In an interview this afternoon at theDefense One Summit , DARPA director Arati Prabhakar explained the history and future of the agency . And Prabhakar want it known that Google and other commercial endeavor are not their enemy . In fact , they ’re more important that ever to DARPA ’s national certificate finish , as individual R&D spending has slowly outgo public outgo over the retiring 60 years .
latterly Google has beenscooping up robotics companieslike Boston Dynamics and vowed to exit the military robotics market . This has led some to enquire if DARPA has any grudges against Silicon Valley companies stealing some of the DoD ’s favourite plaything .
Interviewer and Defense One newsman Patrick Tucker asked if Prabhakar was worried about an design break with Google and jokingly wondered if Google was DARPA ’s frenemy . Prabhakar almost seemed offended and was quick to explain that DARPA is in no means an opponent of Google or any other party work on technologies for commercial use .
“ home security is really not about us versus a secret company . They ’re not an adversary , ” Prabhakar read by all odds about Google .
“ They and we are worried about the problems of the world . They ’re going to attempt and go make money on it — that ’s what they do as a private society — and we ’re going to seek to plow with it from the perspective of national interests , ” she explain . “ I want to harvest what they and many , many others are place in and driving technology onward . ”
According to Prabhakar , about 1/3 of outgo on inquiry and development in the U.S. is currently coming from the government activity and 2/3 is coming from the individual sector . In the year after World War II that ratio was flipped she tell , with about 2/3 of R&D spending coming from the government and 1/3 from secret sources .
“ If you count as a percentage of GDP , private sphere investment in R&D has just grown and grown and grown over many , many decennary , ” Prabhakar said . “ That is the innovation economy that we ’re all living in . ”
DARPA has always used contractor to recrudesce earth - breaking engineering . But they clear list on private endeavor to spur technological furtherance now more than ever .
“ When we invested in technology DARPA could do that with the trust that we ’d have 10 , 20 , maybe 30 days of technological advantage over any other party , ” Prabhakar order . “ That is not the universe we live in today . ”
Prabhakar went on to explicate that this was a fantastic development , but that DARPA was well aware that these technology were not being developed entirely by U.S. companies for an American market . She went on to refer to the “ globalisation challenge ” that DARPA now face in continue ahead of military resister .
“ It is also an opportunity for us to not have to place only DoD dollars to have phenomenally sinewy technologies , ” she said . “ When we use a semi - conductor component from Altera in a DoD military system we get phenomenal reward ride off of the billions of dollars of investment funds that have been made . ”
Tucker made bank bill of DARPA ’s role in creating the cyberspace , and asked if they had another internet in the wing .
“ In all serious-mindedness , we ’re only 200 government employees in an business office building in Arlington , but that is what we come to work to do every single twenty-four hour period — is to make the investing that might become that kind of major potentiality in the futurity , ” Prabhakar said .
mental image : U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in April of 2014 , being shown the ATLAS Robot which completed testing at the DARPA Robotics Challenge at the Pentagon in Arlington , Virginia ; Screenshot of DARPA director Prabhakar from the Defense One meridian
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