Unhappily shocked by Sputnik’s unexpected 1957 success, President Eisenhower quickly pushed the Pentagon to establish the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its ostensible mission: “to prevent technological surprise to the U.S. military, and to create surprises of its own.” Anticipating and enabling “technological surprise” has become even more challenging, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar recently told an MIT audience, because more people in more places have more access to more technology that ever before. Surprises can come from anywhere. In an era of greater global trade, knowledge transfer and transparency, Prabhakar unsurprisingly reports DARPA’s core value proposition demands disproportionately greater imagination and ingenuity. Predictability breeds complacency. Predict…
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