Machine intelligence has been a military research goal for decades, but is it even worth it? Artificial intelligence research reaches toward long-held visions of human-machine symbiosis, and all the benefits this would have for military might. Even if scientists fall short of these lofty ambitions, or even if they prove impossible to fully achieve, aiming for them may move humanity further along the path of scientific progress -- but are small increments of progress worth billions of taxpayer dollars? Such ambitions for generic AI systems have fueled research programs across the defense landscape since the late 1960s. The Strategic Computing Program grew out of the context of the early 1980s --an optimism about the ability of computers to solve military problems coupled with the Reagan administration's Cold War push to bolster the United States through technology advancement and big defense budgets.

Tony Tether has headed up the Pentagon's way-out research arm, Darpa, since 2001. That makes him the longest-serving director in the agency's nearly 50-year history. He sat down with me for an interview in his office, on the top floor of a blandly menacing Northern Virginia office building, last December. For my story in the March issue of Wired (online next Tuesday), Tether and I talked about everything from bio-terrorists to zombie rodents to thinking machines to the golf courses in Iraq. Let's start with the big picture and talk a little bit about 9/11 -- it'?s been five years now -?-? and how, obviously, that has affected defense research hugely. What do you see as Darpa's big contributions to the war on terror? What do you think has been contributed so far, and what do you think is on the horizon that might be the most valuable? Tony Tether: We have several efforts in use in Iraq and Afghanistan today. There's been somewhat of a misunderstanding that when 9/11 unfolded that Darpa suddenly turned totally toward supplying things for the war. Now, of course, the war made us a great deal more interested in trying to find out what the issues and problems were over there so that we could develop programs along that line. Those programs are long-range and, for the most part, they'?re things that won't really come to fruition for several years. On the other hand, Darpa had started many things in the '90s, because we've been looking at this global terrorist war since probably 1994. At that time we called it the transnational threat –?? you know, a threat without a country. At the same time, there was a great push to look at the way our forces were developed and move them from huge divisions, force on force, to small units of action, back to the squad… As it turned out, 2001 came and we went into war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and, after the major conflict in Iraq, really small units became the way we were orchestrating that war. And it was probably that way from the very beginning in Afghanistan. So the technologies that we have been developing for four or five years, some of them were already ready to go. TT: One of the major things we knew a small unit would need, especially in a city, was situational awareness. So we developed â?? we already had been developing -- a small platform that we call Wasp.