{"id":1448,"date":"2007-02-22T09:20:19","date_gmt":"2007-02-22T16:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=1448"},"modified":"2007-02-22T09:20:19","modified_gmt":"2007-02-22T16:20:19","slug":"and-now-a-word-from-the-funders-of-the-inventors-of-the-interwebs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2007\/02\/22\/and-now-a-word-from-the-funders-of-the-inventors-of-the-interwebs\/","title":{"rendered":"And Now a Word From the Funders of the Inventors of the Interwebs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wired&#8217;s &#8220;Danger Room&#8221; blog <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/2007\/02\/tony_tether_has_1\/\">interviews<\/a> DARPA chief Tony Tether:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nNS: Does Darpa&#8217;s mission change at all when it&#8217;s dealing with a low technological surprise as opposed to a high technological surprise?<br \/>\nTT: No. A lot of people think that, when we look at an effort that, unless it&#8217;s going to take us 20 years to do it we&#8217;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&#8217;s fine. But if it takes a year, that&#8217;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.<br \/>\nNS: Right.<br \/>\nS: One area that we really are concerned with &#8212; quite frankly, I&#8217;m a little uncertain about it, so I won&#8217;t go into any details &#8211;\u0080\u0093 is quantum computing. Quantum computing is where you create a computer that uses the fact that you can have photons or something coherently coupled &#8212;<br \/>\nNS: Sure, encryptions.<br \/>\nTT: 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&#8217;re looking into that.<br \/>\nNS: And that concerns you more than biological [weapons] development or &#8211;\u0080\u0093<br \/>\nTT: No, no. It&#8217;s equal. The biological, I think, is a little bit more worrisome because it&#8217;s more potentially near-term. But the impact of the quantum computer, if it can be done, will be really, really revolutionary.<br \/>\nNS: But isn&#8217;t it a little bit ironic that Darpa is funding BBN [Technologies &#8212; one of the original developers of the Internet&#8217;s precursor, Arpanet] to do quantum computing? So, aren&#8217;t you in some senses bringing about the thing that you&#8217;re scared of?<br \/>\nTT: I know, that&#8217;s always a worry, isn&#8217;t it. And, in some cases, obviously when we are worried about a technology that we don&#8217;t want to teach the world how to do, as we&#8217;re learning how to do it, well, we put controls on it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wired&#8217;s &#8220;Danger Room&#8221; blog interviews DARPA chief Tony Tether: NS: Does Darpa&#8217;s mission change at all when it&#8217;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&#8217;s going to take us 20 years to &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2007\/02\/22\/and-now-a-word-from-the-funders-of-the-inventors-of-the-interwebs\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;And Now a Word From the Funders of the Inventors of the Interwebs&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}