concerned with — quite frankly, I’m a little uncertain about it, so I won’t go into any details – is quantum computing. Quantum computing is where you create a computer that uses the fact that you can have photons or something coherently coupled —
NS: Sure, encryptions.
TT: You can get great, great parallel processing. That is something that, if somebody else got it before us, would be a great technological surprise. And so we’re looking into that.
NS: And that concerns you more than biological [weapons] development or –
TT: No, no. It’s equal. The biological, I think, is a little bit more worrisome because it’s more potentially near-term. But the impact of the quantum computer, if it can be done, will be really, really revolutionary.
NS: But isn’t it a little bit ironic that Darpa is funding BBN [Technologies — one of the original developers of the Internet’s precursor, Arpanet] to do quantum computing? So, aren’t you in some senses bringing about the thing that you’re scared of?
TT: I know, that’s always a worry, isn’t it. And, in some cases, obviously when we are worried about a technology that we don’t want to teach the world how to do, as we’re learning how to do it, well, we put controls on it.