How can we enable more science fiction to become reality?
If you want to do something, it usually pays to study those who have done that thing successfully in the past. Asking ‘what is this outlier’s production function?’ can provide a starting point.
DARPA is an outlier organization in the world of turning science fiction into reality. Since 1958, it has been a driving force in the creation of weather satellites, GPS, personal computers, modern robotics, the Internet, autonomous cars, and voice interfaces, to name a few. However, it is primarily limited to the domain of defense technology – there are DARPA-style ideas that are out of its scope. Which emulatable attributes contributed to DARPA’s outlier results? What does a domain-independent “ARPA Model” look like? Is it possible to build other organizations that generate equally huge results in other domains by riffing on that model?

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This document acts more like a collection of atomic notes than a tight essay

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There are two stand-alone pieces to accomodate your time and interest: a distillation, and the full work. The distillation is meant to capture and compress the main points of the full work. Each section of the distillation internally links to the corresponding section one level deeper so if you want more info and nuance you can get it.
I would rather this be read by a few people motivated to take action than by a broad audience who will find it merely interesting. In that vein, if you find yourself wanting to share this on Twitter or Hacker News, consider instead sharing it with one or two friends who will take action on it. Thank you for indulging me!

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