Stephen Lukasik, Who Pushed Tech in National Defense, Dies at 88

His incentive at the time, he wrote in a reminiscence, was to assist the National Security Agency, which employed "vast numbers of transcribers and translators to make sense of a multitude of communication channels they monitored." In one instance he had ARPA researchers work on using artificial intelligence to transcribe manual Morse code. "In my view, he was one of the few people who really thought about how science and technology serve national security," said Sharon Weinberger, author of "The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World" (2017). "He saw the role of strategy, not just widgets or weapons to serve the Pentagon, but the bigger picture around it." Dr. Lukasik was an early champion of the Arpanet, which began as an experiment in computer networking.