The rise of ‘ARPA-everything’ and what it means for science (2021)

As someone with ARPA-related experience, I can say there are some trade-offs (possibly even flaws) in the execution of &quot;the recipe&quot; as practiced in the modern day. However, it&#x27;s probably also the part of government that most closely resembles the start-up world. In fact, when I was there, we often intentionally modeled certain things after ideas borrowed from that side of the private sector. If you believe in maxims like &quot;being okay with failure&quot;, &quot;failing fast&quot;, and &quot;going for moonshots&quot;, then you might think it&#x27;s worth the cost (and all the untrimmed fat).<p>That said, I&#x27;d probably like to see high-level visibility on some accounting of cost versus success in, say, the past 15 years. From what I&#x27;ve seen, there haven&#x27;t really been the kind of big-impact wins you usually see touted from further back in history. Instead it&#x27;s mostly been PR, shrug-worthy output, and outright graft (e.g., a golden parachute for a certain Solyndra exec).

I’ve absolutely loved working with ARPA-E in my job and I cannot imagine why we would create ARPA-C. Anyone in ARPA-E will tell you they are fundamentally working on climate. They also do some energy security stuff but I they would all be very dissatisfied if it got paired down to that.<p>ARPA-H sounds like a great idea, I hope it’s well executed!

A cynics take awaits you, however, if you consider scientific research an organism of sorts then this makes complete sense. since most legislated spending at the congressional and senate level is only ever expediently approved if it is in the interest of the national defense, then the simplest way to encourage and continue meaningful advances in the body scientific is to simply blanket them all as &quot;defense&quot; projects.<p>so, your climate analysis grant may face grim prospects until the cosmic DARPA modifier is applied, and in doing so, becomes easily funded.

I&#x27;m a bit surprised there hasn&#x27;t been much of a pitch for an ARPA-AI, maybe because AI touches on a bit of everything or too many other stakeholders in gov are doing AI stuff? But AI seems like an area where an organization just focused on that would be rather interesting and it would likely have broad ramifications for the other ARPA&#x27;s being considered (e.g. advancements in medical with protein folding and drug discovery, advancements in energy with automated grid management and figuring out optimal mixes for minerals for batteries)

As someone with passing familiarity with the U.K. political landscape, I can confidently predict that ARIA will not amount to much, and that the exact same politicians constantly saying government should be more entrepreneurial will apply their usual mixture of ridiculous oversight, neglect and punishing failure that produces the current outcomes and cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy will continue.

It&#x27;s strange that the article ignores the Mansfield Amendment and the transformation of ARPA to DARPA.