DARPA helps drives technological progress in the US forward. If the EU wants to create a similar agency, key changes will be needed.
A government funded, unionwide research agency does sound like a good idea to me. But DARPA is a military r&d agency and I’d rather see an agency focused on benefitting civilian life, preserving nature, sustainability and such.
EU would clearly benefit from concentrating each nations military industries into unionwide companies and projects, too, though, but idk, I feel like we as a society could benefit from a strong, well funded civilian research effort.
I don’t know if there is such already out there, all I ever hear about is either underfunded or financed by private profit-oriented companies.EU has Horizon Europe a research and innovation program. And some smaller ones. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls_en
EU also building the world’s biggest ground laser telescope in cooperation. https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/
The issue with EU is that there are so many countries involved that getting everyone on the same page is slow process and with changing local governments projects can be easily abandoned as priorities shift.
Sounds like a good idea, but it would probably be better to have a military and multiple civilian agencies specialized in different fields. Like medical, physics, chemistry and so forth research agencies. Also in edge cases both agencies should be allowed to do research or cooperate on it.
Having a government backed research agency might be good seeing as that has declined in recent years.
Back under Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings was a very vocal advocate of the UK setting up something similar (though he referenced ARPA, DARPA’s predecessor, which wasn’t explicitly-military).
The result of that was ARIA being set up last year.
He was also very interested in advanced artificial intelligence work, so I kind of imagine that funding that was a goal.
I don’t know if all their work is public, but looking at that website, it looks like they’re publicly working on:
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Genetic engineering of plants
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Robot dexterity
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Analysis of “tipping points” caused by climate change
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Safeguarded AI research (how to “contain” advanced artificial intelligences)
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