Radical Evolution - The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - And What It Means To Be Human by Joel Garreau DoubleDay, New York May 17, 2005. 384 pages (~450 words/page) pp. 267-270: Chapter Eight - Epilogue Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future is not ours to see. Que sera sera. - Doris Day, 1956 We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done. - Alan Turning, 1950. According to ancient Washington lore, a flap occurs when somebody inadvertently tells the truth. In the early 21st century, there were several flaps involving DARPA. Admiral John Poindexter had created no end of trouble, distress and woe by pursuing a plan to mine databases that would enable the government to collect vast information on the citizenry in the name of fighting terrorism. Just when that was dying down, a DARPA plan surfaced that would have mapped information about expected futures. It would have allowed savvy people to make financial bets revealing their anticipations of events in the Middle East, such as prospective assassinations of various countries' leaders. The balloon went up again. for his previous involvement in the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan administration, Poindexter had always been a lightning rod. But for these flaps, Poindexter finally was canned. All of this had nothing to do with human enhancement, but the Defense Sciences office took the fall. Powerful staffers of the Senate Appropriations Committee went looking for a way to rap DARPA's knuckles. (You thought people elected to Congress made our laws? How quaint.) The staffers went down the list of DARPA's projects, found the ones with titles that sounded frighteningly as though the involved the creation of a master race of superhumans, and zeroed out their budgets from the defense appropriations bill. There is scant evidence they knew much, if anything, about these projects. But we will probably never know the details, because significant people are determined that the whole affair be forever shrouded in mystery. The levels of secrecy were remarkable even for DARPA; they were astonishing by the standards of the notoriously leaky Senate. Even insiders said it was hard to get a feel for what the facts really were. It took months of reporting and questioning, poking and prodding, even to get a formal "no comment" either from the leadership of the Senate Appropriations Committee or from Anthony J. Tether, the director of DARPA. A careful study of DARPA's programs a years later, however, showed little change. Considerable creative budgetary maneuvering ensued. The peas of quite a few programs now reside under new, and much better camouflaged, shells. "They're saying, `Okay, this is the second strike. Do we have to go to three strikes?'" one manager said. "It doesn't stop anything. We'll be smarter about how we position things." Meanwhile, he said, new human enhancement programs are in the pipeline, "as bold or bolder" than the ones that preceded them. The slap by the Senate staffers did get DARPA's attention, however. Tether reportedly is "covering his tracks. He wants paper. It's like now he's insisting on documentation. Before we move ahead, he wants somebody in the Army to say, `If you do this, we will use it.' Which makes it somewhat difficult. But you can always find somebody with stars who is willing to say, `Yes, if you can demonstrate that this is safe and effective, we'd use it in a heartbeat.'" ... Suggested Readings p. 284 Hanson, Robin. "Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence." http://hanson.gmu.edu/aigrow.pdf ---------. "Is Singularity Just Around the Corner?" In Journal of Transhumanism, April 10, 1998. http://www.transhumanist.com/volume2/singularity.htm ---------. Hanson's Web site: http://hanson.gmu.edu/home.html Hanson is that unlikely combination, an economists who thinks about the Singularity. As he says, "I am addicted to `viewquakes,' insights which dramatically change my worldview."