Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff Read Free Book Online Page B

events. In the 1980s roboticists in both Germany and the United States had made scattered progress toward autonomous driving, but the reality was that it was easier to build a robot to go to the moon than to build one that could drive by itself in rush-hour traffic. And so Tony Tether took up the challenge. The endeavor was risky: if the contests failed to produce results, the series of Grand Challenge self-driving contests would become known as Tether’s Folly. Thus the checkered flag at the final race proved to be as much a victory lap for Tether as for the cars.
    There had been darker times. Under Tether’s directorship the agency hired Admiral John Poindexter to build the system known as Total Information Awareness. A vast data-mining project that was intended to hunt terrorists online by collecting and connecting the dots in oceans of credit card, email, and phone records, the project started a privacy firestorm and was soon canceled by Congress in May of 2003. Although Total Information Awareness vanished from public view, it in fact moved into the nation’s intelligence bureaucracy only to become visible again in 2013 when Edward Snowden leaked hundreds of thousands of documents that revealed a deep and broad range of systems for surveillance of any possible activity that could be of interest. In the pantheon of DARPA directors, Tether was also something of an odd duck. He survived the Total Information Awareness scandal and pushed the agency ahead in other areas with a deep and controlling involvement in all of the agency’s research projects. (Indeed, the decision by Tether to wave the checkered flag was emblematic of his tenure at DARPA—Tony Tether was a micromanager.)
    DARPA was founded in response to the Soviet Sputnik, which was like a thunderbolt to an America that believed in its technological supremacy. With the explicit mission of ensuring the United States was never again technologically superseded by another power, the directors of DARPA—at birth more simply named the Advanced Research Projects Agency—had been scientists and engineers willing to place huge bets on blue-sky technologies, with close relationships and a real sense of affection for the nation’s best university researchers.
    Not so with Tony Tether, who represented the George W. Bush era. He had worked for decades as a program manager for secretive military contractors and, like many surrounding George W. Bush, was wary of the nation’s academic institutions, which he thought were too independent to be trusted with the new mission. Small wonder. Tether’s worldview had been formed when he was an electrical engineering grad student at Stanford University during the 1960s, where there was a sharp division between the antiwar students and the scientists and engineers helping the Vietnam War effort by designing advanced weapons.
    After arriving as director he went to work changing the culture of the agency that had gained a legendary reputation for the way it helped invent everything from the Internet to stealth fighter technology. He rapidly moved money away from the universities and toward classified work done by military contractors supporting the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The agency moved away from “blue sky” toward “deliverables.” Publicly Tether made the case that it was still possible to innovate in secret, as long as you fostered the competitive culture of Silicon Valley, with its turmoil of new ideas and rewards for good tries even if they failed.
    And Tether certainly took DARPA in new technology directions. His concern for the thousands of maimed veterans coming back without limbs and with increasing the power and effectiveness of military decision-makers inspired him to push agency dollars into human augmentation projects as well as artificial intelligence. That meant robotic arms and legs for wounded soldiers, and an “admiral’s advisor,” a military version of what Doug Engelbart had set out to do in