Google’s DARPA of Foreign Policy Cometh?
During the Cold War, DARPA was a great success, as government bureaucracies go, partly because secrecy freed it from the normal political and bean counting constraints. The other reason was that DARPA’s focus was primarily upon engineering types of problems. Technically difficult, innovative and exploratory problems to be certain, but generally not the sort of socially constructed or influenced “wicked problems“. Or “intractable ones” ( DARPA delved into technical problems that were, due to the technological level of that earlier era, also intractable, but that is still a different kettle of fish from socioeconomic, perceptually intractable, problems). It would seem that Google Ideas will be tackling the harder set of problems to solve.
Google Ideas is an entity to watch but all the observation will be detrimental to the accomplishment of it’s mission, as the nature of social wicked problems carry with them vested interests determined to defend the dysfunctional status quo from which they derive benefits. In some scenarios, with extreme violence. In others, with political pressure. There’s a reason these problems in the human realm go unsolved – sweet reason and pilot program rational incentives might not appeal to leaders of La Familia or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Google might also need a formidible Google PMC.
Hat tip to Larry Dunbar.
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Charles Cameron:
October 20th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Here’s my Big Question these days when it comes to intelligence: "It’s easy enough to connect the dots you can see — but how do you connect your blind spots?"
Charles Cameron:
October 23rd, 2010 at 2:58 am
Or perhaps that’s my latest koan. I sometimes wonder why there is such silence following some posts. Do they leave the readers breathless and hushed, like a fine performance of the Mozart Coronation Mass, say – or have you taken the conversation into a place where nobody else wants to venture? Just reading the categories you’ve filed this post under is enough to trigger massive interest on my part — OSINT, cognition, complexity, creativity, cultural intelligence, foreign policy, futurism. ideas, innovation, intelligence, metacognition, public diplomacy, social networks, terrorism, to pick a few of my favorites…
Charles Cameron:
October 23rd, 2010 at 3:05 am
So. Let me be unfashionable for a moment. The very word "unfashionable" is a useful, outside-the-box way of saying "outside the box", I think – a "fashion" in thought is essentially just another word for "group-think", and that’s the very box we should be scrambling to get out of.
.Question: is this Google attempt going to be "crazy enough to be correct"? Unfashionable enough to be truly worthwhile?