The Future At DARPA (The Singularity Is Near!)

GO HERE TO READ an interesting summary of the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA - home | Wikipedia) 2009 strategic plan. A quick digest, taken from the post, (with my notations in parentheses):

• Accelerated Development and Production of Therapeutics: rapidly and inexpensively manufacture millions of doses of life saving drugs or vaccines in weeks, instead of the years required to ramp up today's manufacturing practices. (Make vaccines quick in the event of a pandemic or bio-weapon event)
  
• Blue Laser for Submarine Laser Communications: provide for timely, large area submarine communications at speed and depth, which no other future or existing system, or combinations of systems, can do. (Let submarines communicate underwater in a way nobody else can detect)
  
• High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System: novel, compact, high power lasers making practical small-size and low-weight speed-of-light weapons for tactical mobile air- and ground-vehicles. (Laser guns for aircraft and tanks)
  
• High Productivity Computing Systems: supercomputers are fundamental to a variety of military operations, from weather forecasting to cryptography to the design of new weapons; DARPA is working to maintain our global lead in this technology. (The next generation of supercomputing for ... well, everything, likely)
  
• Networks: self-forming, robust, self-defending networks at the strategic and tactical level are the key to network-centric warfare; these networks will use spectrum far more efficiently and resist disruption if the GPS time signal is unavailable. (Computer networks that can arrange, rearrange, and repair themselves -- including if the satellite system that coordinates their common time synchronization is otherwise indisposed)
  
• Quantum Information Science: exploiting quantum phenomena in the fields of computing, cryptography, and communications, with the promise of opening new frontiers in each area. (Using electrons and other sub-atomic particles for creating codes, storing information, and other things)
  
• Real-Time Accurate Language Translation: real-time machine language translation of structured and unstructured text and speech with near-expert human translation accuracy. (The real-time universal translator you remember from Star Trek)  

It's an interesting list, because it hints at what the Defense Department wants to do on the one hand (aircraft that shoot lasers) and what they're worried about on the other (the need to produce millions of vaccine doses quickly or the global GPS satellite system being knocked out of action) on the other. As I post this the link to the original report isn't working, but it may be later. In the meantime, you might go read some of Kurzweil's stuff on accelerating intelligence and the accelerating rate of change, or this description of Vinge's theory of technological singularity, and see, if in the context of the DARPA report, it makes you at all uneasy ...