The real DARPA challenge

The chaos of a Verona morning clashes into my head. Yellow light on yellow ocher buildings under the blue chaos of the sky. The noise hits me first; gulls yawling above the Adige that winds through the heart of the city, competing with car horns and the garbage truck and the inimitable smell of a thousand mokas making coffee overlaid with yesterday's trash. The sun seeps the pallid yellow of an old bruise that blends with the ache in my eyeballs as I walk through the dark atrium of the building and into the brightness of the street beyond. Romeo and Juliet the starcrossed lovers share their corner trysting place with old and new graffiti, dust, urine and the winner of 2018's Mr Mangy Cat. I love and hate this place. My feelings alternate increasingly as I find and lose my way multiple times on the way to the bus stop and on to the university.

Once there, the chaos recedes behind the silence and shadows of the walls. We are here for a talk from an ex-member of the US army, here to give us a summary of the DARPA challenge and potentially inspire a European copycat. The atmosphere is oddly strained compared to the abandon of the traffic jams in the streets beyond as members of various faculties find each other and share a morning coffee before the talk begins.

The DARPA grand challenge, according to their Wikipedia page, is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. While the name DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – itself has been somewhat shrouded in mystery and suspicion, the speaker himself is an avuncular type with a bald head who betrays his military background only in his posture and surveying gaze. He begins with an introduction to the history of the challenge and from the first moment I am fascinated. The challenge apparently began because the US army discovered that instead of paying 10 000 dollars to one research team to produce cutting-edge results, human ingenuity and competitiveness made it far more productive to give 1000 dollars to 5 teams and make it a competition with 5000 dollars as prize money. The recruits were mostly degree and masters level University students, at the peak of their ingenuity and enthusiasm and with a very low margin for what constitutes great wealth. The amount of hours that they were prepared to work and the passion and ingenuity they were prepared to give far exceeded any team of already-jaded professional researchers and keeping the budget low inspired innovation beyond anyone's dreams. I myself had already noted that it is nearly impossible to put an upper limit on what a young person fueled only by ambition, enthusiasm and sleepless nights is able to accomplish. This was the gasoline that fueled the darpa challenge: innocence, enthusiasm and the endless ingenuity of young minds.

My own prof had already recounted me with hilarious excerpts of his time managing a DARPA challenge team. In those early days the focus was autonomous vehicles and apparently every year they entered, the rules were made more rigid the following year to prevent such expedients as driving straight over obstacles and powered manipulators that punched their way through doors rather than fooling around with more conventional unlocking approaches. The speaker recounts that after this, the challenge shifted to underground autonomy, a field even more challenging due to the difficulty of connecting via radio signals with any receiver underground. The challenge was made more difficult by the need to autonomously locate various objects and the introduction of multiple twisting corridors and caverns, deep underground in literal and radio darkness.

It was at this point that my blood ran cold. The smiling bald man explained that while the competitors were told that the challenge was inspired by the unfortunate case of the junior football team touring in Thailand who remained trapped in underground tunnels with their coach, impossible to locate by traditional means, what the military really wanted this technology for was far from this cheerful projection. Replace the missing children with foreign soldiers hidden in caverns under the desert, and the robots sent to aid them with killing machines equipped with high-tech sensors and able to maneuver independently and pitilessly in complete darkness with speed and stealth, all their sensors locked on their objectives. The same robot, but the sweetness and rainbows slipped sideways and blending together to a chilling darkness. I couldn't help but imagine it as I sat there, sweating into my plastic chair, hearing the sound of robotic paws tapping on stone, deprived of senses by the choking dark and fleeing with no sense of why the things tracking me kept coming. No way out into the light, and no escape within the dark either, surrounded by things that have no need to see, that work in teams from the largest to those able to enter the narrowest cavern into which I could enter, that could not be thrown off by anything that would throw off a human being. That cannot be wounded or diverted, that have only one objective. Senseless machines seeking to eliminate the only thing that separates me from them; my humanity.

I open my eyes from this temporary hell to realize that the bald man is still smiling. "It's what we always do. The optics of humanitarian aid are far more appealing than if we gave the real objectives. So we base the challenge on a humanitarian aid problem – for the autonomous vehicles challenge it was rescue vehicles for Fukushima."

Two distinct levels, paradise and the underworld. The same technology, two very different intentions.

I have always been aware of the possibility of inventiveness to be conscripted for very different means from those that were intended – Einstein and the atom bomb is a chilling reminder. In fact, I had always asked my students to consider the levels and limits of their responsibility for any invention created. How far does responsibility extend, when we can't possibly imagine the limits of others but only our own? After all, John Wick is a constant reminder that one can kill another person with a pencil. However, this case was different. Young people were giving their best and staying up at night driven not just by rather paltry prize money but by the genuine belief that their discoveries were making a positive difference. I've been young too and I know that at that time every young adult saw themselves as a potential hero and their life purpose as making a difference. Rescuing children would get out of them things that 5000 dollars would not; and even if it wouldn't, it would certainly buy them more peace of mind than the reality, that their discoveries were actively taking lives, not saving them. There may have been those who were able to square it, but I still doubt that anyone who came for saving the children would stay for the man-eating robots.

Beyond the harvesting of the innocence of young people, which while troubling is still ephemeral, I was left with other questions. If "basing the challenge on a humanitarian aid problem" was the technique there, how many other times is humanitarian marketing used to create support and enthusiasm for things which are far from innocent at bottom?

It is the classic bait-and-switch: and what is a fraud in arguments and sales is no less a fraud when it is done for robot competitions or aid organizations or bills in parliament for that matter. The more sugar-coated something is, unfortunately the more you should ask yourself why it is so vital to someone that you swallow it.