Organizations
How companies, institutions, and movements embody the sixteen values.
DARPA
Creating technologies before there is a use for them
DARPA was created in 1958 in direct response to Sputnik, on the recognition that the United States had been surprised by a technological development it should have anticipated, and that preventing future surprise required funding research at the frontier of what was possible rather than what was needed. The DARPA model - small teams, large bets, tolerance for failure, program managers with unusual authority - is the most effective known institutional structure for producing transformative technological breakthroughs from government funding.
DARPA
Creating technologies before there is a use for them
DARPA was created in 1958 in direct response to Sputnik, on the recognition that the United States had been surprised by a technological development it should have anticipated, and that preventing future surprise required funding research at the frontier of what was possible rather than what was needed. The DARPA model - small teams, large bets, tolerance for failure, program managers with unusual authority - is the most effective known institutional structure for producing transformative technological breakthroughs from government funding.
The internet (ARPANET). GPS. The precursors to stealth technology. The robotic systems that became Boston Dynamics. A funding model that took on research so risky that no private investor and no academic grant system would fund it, and accepted the failure rate that such research requires.
A fundamental tension between a growth-oriented research mandate and a defense department budget, which means the technologies DARPA develops are evaluated by military application first. The dual-use problem in its most concentrated form: an organization whose institutional purpose is to create capabilities that do not yet exist, operating inside an institution whose job is to use those capabilities to kill people.
The 1969 first message sent over ARPANET - a communication between UCLA and Stanford that was supposed to be the word LOGIN, crashed after the first two letters, and was therefore the first internet message: LO.