That said, I'd probably like to see high-level visibility on some accounting of cost versus success in, say, the past 15 years. From what I've seen, there haven't really been the kind of big-impact wins you usually see touted from further back in history. Instead it's mostly been PR, shrug-worthy output, and outright graft (e.g., a golden parachute for a certain Solyndra exec).
This is a wicked incentive problem and I don't know how to solve it.
It keeps coming up in many other fields.
In that case, I would call it a success anyway.
ARPA-H sounds like a great idea, I hope it’s well executed!
It would be great if there were people looking at climate change in truly innovative ways. But if it's a lot of the same-old, wrapped in a new ribbon it's going to be a disappointment.
And honestly there is a huge disconnect between the dire warnings we're getting and the actions we're taking. If it truly is an existential crisis, better wind turbines and solar panels that are 2x more efficient are great, but they're not gonna move the needle, and the real work should be a bout surviving in a hotter world.
so, your climate analysis grant may face grim prospects until the cosmic DARPA modifier is applied, and in doing so, becomes easily funded.
Somewhat off-topic, but at a macro level, society itself and the systems it produces are fundamentally the same thing as the individual cells that make up our bodies (the specifics of what those systems act on and the context in which they act in are obviously different). Basically every societal structure can be reduced to the behaviors of an organic system at some level of complexity.
Actually Norbert Wiener thought a lot about intelligent machines, he called that Cybernetics - but there was a problem, he didn't want to accept any funding from the military:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener
"After the war, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what he believed was political interference with scientific research, and the militarization of science. His article "A Scientist Rebels" from the January 1947 issue of The Atlantic Monthly[19] urged scientists to consider the ethical implications of their work. After the war, he refused to accept any government funding or to work on military projects. The way Wiener's beliefs concerning nuclear weapons and the Cold War contrasted with those of von Neumann is the major theme of the book John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.[20]"
John McCarthy invented the term Artificial Intelligence, in order to avoid any association with Cybernetics - I think he didn't want any association with Norbert Wiener. I suspect that this might have something to do with funding...
see http://jmc.stanford.edu/artificial-intelligence/reviews/bloo...
TCP/IP was a major change in networking, because all telephone companies were used to have reliability at the link layer - that's how you do a telephone network. But TCP/IP is much more scalable, because it has a reliability layer that is not dependent on the link layer.
It did not begin to approach the goals in the project description, which I've since come to believe are detached from reality. A moonshot may have seemed collossally ambitious in 1961 but we already had most of the basic capabilities necessary to succeed. In this case, however, I don't think we're anywhere close, and even if we were, it would be a suboptimal solution to the problem it's meant to solve. (It would however be politically and economically convenient).