DARPA’s Dan Kaufman: How the Government’s Willy Wonka Factory Creates Technology that Changes the World

David Pogue
·Tech Critic
Updated

Even if you think our government is, on the whole, inept or corrupt, here and there you’ll find pockets of spectacular genius in agencies that really, truly work. Classic case: DARPA.

That’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s the group of brainiacs whose work over the years has led us to the computer mouse, GPS on cellphones, our phones’ accelerometers, Siri, night-vision goggles, and, oh, by the way, the Internet.

Here’s another example of DARPA’s offspring: the self-driving car. DARPA conducted an open autonomous automobile competition. The 2005 winner was Sebastian Thrun, who later joined Google. There, he further developed his robotic vehicle into what we now know as Google’s self-driving car.

In this interview, I sat down with Dan Kaufman, who’s become known as DARPA Dan. In truth, he leads only one of DARPA’s six divisions — the Information Innovation Office — but he’s become the public face of DARPA, at least in part because of the profile that 60 Minutes did on him recently.

DARPA has a crazy structure. The agency consists of only 100 technical people, who sign on for a term of only four years — but it has $3 billion to spend. DARPA doesn’t do the work itself; it distributes that money to us. To people with great ideas that can help the U.S. military or Americans in general.

Anyone can submit a proposal in response to one of DARPA’s challenges; every proposal gets read by at least three DARPAns. And $3 billion is handed out every year to people with the best ideas.

For example, Kaufman told me that personal computers are broken. “Why do computers come broken? Think about how strange this is! You go to the store, give them two to three thousand dollars, get your PC or your Mac, and what do they tell you? ‘Install antivirus and patch it.’ Think about that wording for a minute! Like this jacket — if I went and bought it and the first thing they said was, ‘Patch it,’ I’d say, ‘No! Why don’t you give me one without holes in it?’”

So DARPA is now working on the next generation of operating systems — the ones that will control our cars and our home devices — and devising them to be secure from the beginning.

DARPA is also working on protecting our computers from the increasing problem of cyberattacks, by pursuing a principle called binary diversity.

“The reason we’re all alive today, and not dead from the bubonic plague,” Kaufman said, “is that our immune systems are all a little different, and they change over time. Why can’t a computer work that way? Each one’s slightly different. Your computer can’t infect my computer. We won’t have these large-scale attacks, and you probably won’t even bother trying, because it’s not worth your time.”

And Siri? Was it really a DARPA military project? Yes, it was. The version on an iPhone is actually much better than the one that DARPA originated — but sure enough, Siri is the product of your tax dollars.

In short, DARPA is “100 of some of the smartest people in the world, and there’s no egos. You’re just trying to help other people out,” Kaufman told me. “We’re the Willy Wonka factory for nerds.”