IARPA, for those who really want to know such things so they can sleep at night, stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. That mouthful is helpful shortened to the acronym IARPA to remind us all that it is affiliated with DARPA, the outgrowth of the U.S. Defense Department that brings us so much more than that annual competition of highly intelligent vehicles.
IARPA is hiring. And you have to really hand it to a company that can get every letter of its acronym in its logo.
So IARPA offers few readily understandable details on its website, but it certainly knows what it wants: to be the future. One of the other wants is another mouthful shortened to a helpful acronym: the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) Program. Now, even though that program title brings to mind the Future Planning Committee from In the Loop, the FUSE program is still worth worrying about because it is hugely ambitious … ambition is nothing less than a giant "data eye in the sky", the product of a million bits of information collated from traffic webcams, Google and Bing queries, targets and reports from financial markets, and random snippets of conversations recorded surreptitiously in public places during a number of weeks. I guess if you put all that together, you can build any sort of information transportation device you like and hover it in the cloud, as it were. And IARPA are doing this because they want to be ready to fight the enemies of the future, whoever (and whenever) they might be.
I'm actually shuddering as I review that previous paragraph, so let's just move on, shall we, to the Great Horned Owl Program. Now, this one sounds much better as the full name, actually, because the acronym is GHO, and the pronunciation of that one, if done properly, just doesn't bear thinking about. But the goal of this Great Horned Owl Program is to produce a silent drone. I would have thought that drones were relatively silent, given that they don't contain noisy things like people, but there you go, that's what I get for thinking out loud again, and I wouldn't want to do too much of that because I'd be overheard and my words would become part of FUSE. See, IARPA has identified as the key problem with drones the fact that they make a noise as they're approaching targets, which is probably because they contain a payload of weaponry encased in machinery and the combination of the two, when combined with the laws of physics, have no choice but to produce a sound. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a good story, as Mark Twain is purported to have argued.
So, IARPA is looking for people to reprogram the cloud so it has everything everyone ever said or heard in it and keeps on building in the communications of the huddled masses and they're looking to change the laws of physics so that airborne carriers of metallicized destruction emit no sound no matter how heavy their carnage-inducing payload. The thought of both of those projects together has me reaching for the light switch so I can sit in the dark for awhile and shiver, but that's not even the half of it.
See, IARPA are looking to go Back to the Future by actually creating that device that showed Princess Leia in Star Wars. Yep, George Lucas's prescience is on display again, as the Synthetic Holographic Observation Program is on the cards and looking for funding and labor-producing volunteers, the goal being to create a synthetic holographic 3D display that can be observed and understood by people who aren't wearing a special set of goggles or able to channel The Force. The acronym for the Synthetic Observation Program, SHO, is a bit more fun because we can use it to channel Cuba Gooding Jr.: SHO me the money.
But the fact that IARPA are looking to create this sort of thing suggests to my very worried psyche that they know something that we don't, namely that the Emperor and Darth Vader are out there somewhere and the need for a Princess Leia-type message to be implanted into an R2 unit will be more current and possible than we might have first thought.
Worry is me.
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