Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM

“It’s OK for Us to Fail”

Darpa director Tony Tether talks about improving soldier potential and the need to think big.

Your agency is known for technology. But under your tenure, it’s really gotten into human enhancement. Not really. The biology program was going strong when I got here in the mid-’90s. You could just say, hey, what is something that countries or individuals who don’t have a big infrastructure could do that would be very dramatic? Well, biologic threats come to mind .

Certainly there have been many more biology programs since you arrived six years ago. Oh, yeah. I kept it going. I think it was natural. Which programs do you think are particularly promising? Our cooling glove. We’re making the form factor a little bit more usable, getting it so that it can be built into a boot .

And on the non-biology front? We realized that we’re going to have to teach all of our soldiers 16 different languages. So we came up with a phrasealator, a device that speaks phrases in eight languages.

I’ve tried it. Did it work for you?

Yeah. It worked. Sometimes it doesn’t work for me. But people like them. Now we’re developing a two-way translator good for specific functions, like checkpoints.

Really? It can capture more than just yes-no? That’s right. But if you ask, “How’s your golf score,” it wouldn’t be very useful. And in our cognitive program, we’re looking at having a computer learn you so you don’t have to learn the computer. It might even put together slides or a briefing at the end of a shift for the next person that comes in.

I don’t have to tell you people have been promising cognitive computers — Oh, forever. Since science fiction in the ’30s. But this is Darpa, right? It’s OK for us to fail.

What future technologies worry you? Quantum computing. If someone else, an enemy, got ahold of that, it would be a real technological surprise.

That concerns you more than biological weapons? The biological is more worrisome because it’s potentially more near-term. But the quantum computer will be really revolutionary.

By working on it, though, aren’t you potentially giving it to them? That’s always a worry, isn’t it? In some cases, when we have a technology that we don’t want to teach the world how to create, we put controls on it.

But isn’t the best science done in the open? Not always. I mean, I think that’s the legend. The best science is done when you get the best people together, whether you do that open source or by having a very tightly knit project.

— Noah Shachtman