Memex … Have You Heard of It?
The US Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) has put out a solicitation for Internet searching tech. Why? Its heart is set on one thing: Track down and eliminate human traffickers, meaning people who sell other people as property.
Chilling, right? On one side of the equation, the Darth Vader of Internetdom, the US government, seeks greater power through bigger and better technology to find bad people, as DARPA defines ‘bad.’ On the other side of the equation, the Scum Of the Universe steals babies, overdoses sex slaves, and crates humans as sardines to transport them on ships that never seem to reach predictable ports. Almost makes one a little … uncomfortable about our world. And it’s really happening.
You can read the DARPA solicitation for yourself, but remember that some very big companies will offer their best and brightest in order to win the purse of $45 millions for offering the most effective machine.
Did you notice the name of the DARPA machine, by the way? Read the 1945 article by Vannevar Bush (a government scientist from an earlier age), As We May Think, to find the origins of a reference to advanced machines with fantastic functions. ‘Memex’ must have stuck in a DARPA clerk’s mind all these years as he or she dreamed of some application some day for that weird new name from an old science-fiction writer. Christopher White, the master scientist leading the DARPA effort to find Memex might even have come up with the name himself. Who knows? Chris promises that whatever machine they make and call ‘Memex,’ it will not be used to spy on the rest of us.
Do you believe Chris, the scientist over at DARPA? What do you think?
